New Arrivals
Do You Love Me?
Do You Love Me? is an extension of Lutz Bacher's videos of the same name, in which Bacher interviews curators, artists, friends, and family about Bacher the person and Bacher the artist. Though Lutz Bacher is the starting point, the interviews often reveal more about the people being interviewed than Bacher herself. The publication takes the form of transcripts interwoven with images of Bacher's artwork from the 70s to the present as well as photos, letters, and ephemera.
Coin coin chapter one: Gens de couleur libres
At first look this might seem like a weird move for the Constellation label as Matana Roberts’ debut for the imprint is pretty much straight-up free jazz. But she’s got some serious history with the Montreal collective, even throwing down horns with Godspeed Thinking about it too, there’s always been a nod towards the free jazz scene (not least on Colin Stetson's recent genre-bending LP) but where others were a nod, ˜COIN COIN Chapter One : Gens de Couleur Libre…
Probability A: three studies for compositions of infinite lenght
Probability A collects three pieces composed by William Hutson between 2009 and 2012. Over the past seven years Hutson’s project Rale has evolved to incorporate more negative space into the music. The three pieces herein contained were recorded as proofs-of-concept; they are tracks that Hutson made to loop indefinitely in his house as he built up the courage to use long silences in what is supposed to be a noise/drone act.
William Hutson began recording and performing as Rale in 2006. He …
Jazz Sahara
Decades before the advent of 'world music', bassist-composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik introduced Arabic music into jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. Best known in jazz circles for his solid work with Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk, Abdul-Malik, who is of Sudanese descent, was also the first to use the oud, a pear-shaped, traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument similar to a lute, as a jazz instrument. Recorded in 1958, with tenor saxophonist Johnny Gri…
Score: The Complete Sextet Works 2002-2007
In celebration of their 10 year anniversary New York City-DIY modern composition combo Zs offer this 4CD retrospective. Throughout 10 years of activity, the band has changed in countless ways without ever changing a fierce commitment to inscrutable easthetics & execution crafted to provoke reflection & challenge assumption in the consumption of music. Housed in a 2 piece 55pt box featuring artwork by Fredricks & Mae
Jedwabnik
More music involving the seemingly always-at-work Wojciech Kucharczyk (does the man ever sleep?), this time in a quartet alongside B a ej Król, Jerzy Mazzoll and Radek Dziubek. The project's title Dwutysi czny translates as 'two thousand' - referring, according to a brief recent interview with Easterndaze, to the year when Król first came across the music of the other three players, a discovery that eventually led him to write to them to ask if they'd donate him some of their recorded sounds to …
Preplexure
John Oswald (Plunderphonics) returns with two fourteen-minute-plus tracks of sliced and diced audio assemblage. Pre and post versions of Plexure out in 1993 on Avant, 'PrePlex' (1982 - 1992) and 'Plexure concentrate' (1992 - 2009). Here some feedbacks: 'Highly recommended. Imagine playing Ôname that tune' at 5 times the speed of your ears' ability to recognize familiar sounds. This composition, made up entirely of pop music samples, deserves five stars because of its meticulous organizatio…
Tobel II
Reinhold Friedl, inside piano. Franck Vigroux, electronics. 'An encounter between two worlds. Reinhold Friedl and Franck Vigroux are two musicians, both addicted to a real contemporary approach, getting to the core of sound but by very different means. Reinhold Friedl with his purely acoustic instrument and his highly developed and refined inside-piano techniques meets Franck Vigroux with his electronics including all kind of devices from tape recorders to analog synthesizers. Their sole purpos…
A vacant lot to be in
Jason Zeh is a hands-down master of cassette tape and cassette playback devices. Using magnets, metal, plastic, car stereo tape adapters, cassette players without tape, cassette tape loops, modified tape decks, and sand paper (among other devices), Zeh creates two tracks that swim through hiss, grit, and wavering, fractured soundwaves to create some of the most engaging audio I've had the pleasure to hear. This recording reflects not only Zeh's dedication to mastering and refining his source mat…
Echokrank
Ear drum piercer brezel göring (of stereo total) and thrash lout "hotleg" have committed themselves to a reckless and impulsive mix of dub-psycho-speed-new wave, action film soundtracks and 50's musique concrète. For several years, these two desperados have hacked their way through the unpredictable weeping fistulas of post-industrial easy listening. In doing so they combine genre-spanning arranged marriages and acceleration of track playback speed. The music is played on children's toys and fle…
HaLF-UNReLeaSeD MaDNeSS
Very cool compilation of unreleased BeNe GeSSeRiT tracks. The husband & wife duo of Alain Neffe & Nadine Bal counted as one of the most frivolous & quite impressive live acts around during the eighties. On top of a catchy but minimal synth basis created by B GHoLa (Alain Neffe) runs the strange, & playfull voice by BeNeDiCT G (Nadine Ball). This is minimal synth pop for the crazy ones among us, but aren't we all a bit mad? Limited edition of 400 copies. Cover sleeve & insert by B GHoLa
Barca beach
Live recordings from Barcelona, summer 2009. Frankensteins Ballet features Mik Quantius (Embryo) speaking-in-tongues and Thomas Hopf on drums. Other members have played with Damo Suzuki, Michael Karoli, Michael Rother etc. Some serious damaged krautrock jams happening on this one, not to mention the weird dub space some of this is floating into. Edition of 70 copies.
Low Life / Last Exit
Two key 80s moments from Peter Brotzmann – split together here on a heavy LP! First up is material from the album Low Life – hard-handed work from the duo of Peter Brotzmann on reeds and Bill Laswell on bass – a set that's kind of a side project of the Last Exit quartet, and one that comes across with a similar sense of power! Laswell's handling a fair bit of basses here, often with a bit of processing – thanks partly to producer Martin Bisi – and there's a dark, electric undercurrent to the who…
Lalibela
Founded 40 years ago in 1972 The Pyramids released three albums before splitting up in 1977: Lalibela (1973), King Of Kings (1974) followed by the seminal Birth/Speed/Merging LP (1976). Three albums that made them one of the most mysterious and legendary of all the spiritual cosmic jazz collectives of the early 70s, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra. Lalibela (1973) was the first album recorded by The Pyramids following their landmark journey throughout Africa as students from Antioch …
Berberian Sound Studio
To coincide with Halloween we can announce that Warp Records will be releasing Broadcast's original soundtrack that accompanied the recent Warp Film 'Berberian Sound Studio' - Peter Strickland’s brilliant homage to 1970s Italian horror. The film's integral soundtrack was composed by Broadcast before Trish Keenan's untimely passing last year.
Tragedy & Geometry
On Tragedy & Geometry, Steve Hauschildt, one-third of Cleveland’s neo-kosmische revivalists Emeralds, crafts an hour’s worth of instrumental synthesizer vignettes. His pieces tend to evoke thoughts of bygone eras of technological pop culture — many of these tracks could be placed seamlessly into Blade Runner, or into some lost Playstation-era (you know, when Final Fantasy VII was cutting edge) videogame. Hauschildt doesn’t craft wholly formed songs so much as he works with detached, technologica…
Ambient/Ruin
Gravetemple was formed in 2006 as a side-project of the band Sunn O))) by Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and Attila Csihar. The group formed initially to tour in Israel in the summer of '06, creating several recordings which eventually became The Holy Down album, which was released on Southern Lord Recordings in 2007. At the time of the Israel tour, the Lebanon War started and was in action. In summer '08, the trio reformed together with the addition of Australian drummer Matt "Skitz" Sander…
Corporate Laughter
Debut CD from one of Chicago's finest modular synth manipulators, Neil Jendon. One of the first things that struck me about Neil's work, when I saw him live, was his pacing. Neil would subtly build levels and layers of various oscillations, frequencies, and tones so deftly that by the time he was sending a hailstorm of electronic chaos out of the PA like buckshot, you almost had no recollection of how he got there without you being aware of it. 'Corporate laughter' reflects many of Jendon's fant…
Character
Opportunities for introspection have come few and far between for Canadian-born, New York City-based cellist Julia Kent. After coming to prominence as a member of the cello-driven group Rasputina in the ‘90s, she went on to arrange and play on numerous recordings and tour extensively as a member of Antony and the Johnsons, among other projects.The opportunity to explore her own emotional and creative world came with her solo LPs, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), and it is something she ap…
Gongs of Cambodia and Laos
A compilation of gongs of ethnic minorities in Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces of Cambodia and in Champasak and Attapeu provinces of Laos, recorded between 2003 and 2007, released for the first time on a double vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker at dubplates Berlin. Georges Condominas had released end of the 50s on the french label Ocora a vinyl containing recordings of gong ceremonies 'musiques Mnong gar du Vietnam', in between so much has happened and more than 50 years later it's tim…