New Arrivals
Electric Fruit
"Electric Fruit" alludes to the vexing encounter between nature and technology, one of the most complex issues that we face as a global society. The album brings together a powerhouse of innovators—Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans—to emphatically capture, question and explore the throes of this crucial contradiction. "Electric Fruit" is a stirring and potent recording of the dangerous confrontation between the innate and the artificial, the organic and the robotic. Each member of th…
Genclik Ile Elele
Regarded by collectors of Anatolian rock as The Daddy of all Turkish rarities, this instrumental record from 1973 has to be heard to believed and even then it’s unbelievable. Either these guys had time machines or DJ Kool Herc had secret Eastern connections. Ten tracks of swinging hybrid grooves that run from blues to jazz to folk to soul to kraut, Latin, African and beyond. Rare grooves, indeed.
Mune
Claire Bergerault, voice. Jean-Luc Guionnet, pipe organ. 'Music that proves that improvisation can still offer something vibrant and different. Intense, powerful music that will annoy as many as it delights.' Highly recommended !
Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa
endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orche…
Unknown skies
...Every trio without a piano, or without a drums, or as in this case without a double bass, gains in incline what it loses in “balance”. It only takes a little sometimes. Everyone plays at ease across. Everyone can split themselves. There are no more solos as solos but phases, circles of influence and predominance which do not last. The duos bind and unbind more clearly, the contrasts stand out better. The theme is no longer material to develop but, as in Unknown Skies, a lyrical and volatile s…
Garage Music
Bruce Russell has an MA in Political Studies, and works as an information designer. He has previously worked in the field of archives management, during which time he ran the National Radio sound archive. As a sound artist Russell is known mainly for his involvement in New Zealand's longest-running improvisational 'post-rock' group, the Dead C., although he also works in the field of radiophonic composition, and records as a solo artist and with the trio A Handful of Dust. He performs wit…
MP3 Deviations #6+7
Yasunao Tone creates music by means of disrupting MP3-files. Sound files that were corrupted in the MP3 generate error messages, which are then utilized to assign various lengths of samples automatically. Feeding also different play back speeds creates a sound which is always different – unpredictable and unknowable. The MP3 Deviation album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt…
La journée de l\'existence
“Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979). "The Day of Existence". Confession of life before life. For orchestra and narrator. Text and music by Ivan Wyschnegradsky. With Mario Haniotis (speaker), Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France under the direction of Alexandre Myrat. "Ivan Wyschnegradsky had to wait sixty years to hear the first performance of his masterwork, La Journée de l'Existence, which he had conceived and composed beginning in 1916 in Saint Petersburg. And we have had to wait anot…
Making The Walls Quake As If They Were Dilating
Recording of the sound sculpture in the Polish Pavilion at 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Sound sculpture by Katarzyna Krakowiak. Sound design by Ralf Meinz. Voices by Ulrike Helmholz and Sabina Meyer. Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by by Ralf Meinz. 32-page booklet. 'Architectural Biennale sound sculpture amplifying the entire building of the Polish Pavilion turned into a flat CD ? Will you say it completely misses the point? Brings the real space into a stereo syst…
Atonal drone
Rarely you remember the moment you listen to a record for the first time as something clear and tangible - what is retained in the memory is the atmosphere and the emotions that the music evokes, but not much else. Atol Drone (Polycephal 2002) was an altogether different case. It broke through into my mind surreptitiously like a high Pacific wave and for years it held sway over the area of my musical memory responsible for the rough sea, atomic fears, sea fever, incomplete Morse signals no…
13 Japanese birds Vol.10 Niwatori
'MERZBOW's 13 Japanese Birds is a 13 month series of releases inspired by Olivier Messaien's Catalogue D'Oiseaux. Beginning in January 2009 one volume of 13 Japanese Birds will be released each month. The 13th and final volume will be released January 2010. Cover art by Jenny Akita.'
We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
In May 2011, Foxygen's Sam France and Jonathan Rado nervously handed off a CD-R of their homemade mini-opus Take the Kids Off Broadway to producer and visionary Richard Swift after his performance in a Lower East Side club. The duo, who had just mixed and burned the disc that very night, had been devotees of Swift's outsider-pop oeuvre since high school, when they first began recording their own pubescent forays into oddball rock n' roll (At least a dozen records were finished before they …
Thing
This powerful 1972 performance by Arni Cheatham's group provides a unique glimpse of the jazz scene in Boston. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early seventies "jazz fusion" of the highest order, before the term evolved to mean a light, commercially acceptable genre. As with many innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local universities, Harvard. The resulting album was pressed in scant…
Class Insecta
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…
33 bays
Format: Glass-mastered CD. Packaging: Recycled Chipboard Sleeve. 33 bays was recorded in October 2009 in Kyoto, during a Japan tour by the duo of Tim Olive and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, the two untitled tracks were chosen from a number of pieces captured over several days, showcasing the duo's attunement and dramatic sense of structure. Olive (one-string electric guitar) and Costa Monteiro (electro-acoustic devices) produce a rough, feral music …
Prayer Wheel
The Prayer Wheel, like this CDR, spins prayers into the ether. Book of Shadows combines psychedelia, experimental music, and the pursuit of spiritual understanding, all performed together in the eternal present. For the Prayer Wheel release Sharon and Carlton Crutcher are joined by longtime guitarists Aaron Bennack, Jonathan Horne (Plutonium Farmers), and Douglas Ferguson. Also appearing on this release are percussionist Johnny McCollom of the Primordial Undermind, theremin player and fil…
347
'Tim uses several boxes of speakers and Seijiro uses a snare drum as a resonance box, with microphones. They put boxes for their music in another box = the space. They create different levels of universe within the space. From micro to macro. Always with one clear intention: to improvise listening and to organize sonic space together in a very delicate way.Thanks to La Comète 347, Paris. 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to i…
The Buried Stream
For the better part of the past decade, Loren Chasse has been refining his compelling sonic approach, which generally involves "activating" the latent sound-making qualities of natural / commonplace objects, such as pine cones, leaves, stones, or paper. This approach will seem immediately familiar to fans of John Cage, although Chasse's work has always felt more humanist to me than Cage's—driven less by theory and more by a romanticism that isn't afraid to get muddy or wet. You could also align…
Twilight Of The Gods
"Active in electronic composition since 1971, Creshevsky delights in presenting extreme and unpredictable juxtapositions in which the integration of electronic and acoustic sources and processes creates virtual "superperformers" by using the sounds of traditional instruments pushed past human capacities. Creshevsky uses the term Hyperrealism to describe his electroacoustic language constructed from found sounds, handled in ways that are exaggerated or intense. The second Tzadik CD by this modern…
Lithp
Improvised music group originating from Haifa, Israel. Ofer Bymel (drums), Adi Snir (soprano & tenor saxophone saxophone, clarinet), Michel Mayer (guitar), Ronni Benner (guitar). A clean, sophisticated minimalist style and a sound that fits snuggly into the soft abstract current European scene.