New Arrivals
Llum moll
Llum Moll is a multilayered composition made with a manipulated AM radio receiver subjected to interference by LED lamps. The combination of the lamps in tandem with the radio tuned to certain frequencies creates a phantom organ' sound, turning the receiver into an instrument with a peculiar timbre and pitch. The composition was made in two parts. The first was to record and then select fragments with different lengths, pitches and textures. The second was to readjust the pitch of the chosen fra…
The Persistence of Meaning
New York duo of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. Blistering, overdriven shards of noise obscure the almost entirely hidden melodies. These musical moments are few and far between, as The Persistence of Meaning is more about reveling in destruction and decay, emphasizing raw feedback and hollow, rhythmic loops that shamble like the walking dead. Dirges from the deepest ossuaries can almost be heard, pained notes buried by locust swarms of static. While occasionally the pair engage in erratic Krautro…
White Cable, Black Wires
A stunning series of duo improvisations from two of the world's finest string players, whose shared dynamism and intensity of purpose produces fluid, powerful music that ranges from dense viscosity to swift effervescence.With all-strings improvisation there's often a danger of pseudo-classicism, of sounding vaguely like modernist chamber music, replete with refined flourishes and familiar motifs. Edwards and Lee don't just avoid this but go nowhere near it, heading off in another direction entir…
Duos 2011
Jonas Kocher, accordion with Hans Koch & Patricia Bosshard, Christian Wolfarth, Gaudenz Badrutt, Urs Leimgruber, Christoph Schiller, Christian Müller. Recorded during the year 2011. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Limited edition of 222 numerated copies.
Dream Loops
This CD was created to raise funds for my mother, Jeanine, to assist in her fight against stomach cancer diagnosed in June 2009. Edward Ka-Spel has generously donated "Dream Loops" to this cause and all proceeds will be donated to her to assist in covering medical and travel expenses.
Fenetre ovale
Karl Naegelen and the Risser/Rühl duo share a common interest in the quest for new sounds and sound illusions. Creating a confusion of sources, suggesting various acoustic spaces, evoking the sound of a sewing machine or a hard shoulder, making a rubbing sound sound like breath and making breath sound like creaking, this is the type of urge that stimulated collective research. The grand piano had to become a wind instrument and the clarinet a water instrument ; the pianist had to play per…
The Sky Is Full Of Kytes
Mindblowing!!! Simon Balestrazzi should need no introduction. He founded T.A.C. (Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata) in 1982 and has bee pioneering the italian industrial scene since then. His passion for sound synthesis and exploration brought him in recent years to develop a research in electro-acoustics, both in duos, trios and also in solo.
Music In And On The Air
"A major gap in Clara Rockmore's recorded legacy will be closed with the release of Music In and On the Air, a CD derived from a live 1979 WQXR broadcast. To celebrate the 9th anniversary of a series called The Listening Room, Clara brought her theremin to The New York Times building, and before a full house in the auditorium there, played solos and chamber pieces with her renowned pianist-sister Nadia Reisenberg, the superb violinist Erick Friedman, and eight members of the Violincello Society.…
Huge
Following the critical acclaim which has greeted EP 1 Bloom, Die Stadt and Janet Records are proud to announce that Huge EP 2 in the 'Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent' limited edition series by Fovea Hex is out. Fovea Hex continues to shape-shift and to evade & confound those who bray 'what exactly IS it?,' and 'where does it BELONG exactly?,' and 'who exactly belongs to IT?'. If you must bang on the table like that, you won't hear a thing. If this music can be described as 'up-to-the-momen…
Let\'s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow
Let's Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow is the third full-length CD from the young Polish musician Tomasz Bednarcyzk. Following Summer Feelings and Painting Sky Together (Room40), Bednarczyk naturally continues his process of utilizing mainly treated piano and guitar to create fragile, lingering structures that hover around only a few fundamental notes. Let's Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow is divided into two sections, split down the middle by 'The Sketch,' which was written in cooperation with Adria…
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…
A winter's night at the crooked forest
Kari Rønnekleiv, violin. Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. In 2011 Rønnekleiv/Moe released the album “A summer’s night at the crooked forest” on SOFA. The London based music magazine WIRE wrote that the album is a technical tour de force. And a musical one, too, each track structured with composerly precision. On this sequel we meet an extraordinary duo with an almost telepatic interplay. Recorded in the middle of the forest in a cabin with no electricity (the recording equipment was run on solar en…
Ceremony
Phoenix Records reissues a digitally remastered edition of People's sole album, the legendary Ceremony -- Buddha Meet Rock, originally released in 1971 in Japan. Nobody's sure if the musicians on this recording ever performed as a group or whether Ceremony was simply a studio super-project. Certainly, guitarist Kimio Mizutani had already enjoyed a certain amount of critical exposure following stints with Love Live Life + One and Masahiko Satoh's Sound Brakers, and it is Satoh's jazzy fuzz guita…
Erroneous: A Selection Of Errors
Lovely collaborative project, result of the meeting of Italian cult band Larsen and Steven Stapleton’s ubiquitous creature Nurse With Wound. Almost 2 years of file swapping and occasional conceptual meetings led to a multi-headed collection of deformed sounds based on one long NWW piece and two Larsen tracks (that both bands have written specifically for this project) then deconstructed and rebuilt by each other into totally brand new opuses.Erroneous also features Neu! and Kraftwerk original me…
Coda (For WK)
The new CD-EP (clocking in at 20 minutes exactly) from Stephan Mathieu is a coda to A Static Place (2011, 12k), created with his highly focused setup of two mechanical-acoustic gramophones and computer. Coda (For WK) is dedicated to the legendary “quiet” pianist Wilhelm Kempff, whose 1927 recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 Les Adieux from a double 12” 78RPM set on Brunswick were used as input for an autogenerative process. Mathieu’s process emphasizes the archaic beauty and texture of…
Litany Of Echoes
It was once easy to think of James Blackshaw as an inheritor of the Takoma tradition, a school of searching acoustic guitar playing pioneered by John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, and others in the 1960s. But listening to the English guitarist's new album, it's clear it's not that simple. While echoes of those three and some of their contemporaries are still present in Blackshaw's music, these days you can hear just as much Terry Riley and Philip Glass in his work. His synthesis of acoustic e…
Wireless
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.
divide by zero
NEW SERIES FRAMEWORKAn extension of our CONCRETE ELECTRONICS NOISE,a brand new mix-up of unusual conceptions of sound material by young unknown composers, well known not-so-young composers and old but clever composers.Benjamin Thigpen, nomad, born in the United States, immigrated to Paris at the age of 31. He studied music, literature, philosophy and esthetics. He now composes in European studios such as GRM, EMS, Visby and STEIM, as well as in his bedroom and in the train. After six years as a …
Surface of the Earth
Gunn Amps and Smashed Guitars. Surface of the Earth was recorded live to cassette, using two microphones in a wooden community hall in Wellington, New Zealand. The lp was gathered from two or three recording sessions in 1994/95. Back then we used to book out the hall for a couple of days, set up our gear and then record everything. It was a very atmospheric room for recording. Tony and Donald would put their guitars through their two old Gunn valve amplifiers and get to work. Tony often used thi…
I Know When it's Time To Get The Fuck Away
From the initial sonic assault of “Apocryphal” to the final “Wrong Affection”, the five tracks guide the listener through shades of early nineties electric blues (think Palace, Songs:Ohia and fellows), sixties psichedelia flavoured from the spirit of Skip Spence. Rella's singing is rich, intense and perfumed, sometimes plunged into deep trance, like in “Are You Expired?” or “Wrong Affection” where instruments and voice rise together in a psichedelic unison building from a country-like ope…