New Arrivals
Bricolage
'Alessandra Rombolà: flutes, tiles & preparations. Rhodri Davies: electric harp & electronics. Ingar Zach: percussion, drone commander & sruti box. All music by Muta. Recorded by Fadi Tabbal on the 8th of april 2009, at Tunefork studio, Beirut. Edited by Ingar Zach, mixed & mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj. Produced in Lebanon by Al Maslakh & Muta.'
Spoils
For this latest album Caledonian folk impresario Alasdair Roberts teams up with expected collaborators like Alex Neilson (whose drumming and percussion work has illuminated many a free-folk record over recent years, a few of which Roberts has been involved with) and more unusual contributors such as Niko-Matti Ahti of Fonal's Kiila. Perhaps more than ever, Roberts' music invites comparisons to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, traveling sufficiently far from the trad songwriting fold to be thought of as 'a…
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…
My Life On The Plains
Lee Hyla is a composer of rare power and versatility whose work combines the complexity of atonal classical concert music with the energy of experimental jazz, rock and improvised music. Truly part of the American tradition, his work is imaginative, fresh, and embraces a widerange of diverse influences. Lee Hyla’s third Tzadik CD presents a collection of recent works large and small. Colorful and startling pieces filled with surprises and wild bursts of energy. This is a fabulous and varied prog…
Civiltà Paleospaziale
Italian minimal synth & drum machine duo, another side project by Ottaven/Canedicoda, abstract dread sounds with elements of clinical drone and throbbing frequencies to a more introspective ambient chaos
Grass Openings
After numerous CDs, CDRs, cassettes and LPs, Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood have established themselves as one of the many lights in modern improvised outsider music. Their latest offering, ‘Grass Openings’ sees them continue down this winding path of intoxicated trance derangement. Drawing heavily from psychedelic, jazz and weirdo traditions to create a unique form of mutant sound.
An Angel Fell Where the Kestrels Hover
Third full length release for 2009, coming hard on the heels of Bright Failing Star and Snow Blind. Recorded in tandem with Snow Blind in London during July 2007, covering themes based on seasonal changes and mood swings. Where Snow Blind was harsh, unrelenting and a little pissed off, An Angel Fell Where The Kestrels Hover shows a more reflective and melancholic approach. Comes in a beautiful book-sized wallet designed by mondii featuring photography by PW. Full details and interview here.
Raudales
Rogelio Sosa was born in Mexico City in 1977. His work explores a wide range of aspects that deal with sound morphology, structures of auditory reference, intensification of the acoustic space and performativity. His projects include solo and collective improvisations, music compositions, sound actions and sound installations. All of these are produced using electronic media. He started studying musical composition with Julio Estrada and then electroacoustic music at the Ateliers UPIC and IRCAM …
Exécution des hautes œuvres
Roro Perrot is acoustic improvised songs by Romain Perrot, aka French master of Harsh Noise Wall Vomir. CD released by French label Premier Sang
Remixed No. 1
Moondog's outsiderness ensures an approach to modern composition that doesn't ever establish any single, fixed identity, which is of course what makes this man such an alluring figure in 20th century music. Mr Scruff remix is a post-futuristic-jazz influenced by hip-hop cadences that makes appear how important Moondog has been in the past and how he will be for contemporaries and future generations.
s/t
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…
TransMongolian
TransMongolian is a composition of unprocessed field recordings composed in soundscapes. I recorded these acoustic phenomena on my journey through Russia, along Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, China and South Korea to Japan. These countries do not only have very different landscapes and ways of life, they also differ in their sounds, a dimension which more often than not goes unnoticed. The 6 acoustic portraits reflect what I found to be representative of or very special about the countries.
(Old school) Alvin Lucier
The internationally acclaimed 'hilarious releases' [vital weekly] of zeitkratzer records go on. This is the third release in the new series [old school]. The first two CDs, dedicated to the music of John Cage [zkr0009] and James Tenney [zkr0010] have been highly acclaimed. London's Wire Magazine wrote: 'The rigour and discipline they collectively bring to this compositions make both discs utterly enthralling, from start to finish.' The new release is dedicated to the music of Alvin Lucier. In 20…
Nature Data
Why is the phoneme the most 'ideal' of signs? Where does this complicity between sound and ideality, or rather, between voice and ideality, come from? When I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m'entende] at the same time that I speak. The signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention, is in absolute proximity to me. The living act, the life-giving act, the Lebendigkeit, which animates the body of the signifier and tra…
Boolean Blues
ASESOME NEW RELEASE! Josh Hanson is another of Portland, Oregon’s underappreciated sons. Having come up through the ranks of long-time, long-forgotten faves Hochenkeit, he also spent time as a member of The Davis Redford Trio. But Hanson’s path diverges into a totally different sphere nowadays, spinning solo modular synth exploits to the stars. Influenced not just by the likes of Subotnick and Cluster but also various types of Eastern sounds, Hanson is looking forward, trying to find new pa…
The Pattern Prism
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…
Few and far between
Susann Wehrli (flutes, melodica) with Karin Ernst (laptop, live electronics).DUE is playing. A beginning, a tone, a noise, a sound. Listen. Act, react. No ready-made concept, no intended form. Awareness. Liability. Instant composing, where what has been connects with the here and now and the yet to come. DUE is a formation that joins an acoustic instrument with electronics in a unique way: two women, each musician doing her own thing on her own instrument; but at the same time, the flute music i…
Extra space, extra time
'Six tracks. Recorded at the studio of Extrapool in Nijmegen for a series of 'Brombron' project in October 2009. Mixed and produced by Kazuyuki Kishino at Prima Natura Studio.' label info
Book Of Nods
A new landscape is painted out of darkness by progressive strokes of the dawn. The finished piece is neither night nor day, but the transformation itself. Aidan Baker's (Nadja) "Book Of Nods" crests experimental peaks in similarly paced sonic transmigrations. His lustrous chimera blooms open in shifting onion layers built out of slow-moaning guitar, flute, organ and drums. The resonant frequencies of quietly crashing nodes vibrate the ozone with a sub-textural beating of multi-pianic fea…
The Hexagram on Grace
Third soloist album by Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien, Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, Praxinoscope). During the same period of self isolation in the Westrn Alps that brought to life MCIAA's 'Photoelectric Season' double album, Roberto conceived the creation of his new full-lenght album, inspired by the mystic aura of the nature surrounding himself. Focusing himself on his peculiar wordless vocalizations, and using simply a mini-key…