New Arrivals
The Gowanus Session
“The Gowanus Session”, a new trio recording by Thollem McDonas (piano), William Parker (acoustic bass), Nels Cline (electric guitar), that explores the density and subtlety of tones with reverberating layers of sounds. Thollem McDonas approaches the piano brilliantly, leading the listener to image abstract and beautiful worlds within themselves. William Parker, with his mastery of the acoustic bass, brings warmth to the recording that is complex, soaring and joyful. Nels Cline’s innovative and s…
Smudge Another Yesterday
Pimmon is the alias for electronic composer Paul Gough. In the last decade, Pimmon has forged an international reputation for creating dense, challenging and engaging electronic music. Smudge Another Yesterday is Pimmon’s first full length release in five years. This release picks up and goes further from the point where the acclaimed Secret Sleeping Birds left off. Smudge Another Yesterday is an exploration of the song behind the noise; the secret whispers hidden in the static. Within these vas…
Ultrealith
Ultrealith' is an electro-acoustic sound-adventure exploring sounds that exist on the periphery of human perception, such as underwater recordings (such as fish-songs, crustaceans etc), ultrasounds (sonar of bats and dolphins, insects), electromagnetic signals and other textures. These recordings were sourced in the Amazonian rainforest, Africa, Canadian Newfoundland, northern Australia and in various parts of Europe.
Somnambulance to Dream General
"Somnambulance" is a reworking of an album of odd and obscure tracks that was released in a microscopic edition on CD-R before. For this CD, Mr. Liles has provided his funniest and possibly most controversial artwork as of yet. You get an hour of music of many different styles: Andrew Liles' trademark of eerie and spooky sounds is there; also electronics and a whole range of instruments are placed in between sketches and longer tracks. And if all this weren't enough, you get three bonus tracks t…
Musiques Machinales
1 copy only, long out of print - for many years, Pierre BASTIEN has developed his personal music based on musical machines made with Mecano. His orchestra MECANIUM is his backing band both on album and on stage. All this creates a tender, delicate and emotive machine music that seduced Pascal DOMELADE from the beginning. A terrific mixture of J. Dubuffet and John Cage
Saxophone Solos
Reissue of Chronoscope CPE 2002-2. Originally issued on LP 19 and a limited edition cassette. Evan Parker's first solo concert on soprano saxophone. Recorded by Martin Davidson in 1975 at the Unity Theatre in London, at that time the preferred concert venue of the Musicans' Co-operative. Further solo material for the original LP release was recorded by Jost Gebers in the FMP studio in Berlin later that year.
Ablation
Welcome return for Robert Hampson with the first Main album in seven years, new on eMego. Hampson founded Main with Scott Dawson upon disbanding Loop in '94, and while their initial releases still bore traces of their space-rock origins, the goal was always total ecstatic abstraction, and by the time of the Hz series, completed in '96, they'd pretty much achieved it. Main's music has been called many things: industrial, noise, isolationist electronica, dub, drone; the truth it, it's all a…
Costellazione Seconda
Constellazione Seconda is the follower of the Lombardi 1978 "Costellazione" a piano sound exploration based upon a map of sky constellation, planned as the first step of a large work focused on the exposition and 'performance' of constellations maps, planetaria and maps of the heavens. This new work breaks up into 21 short piano movements, concentrating on incredibly short staccato notes that sting violently between fractured harmonics leaving plenty of momentum-puncturing silences to really he…
Zone Sensible 2 - Dundee 2
For the best part of a decade, Éric La Casa's attention to sonic phenomena has resulted in some of the finest contemporary Musique Concréte to come out of France. A listener of the highest order, La Casa's methodology for sound recording allows for a versatile examination of both urban and natural environments and it is these interests which are captured on this new edition for Room40. With an ability to find unique perspectives on his sound subjects La Casa's site specific works 'Zone Sensible'…
The beauty is the thing
The trio of pianist Aki Takase, guitarist/daxophonist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, and trumpeter Axel Dorner in an exploration of informed and exquisite dialog in acoustic and electric improvisation. This trio's musical inspirations give birth to an amazing, extraordinary, mind-boggling mandala of sound. It's an extreme sound that could only be achieved by people engaged in the ultimate sonic and musical explorations. Surrender yourself to the joyful sounds coming out of the left and right speaker…
Los Autodisparadores
A soft immersion, leaving the surface behind,knowing that on the inside, wide horizons are waiting.In the mines of matter: laboring and exploring, searching and will-o‘-wisping, but always with compass and sextant at hand.Ample discoveries are the prize – never boastfully on display,but tended with archeological care: larger molecular aggregates, atoms, elementary particles; interacting or alone.A journey, seemingly documenting itself through close observation. Land surveying through experiencin…
Cellos
The association between Ulrich Mitzlaff and Miguel Mira promises an unforeseeable sound meeting. The specific, personal and different ways of their distinguished expression is the base for their very dynamic and interactive music. They create sounds where the improvisation moves with great fluency between the establishing of textures and abstract musical ideas and the switching in the musical discourse to singular, rhythmic and melodic affirmations. They construct the sonar explorations using th…
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…
Castings
The title of Fern Knight’s 2006 release, Music for Witches and Alchemists, served simultaneously as a wonderfully apt description and an unambiguous product warning. If you prefer the mundane to the magical, move on: These are not the druids you’re looking for. Since then, the group has relocated to Arlington from Philadelphia, and while Fern Knight’s music evokes far-away times and places, it turns out the band fits in nicely with the D.C. area’s musical history—assuming you can stomach …
Foundations
With an explorative approach Orquere organizes concrete sounds into experimental structures of cold and dry sonic landscapes where sounds appear as objects. Stripped down to their bare essence. No effects. No electronic noise. Just raw analogue manipulations with magnetic tape which carves out a sound that has its roots in both industrial, field recording and sound art. Orquere is Viktor Ottosson, a sound artist active in Gothenburg, Sweden. V O was one of the key figures of the now defun…
Less Is More
The piano trio is probably one of the most common ensembles to be heard in jazz, and truth be told, I am a little weary of them, preferring the expressiveness of a horn section. Yet once in a while, a piano trio comes forward that has something new to tell. When I listened to WHO Trio's "The Current Underneath" (Leo Records) a couple of years ago, I was immediately enchanted by the sheer musicality of the project. This one, "Less Is More", is even better. The trio consists of Michel Wintsch on p…
Oort
David Chiesa - double bass. Jean-Sébastien Mariage - acoustic guitar. Recorded by Pierre-Henri Thiébaut at école Britten in Périgueux.
I Wish I Didn't Dream
Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Sp…
See
Tim Hodgkinson's first major project after Henry Cow with Bill Gilonis, Mick Hobbs & Rick Wilson. See was the third and last record the band released before it broke up, and was continuing to evolve, becoming more subtle, complex and rounded than the earlier albums, though still packing a mighty punch. There's nothing polite about this record and no other group ever attempted to occupy this territory. See is extremely appropriately recorded and is constantly in your face with powerful rhythmic t…
Manfauna
Miasma are a band comprised of various members of Guapo, Cathedral, Chrome Hoof and Elsa Drake all playing at the top of their form on this three-part sequence of instrumentals. The band court references to prog, the occult and Victoriana - at least that's what the press release is saying, and I'm not one to argue. The group's fearsome instrumental abilities are the real source of Miasma's strength, with sophisticated, thorough arrangements boasting some of the finest implementation of bassoon y…