New Arrivals
Water days
The book and audio CD documents an exchange of pictures, texts, sounds and voices between multimedia artist Leah Singer and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. WATER DAYS began as two texts each inspired by the contrast between wanderlust and the desire for home and in this volume attempts to create a filmic sequence of photographs to augment and accompany the recording. The new sound piece WATER DAYS, a radio piece for Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture (ACR) is a mix of sound recording…
Para Pacem Para Bellum
Para Pacem Para Bellum” is the first CD release with the great music of Svyatoslav Lunyov's. That serious, highly emotional and spiritual work is the result of two general methods of creating music: academic tradition (scores, acoustic instruments and playing of the real musicians) and the contemporary/experimental way (generating, synthesis, editing with computer tools). Needs to say that this electro-acoustic work combines the well-known traditional elements of the Requiem, Passions and the Ma…
Mining Our Bid'ness
A revelatory debut album by a 64 year old pianist/composer may beg the question: where has Carei Thomas been all this time? Born in a culturally diverse neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Thomas cut his musical teeth in Chicago during a particularly fertile period for that city: gigging with Sun Ra as an improvising vocalist in 1959-60, joining up with the AACM for one hot minute in 1966, co-founding a group called The L…
Einstein on the Beach
Widely credited as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century, this rarely performed work launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success when it was first produced in Avignon, France in 1976, with subsequent performances in Europe and in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. It is still recognized as one of their greatest masterpieces. Now, nearly four decades after it was first performed and twenty years since its last production, Einstei…
Into An Energy
This is a new release by California's extremely prolific avant-drone duo, Starving Weirdos. These eight new pieces bear all the hallmarks of Starving Weirdos' greatest work: the dizzying mixture of instrumental sounds, electronics, and field recordings, the pointillistic attention to sonic detail, the duo's post-production technique, which achieves something like the aural equivalent of deep-focus photography. On Into An Energy, the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay is joined by occasional …
OvalDNA
In many ways, O, released on Thrill Jockey after a nine-year break, was a second debut album for Markus Popp aka Oval. A radical break with old concepts and methods, a new beginning. While Popp's artistic approach in the 1990s and early 2000s was more of a structural, theoretical nature, O was just about the music itself. Themes such as the means of production, limitations, dogma and concept took a back seat to a musical sensibility. Instead of writing new software to synthesize and proces…
Palace of marvels (queered pitch)
Marcus Schmickler's new release following his acclaimed Altars Of Science (EMEGO 082CD) is a must-have for those interested in the rising field of contemporary computer music. It reconfirms Schmickler's interest in the liaison of sound, phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Schmickler, therefore, utilizes a new interpretation of 1960's discovery, the Shepardtone, discovered by Roger Shepard, which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually rises or descends in pitch yet ultimately …
Underneath the surface
Since the very first notes, this music appears to be about memory, decay and subversion. It is a deep investigation on the ability of sounds to freely attract or reject each other, in accordance with their own nature and disposition, and still maintain their meaning. Combining dense, multilayered sheets of synthetic sounds, treated bass, electronic percussion, the six tracks reveal their non-architectural principle as the music develops through warm textural details, reverberations, underlying m…
The Drive
Billed as a soundtrack to an imaginary road movie this latest album from Jon Egeskov's Pixel project (his third in all) reaches into your subconscious and yanks out whatever images are lodged in there. Using a basic palette of miniscule percussive elemnts and delicately manipulated amplifier hiss Egeskov instils a sense of gentle motion, sounding out dream-like engine noise that propels the listener down whatever shady lane they're prepared to venture down. The floating hum and crinkled analogue…
Lacunae
Sound and video artist MPLD works in a world of sentiment and detachment, creating a Lost & Found aesthetic uniquely his own. Lost are the old Kodachrome slides which make up the foundation of his work. Found are the feelings of misplaced memories the slides conjure, as well as the sounds — processed and amplified — of the projectors that bring those images back to life. What’s seen on lacunae is a straight shot of the screen during a rehearsal for a concert, although that might not be clear to …
Live at Cafe Oto
a rich, layered mesh of droning sound leaning towards the lower end of the scale that hangs together in a somewhat fragile manner. In many ways there can be detected some of the dynamics and stimuli present in modern noise music in what Oceans of Silver and Blood are doing. Indeed Nordwall has a partial background in this area, and both musicians took part in a very noisy conclusion to the Eight Hour Drone People concert I saw at Oto last winter, alongside the likes of Lasse Marhaug, thirty minu…
Snow Blind
RESTOCKED!! Limited to 300 copies only "We haven't heard from New Zealand dronescaper Peter Wright in about a year. Well, it's been at least that long since we've reviewed one of his discs. Somehow two other Wright discs slipped through the cracks in that time though, which is a shame, since pretty much everything we've heard from Wright is fantastic. This latest double disc is no different Nine looooooong tracks spread out over two discs, most in the 15-20 minute range, which is ideal for Wrigh…
Living With Yourself
Mark McGuire operates chiefly as guitarist in the legendary Emeralds, however he also has racked up an impressive set of solo releases over the last few years (albeit mainly in small to micro print runs). 'Living With Yourself' is his new album and we at Editions Mego hope to meet any demand which may arise from this fine selection of modern crafted guitar tunes. Focusing on his family, early friendships and the problems that inevitably develop through years of knowing someone, it takes McGuire…
Radio Imitat
The piece “Radio-Imitat (Radio Imitation)” by the German artists and musicians collective Insitut fuer Feinmotorik was produced in 2009 for the monthly radio show “Radio Arthur” on Radio LoRa. In addition to its reconstruction of advertising, music and jingles, imaginative room is also made available for talk and discussion. A facsimile of radio is thus painstakingly manufactured, as if by someone who for cared very much less for sense and signification than they did for the weird flow of sound …
Manual for the construction of a sound
Surface Tension Supplément N°4. 'Organized as a temporary working group, the Manual project set out to explore sound and auditory experience as platforms for social meeting, urban intervention and environmental investigation. Developed in collaboration with Atelier Nord and the Ultima festival and staged in Oslo in 2009, the project brought together six artists from around Europe engaged in experimental media practices. The project functioned as a series of process-oriented field studies of the …
Polvere
Xabier Iriondo and Mattia Coletti. Polvere by some means is the avant/kraut folk project of this couple of musicians and beside the experimental/post-psychedelic characteristics of the cd it shows their melodical/acoustic virtues.