Best of 2016
La Jetee
"'This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood.' Thus begins, with deceptive simplicity, Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962). The film, by far Marker's bestknown work, synthesizes many of the elusive filmmaker's central preoccupations -- time and memory, power and resistance, the ephemerality and resilience of love -- yet it also undermines the very idea of film. Composed almost entirely of still photographs, La Jetée quite literally pieces together the tale of an unnamed, forsak…
Concerto Per La Mano Sinistra In Un Solo Movimento
The Concerto For The Left Hand In One Movement, for piano, is the last unpublished composition of Walter Marchetti to be performed in public before the death of the author on May 12, 2015. This performance by Reinier van Houdt was recorded on April 29, 2015, at Onder De Linden in Valthermond, Netherlands, and is presented with liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, translated from the Italian by Philip Corner. Composed in 1994, the Concerto For The Left Hand belongs to an ongoing series of works writte…
Key To Nowhere
Cosmic righteousness from Brother Ahh – aka Robert Northern – best known for his work with Sun Ra, but a force behind some wonderfully soulful records of his own! This album's one of Ahh's later works – self-released in 1983, with a conception that's fuller than his earlier works – almost in an Alice Coltrane spiritual mode, with tracks that emphasize consciousness, healing, well being, and awareness. Ahh plays flute and French horn on the album – and other instrumentation includes percussion by…
Xhos De Villemahu
Recorded between 2009 to 2016, this is the Jacques Brodier masterwork, a truly unique hybridization of musique concrète practices, sounds from nature, shortwave signals and a dystopic / mystical realization of minimalism. "Penultimate Press is proud to present the second full length release by the acclaimed French inventor, instrument builder, musician, visual artist, researcher and writer Jacques Brodier. Following up the 2012 release Filtre De Réalité, Xhos De Villemahu expands Brodier’s visi…
Diasporagas
Amelia Cuni was born in Milan and has lived in India for more than 10 years where she studied dhrupad singing with various renowned masters. Werner Durand has been performing his own music for saxophones, Iranian ney and self-made wind instruments since the late 70s. He started building his own wind instruments from plexi-glass, PVC and metal tubes in the early 80s and has performed in various groups including The Thirteenth Tribe and Armchair Traveller. For more than 20 years, Cuni and Durand h…
Trio Prosodico
** Edition of 250 copies, includes gatefold 12" insert with score, and printed inner sleeve. ** Sound Poem in six movements, recorded in Torino, 1976. Arrigo Lora-Totino (Torino, Italia, 1928) is a poet, a performer, a writer, an artist and a publisher. Both a major pioneer in European concrete and sound poetry and a key figure in Italian experimental poetry. Author of numerous essays on visual and sound poetry, Totino was a man of extreme inventiveness. He has developed the Idrornegafono, a rot…
Mahjun (1974) - LP
Solid blue vinyl version. Edition of 200. On Mahjun's second eponymous album released by Saravah in 1974, percussionist Nana Vasconcellos joined the line up on the nearly 14 minute long track "La Ville Pue" and "Fin Janvier". Their politico folk-prog sound moved to an ethnic flavored psychedelic fusion. First time reissue of this classic and influential album. Standard black vinyl LP version is in an edition of 500. Comes in 350 gram sleeve with an obi strip, insert and matte printing.
Number One Intersystems
Alga Marghen presents a reissue of Intersystems' Number One Intersystems (1967). Intersystems' works evoke the heightened awareness, intermittent psychosis, intellectual over-stimulation and giddy nihilism of an acid expedition. "Orange Juice and Velvet Underwear" may indeed be the most typically "Psychedelic" cut of Intersystems entire catalog. Its saturated crypto-Indian drone and bent acoustic guitar notes, are upstaged by Parker's lurid-sounding declamations and Mills-Cockell's fierce …
Magnetic Systems
From the same vibrant cinematic landscape of '70s studio supergroups as Goblin, The Pawnshop, The Feedback, and The Braen's Machine comes the Magnetic System, the Italian incognito dream-team composed of Milano prog keyboardist Vince Tempera, Cinevox sibling Franco Bixio, and video nasty maestro Fabio Frizzi (whose career it launched). Bridging giallo jazz-bass-driven prog and the arrival of home studios and synthesizers, the film music of the Magnetic System marked a sea change in Italian gen…
Heteronormativ Musik For Att Starka Medelklassens Sjalvbild
If the term "noise" still makes sense in 2016 it is thanks to figures as Tommy Carlsson and his project Treriksröset.Since the beginning of 2000s Tommy had offered some of the most inspired harsh noise ever heard. Simple and complex at the same time the sound of Treriksroset is pushing the boundaries of the genre, and except the pure harsh noise output he can also experiment with low-key electronic or dig with static frequency studies as he did in a series of cassette releases together with Sewe…
Get On
With over two decades of formal exploration and exhilarating abstraction, Get On is, somewhat surprisingly, only the fourth solo Pita full-length. Peter Rehberg has always been vouched for pushing the very limits of the technology du jour, be it software or in recent years a complex modular set. Rehberg's motives are one of unbridled exploration often resulting in extreme and exhilarating audio works. Having spearheaded the contemporary electronic sound with his uncompromising explorations of no…
Desert Tracks
CD Edition. Sub Rosa present Michel Redolfi's Desert Tracks as part of their Early Electronic Series, originally released by INA-GRM in 1988 alongside "Pacific Tubular Waves". In 1987, Michel Redolfi hit the California desert road during the fall, to catch those hypothetical poly-sensorial desert tones. He visited the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, Palm Canyon and came back with an extraordinary album of early electronic music, sparse and bright to express the crude light and the divine sil…
Interlacing
Ross Manning is one of Australia's best-kept secrets. Since 2010, Manning has been behind a series of increasingly profound explorations into light and movement. These installation works seek to reveal spectrum and frequency in patterns that often go unrecognized. With Interlacing, his first LP for Room40, Manning showcases his deeply personal sonic works. Having been an active experimentalist for much of the 2000s across Australia, with projects such as 4 Layers of Nine, Sky Needle, and F…
Which Way To Leave?
Includes download code. Which Way To Leave? is the latest record by Stockholm based musician John Chantler. The self-reflexive sequencing that tracks the sub-harmonic series in the opening blast of "Falling Forward" positions the record as Chantler's most explicitly melodic. These melodies however do not exist in a mono-dimensional vacuum, rather they co-exist in a meshed framework of dynamic layers of timbre. The record's abrupt cuts, deft variations of density and unexpected diversions a…
Immagini per Diana Baylon
Small repress available. The long and mesmerizing single piece of analogue electronic music that develops over the two sides of the latest Die Schachtel "silver series" LP is a soundscape composed by Teresa Rampazzi for the artist Diana Baylon's 1972 exhibition at the modern art gallery "Il Fiore" in Florence (Italy). Diana Baylon (1920-2013) was a cross-disciplinary artist active in abstract and programmatic art. In the summer of 1969 she appeared – along with with Alberto Burri, Pablo Picasso…
Year of the Horse and Other Electroacoustic Works 1974-1986 (2CD
Jean Schwarz joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1969. In the same year, he also worked as an engineer and researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in the ethnomusicology department of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. He founded Celia Records in 1980 releasing a vast catalog of his own works as well as collaborations. Schwarz favors electronic sounds - the raw material from which he creates large architectural forms and vigorous sonic structures and takes inspiration fr…
Circles
Restocked. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was a lot happening on the German "post Krautrock underground" that few people knew about, lots of independent artists doing their own thing, either via small labels or doing it themselves. Circles were one of these bands. Based on the Frankfurt suburbs, they consisted of the multi-instrumental duo of Dierk Leitert (synthesizer, sequencer, drums, bass, guitar, voice, saxophone, flute) and Mike Bohrmann (guitars, bass, synthesizer) plus a …
Mahjun (1974) - LP, Blue Vinyl
Solid blue vinyl version. Edition of 200. On Mahjun's second eponymous album released by Saravah in 1974, percussionist Nana Vasconcellos joined the line up on the nearly 14 minute long track "La Ville Pue" and "Fin Janvier". Their politico folk-prog sound moved to an ethnic flavored psychedelic fusion. First time reissue of this classic and influential album. Standard black vinyl LP version is in an edition of 500. Comes in 350 gram sleeve with an obi strip, insert and matte printing.
Le Soleil, la Mer, le Coeur et les Etoiles
Edition of 200 copies on red vinyl. Released as part of the series 'Collection Archives Des Musiques Industrielles DeFrance', here are two previously unissued tracks from 1982. This music like all first works of Etant Donnes was made without any instrument or effect but is the fruit of a long work on a raw sound material coming only from nature field recordings.
Etant Donnés are two brothers, Eric and Marc Hurtado, who founded this duet in 1980. They realised music, films (from 1982 to 1…
E.s.p.
In Italy, the genre of documentary film has represented a particularly fertile field for a critical review of the musical contribution to cinema at least since as early as the 1950s. The Italian public television RAI used to broadcast disturbing paranoiac dramas, weird documentaries on the bottom of the sea and indigestible so-called “educational” movies. ESP was a television series produced by Rai in 1973, directed by Daniele D'Anza, and aired from Sunday, May 27 1973 to Sunday, June 17, 1973…