Moving Furniture Records super sale
Albumin
Tip! Jim O'Rourke and Jos Smolders teamed up again after their first collaboration, Additive Inverse from 2021. Over a period of three years, both artists worked in sessions of a day, each in their own studio.The result is sometimes like a warm cloud of sounds, suddenly breaking up into a rhythmic, irregular pattern, after which it dives into introverted mindsets. The music is in constant flux. The project followed the same workflow, but this time Jim took the lead and kicked off with a salvo of…
Saxophone Studies
Two long drone pieces built around recordings of improvised saxophone. The first is a seventeen-minute work derived from material James Fella sent Orphax in 2006: multi-layered and roughly cut, with non-harmonic multitones colliding in the room and ear to produce a piercing psychedelic effect. The second, recorded with his father in late 2017, is bass-heavy and centred on baritone, working through multi-layering and phasing into a slow form from which melodic fragments quietly emerge.
A Concrete Pasture
Follow-up to Haarlemmerhout, pushing Polack's hyper-local Haarlem practice out into the wider world. Four long pieces are built from material gathered across continents - the temple of the reclining Buddha (Wat Pho, Bangkok), Schiermonnikoog in the Dutch Wadden, Hong Kong traffic lights, Gamelan percussion - then routed through electronic processing, nostalgic power chords, electroacoustic crescendo writing, and a final tenor saxophone gesture reminiscent of Albert Ayler's raw expressivity.
Unfold Yourself
Fourth release by Petrovic on the label, distancing himself from the GEST instrument to re-explore conventional means. Seven pieces narrate an emotional arc - Disrupt, Obstruct, Shatter, Rejuvenate, Illuminate, Erupt, Arise - through which a Petrovic-figure works back out of an extended depression. The vocabulary moves from Moog-like dark tones and metallic percussion through bowed-guitar ambient writing to almost danceable beats in the closing pieces. A study of recovery in compositional form.
Battleship Potemkin
Seventh in the MFR Contemporary Series. Ezequiel Menalled composes a new soundtrack for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), performed by Ensemble Modelo62 and recorded at their Hague studio on 13 March 2020. Six acts span the film's structure, internalising the frantic editing in shifting layers, pulled focus and forced perspective. Realised in the spirit of Eisenstein's wish that a new score be written every twenty years, the music becomes a speculative meta-version of the film.
Loess
First collaboration between Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and Modelbau (Frans de Waard), composed entirely by exchanging physical cassettes through the post. Each artist worked unpredictably on what the other sent: Rimbaud through Ellitone Farm Detective Ultrarollz and Flower Electronics, de Waard via Modelbau's iPad synths, Korg Monotron and cheap pedals. The released sequence (ten pieces across four LP sides) is one interpretation among many possible mixes. Warm, lush ambient with analogue grain.
Focus Intensity Power
BJ Nilsen's first LP for the label, departing from his field-recording practice. Recorded during a Fall 2017 residency at Willem Twee Electronic Music Studio in Den Bosch, the five pieces document improvised sessions on modular synthesizers, tone generators and laboratory test instruments. The flâneur's ear, normally trained on wind or city traffic, is here turned on machine-generated material: analogue pulse, droning waves and subtle noise arranged with the same patient sense of texture.
Equal Weights
Companion to Various Weights, pursued through an inverted method. De Waard prepares two empty acoustic containers of predefined length with his own sonic brushstrokes, then sends them to Comes, who completes the 'paintings' by filling in the blanks - the two artists collaborate without ever directly responding. The electroacoustic timbres triggered a sentimental mood in Comes, and the two long-form tracks develop themes of memory, grief and longing. CD with an A5 eco-printed book.
Memory Loss
Sixth release in the MFR Contemporary Series. Greek trio Eventless Plot (Liolios, Giatas, Tsirikoglou), joined by bass clarinetist Chris Cundy, take recent research on music and Alzheimer's disease as starting point: that music helps both retrieve old memories and lay down new ones. Two long compositions are built from repeated patterns creating familiarity, then gradually layered with shifting tone combinations. Instrumentarium includes psaltery, tape (Revox A-77), modular and bass clarinet.
Various Weights
First collaboration between Frans de Waard and Martijn Comes, deliberately built without an underlying concept. Each artist supplied the other with a pool of source sounds: de Waard sent Comes Korg MS20 and Koma Field FX recordings and field material; Comes sent de Waard a processed stylophone, a loop and recordings from the University of Twente's web Software-Defined Radio. Two epic pieces result: Comes's harmonic deep-sonority drone, de Waard's quieter acousmatic-minimalist hover.
Of What Once Was
A fifty-five-minute diptych. The opening piece transposes Yves Klein's Monotone Symphony (1949) onto solo electric guitar: a sustained drone on the pitch D, where variation arises only from durational shape and the changing morphology of resonance. The closing piece, live-improvised, marks Machinist's move beyond guitar-drone toward wider sonic terrain. Across both runs the same inquiry: spatial field recording against non-spatial computer tone, mediated by guitar amplifier as resonating body.
Music For Modified Melodica
Suzuki's third solo album, framed by a single instrument she modified herself: a melodica re-engineered to play via foot bellows, so that high-pressure airflow overblows the small reeds into a sustained, loud excitation. The pumped breaths are amplified through time delays, layered with oscillators and manipulated highs to develop the combination tones that emerge at extreme volumes. A durational, psychoacoustic drone work that 'rewards endurance with transcendence', performed live.
Caveman
Caveman is a document of Stamou's live practice: two complete extracts of solo improvised performances using his 'portable electroacoustic studio'. The setup combines acoustic instruments (prepared zither, reeds, recorders, objects) with handmade electronics, modular synthesis and live-processed feedback loops, producing long continuous pieces built on sustained tonal textures and free improvised solos. What the artist calls ritual noise: a slow-burning, immersive electroacoustic atmosphere.
John Duncan / T.R. Kirstein
First collaboration between Tobias R. Kirstein and John Duncan, prompted by a dream Kirstein had on 31 May 2019 - the day Roky Erickson died - in which Duncan repeated 'You Are Safe' against a backdrop of sine waves. Two long pieces result: Duncan voices texts (You Are Safe, the second 'Come To Me') sustained by Kirstein's slowly morphing electronic backgrounds, computer-generated drones that thicken into something close to insect resonance before settling. Process-led voice and electronics.
Less Is More
Recording of Orphax's live performance at Factor-IJ, Amsterdam in August 2021, part of the programme curated by Moving Furniture Records to accompany the Polderlicht-organised exhibition Less Is More. The full set is reproduced as recorded, without edits. The performance brings Sietse van Erve's recurring interest in minimalist aesthetics into conversation with his own drone practice, producing warm, organic atmospheres in which the listener's sense of time and place deliberately disintegrates.
Cuspa Llullu
Second collaboration between Anla Courtis and Daniel Menche, recorded across Portland and Buenos Aires. Two side-long pieces traverse a kaleidoscopic sound labyrinth: Side A moves through metallic, multi-layered corridors in constant mutation, Side B opens outdoors and gradually visits a sequence of interior regions toward a final climax. The sound material is treated as living, vibrating matter rather than inert sample, a study in frequency-as-organism on the drone-noise threshold.
Weerkaatsing
First studio meeting between two figures long circling each other in the Dutch experimental scene. The structure is itself a kind of mirror: Spiegeling is Machinefabriek's remix of Orphax's De Eerste Dag, Reflectie is Orphax's twenty-minute remix of Machinefabriek's 2007 piece Stofstuk, and the title track is the only fully joint composition. Long-form drone built through indirect dialogue, with each signature still audible but inflected by the other.
Smelter
Second album by DNMF, the duo formed between Machinefabriek and the Dutch droning free-jazz combo Dead Neanderthals. Across some forty minutes Smelter develops a highly dynamic amalgam of metal, drone and dark ambient, the heaviness of the Neanderthals' instrumental mass folded into Zuydervelt's electroacoustic processing. The result moves between glacial expansive stasis and dense ferrous noise, holding the two registers in productive friction without resolving them into either.
Inheritance
First collaboration between the brothers Sietse and Tjeerd van Erve - Orphax (drone and electroacoustic) and PONI, Person Of No Importance (dark lo-fi guitar songs). Inheritance is a near-translation of the family name van Erve, and the album returns to shared early influences from their father's record collection, late-night Dutch radio and the Belgian Studio Brussels station. Opener As Received builds slow drone into post-rock intensity; later tracks reach toward late-period Swans territory.
Smolders / Delaere / Nijs
Composition trio between Jos Smolders (electronics), Guido Nijs (saxophone) and painter Koen Delaere, whose abstract pigment surfaces serve as compositional model. Five tracks named after pigments (Aureolin, Barium, Diarylide, Bianco di Titanio, Indigofera Suffruticosa) translate Delaere's clashing, superimposed colour material into sonic canvases. The work grew out of two years of free improvisation; on Diarylide, the duo is extended with Eric Van Der Westen on bass and Aron Raams on guitar.