a Snare is a Bell is a solo piece for snare drum, voice and the room in which it is played.Inspired by some close encounters I had with African shamanic/trance musicians and my personal experiences with meditation and music, it also relates to a known-to-many-of-us acoustical wonder of sitting on the toilet and picking up the tone of that little room (often by accident while coughing or talking out loud to oneself) and enjoying to sing that tone and let the toilet become filled with an eno…
** Edition of 300 copies ** In the late 1980s, Klaus Wiese (Popol Vuh) deepened his connection with Tibetan culture. The result is a series of works solely dedicated to the universal purity of the Singing Bowls. Uranus, perhaps the most rigorous of these, is an intense meditation on the trans-personal sphere of the VI chackra. The music becomes like a single harmonic chant, the reflection of a constant flow of divine light, which transforms the psyche and dilates the secret passages of the hear…
2002 release. Gong + presents three previously-unpublished compositions by Philip Corner recorded in New York City, 1974. "Metal Meditations with Listening Center," a 29-minute long piece, is a collaboration between Philip Corner and Bill Fontana. At that time Bill Fontana was very interested in the resonance properties of every object, putting his ear to everything, and sometimes recording what he called "Listening Centers," a microphone placed in a resonating space (for example a jar, or a pip…
Tip! This is raw, unfiltered ceremonial gong ensemble music recorded on location by Laurent Jeanneau in Ratanakiri, Cambodia’s northeastern province, bordering Laos and Vietnam. Along with Mondolkiri to the south, it was once home to many of the country’s ethnic minority communities. During the colonial period, the French failed to establish full control over the region. After independence, the Khmer state also struggled to govern it, while Khmer Rouge rebels hid in its forests in the 1960s amid…
A live carillon performance on the bells of St Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen, October 2017. Palestine started out on the carillon of St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue as a teenager, years before the Bosendorfer, and this is him going back to it with fifty years behind him.
Bill Fontana investigates the physics of perception itself. Side A: tape collages where sound becomes both material and force. Side B: Wave Spiral for 5 Rin Gongs - a sidelong, 21-minute centerpiece where pure sine waves create interference patterns, frequency made sculptural. Sound spiraling through space, dissolving boundaries between observer and phenomenon.
Microphonies 21 by Marc Billon is a long-form electroacoustic exploration centered on the resonances of a tam-gong. Blurring the line between acoustic gesture and electronic transformation, the work unfolds as a slow, tactile meditation on vibration, decay, and the physical act of listening itself.
Graze the Bell is a collection of soul-stirring, mesmerizing solo piano pieces, and the most distilled offering of David Moore’s artistry to date. Known for his atmospheric compositions with Bing & Ruth, as well as his collaborations with guitarist Steve Gunn and Cowboy Sadness, this marks Moore’s first widely shared solo piano album. Using the piano to meditatively inquire into the human condition, Graze the Bell is a sanctuary of sound, and an invitation for listeners to meet him in the presen…
Semiotic Drift is a living conversation - Maggie Nicols uses voice as a map to possibility, Matilda Rolfsson provides creaking, insistent percussion, and Mark Wastell frames everything in the deep resonance of amplified tam-tam. The work rides the edge between storytelling and pure abstraction.
Michel Vogel explores the resonant possibilities of metallic percussion, sculpting shimmering, meditative soundscapes that blur the line between music and pure sound: alpha-wave improvisations for "prepared" gongs and self-built metal instruments
Reissue on 180-gram opaque white vinyl. Originally released in 1965. The transitional "Bells" was just under 20 minutes, released originally as one side of a clear vinyl LP with the other side empty of music. It was recorded at a May 1, 1965, Town Hall concert of ESP artists, displaying Albert Ayler's new group, which added Albert's brother Donald and Charles Tyler. The denser sound of "Bells" shows Ayler moving towards the bigger sonic statement made on Spirits Rejoice (ESPDISK 1020CD/LP), h…
Three violin and cello duos by Jennifer Allum and Ute Kanngiesser, recorded in different rooms of St Augustine's Bell Tower, Hackney, London, on 29 May 2012.
The Buffalo sacrifice is a significant ritual among the Bahnar people, an ethnic group residing in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It symbolizes a connection to ancestral spirits and the natural world. Prior to the sacrifice, the community gathers to prepare offerings and adorn the buffalo with symbolic decorations.
The ceremony typically involves prayers, chants, and dances led by village elders. The sacrifice is performed with reverence and gratitude, honoring the buffalo's sacrifice for the…
*2023 stock* "Gongs have been part of my life since 1970, when as Jazz Swiss School student in Bern (Switzerland), I had the lucky opportunity to visit the Paiste, Cymbal and Gongs factory. I was immediately fascinated by the sonic world of the gong and related metal percussion and I started dreaming a future that could possibly include those marvelous instruments. Few years later, while in New York on my first US trip, I found few Albums of Balinese Music in a small record store in the Greenwic…
Karlheinz Stockhausen's early percussion works on two CDs: Zyklus, Kontakte for piano and percussion with tape, Mikrophonie for tam-tam, Refrain and Schlagtrio, with new transfers from the analog tapes.
Tim Catlin built the vibrissa: twelve tuned aluminium rods, mounted vertically and stroked lengthwise by hand. Around them, quarter-tone bells, wine glasses, EBowed guitars and long wire instruments, with Philip Brophy and David Brown in the group.