Reissues
Born in the state of FLUX/us
Restocked, reduced price Performing and visual artist Ben Patterson (born 1934) was a founding member of Fluxus' participatory, do-it-yourself, anticommercialist avant-garde network. While many Fluxus artists, influenced by John Cage's precedent, employed conceptual techniques borrowed from music (e.g., the event score), Patterson's fusion of art and music was informed by his background as a classically trained double-bassist. His "Variations for Double Bass" (1960), for example, was played with…
For A World After
LP version. Includes download code. Mental Experience present the first ever reissue of Requiem's For A World After, originally released in 1981. Dark, progressive, synth ambient meets Berlin-School sounds on this obscure kraut album, which "tells the story of a world annihilation through nuclear war." For A World After is full of delayed psychedelic electric guitar, effects, cold drum machines, waves of analog keyboards (Korg MS20, Casiotone 201, Crumar DS-2, Jupiter-4), and cosmic atmosphere…
Autoportrait
Reissue of a cassette released in 1991 by La Légende des voix. A sound self-portrait harsh and tortured also using some texts.Brume (Christian Renou) is a prolific French musique concrete composer/sound sculptor who has won himself a place of his own with his crossover between sound collages, electro-acoustics and noise. His compositions rely on dense, rapid-fire montage and wed cacophony and dynamics, emphasizing both the elements of discontinuity and continuity. Why the nickname « Brume »?: he…
A Trip Down The Sunset Strip
The Leathercoated Minds’ 1967 release A Trip Down the Sunset Strip is a one-of-a-kind artifact of the psychedelic era. Originally conceived as an Exploitation item, it nonetheless emerged as an enduring musical statement, thanks to the talents of those involved, particularly then-unknown Oklahoma-bred guitarist J.J. Cale. As its title suggests, A Trip Down the Sunset Strip was originally concocted by noted pop producer Snuff Garrett (known for his hitmaking ‘60s work with the likes of B…
Les Espaces Électroacoustiques
Milestones of electroacoustic music – from Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique (1958) to Brian Ferneyhough’s Mnemosyne (1986) – are investigated from a music-historical perspective and presented in a contemporary 5.1 surround edition.The selection of works on this double CD mirrors the development of electroacoustic music over a period of 30 years, from the early analogue studios to the shift to digital technology in the 1980s. It includes electronic compositions and works for instruments and e…
Taste Me
“Taste me” is a 1981 obscure instrumental library music album and a weird example of Italo Funk Disco played by professional musicians (most of them under pseudonym) involved also in many different musical projects (from jazz, progressive rock and disco music). The LP includes the killer Disco Funk "Don’t Stop It”.Repressed in limited edition with original artwork for the first time since 1981. Don’t miss it.
Who Says Birds Don't Do Things Just For Fun?
Wow, just wow. One of the dynamics at play in the C.P. program that has been all but absent in the recent catalogue is the "one man against the world" spec. These politically-charged times make me hesitant to use the catch-all "outsider", although, in the case of upstate-New York Composer Glenn Williams, it's clear that a palpable distance from the greater world was, indeed, in effect. Let's first focus on the music; the A-side's side-length title piece works a long-form take of the exact sort o…
Skinny Woman
Cinedelic Records present the first-ever reissue of Ramasandiran Somusundaram's Skinny Woman, originally released in 1974. Skinny Woman is the only solo album by Indian percussionist Ramasandiran Somusundaram, a former member of Bambibanda E Melodie (post-Garybaldi band of Bambi Fossati), Maya, and New Trolls' Atomic System (1973). Produced and played along with a large portion of New Trolls - the De Scalzi brothers, Gianni Belleno, and Giorgio Usai - Skinny Woman is an absolute anomaly of an al…
Space Songs
The first ever vinyl reissue of an extraordinarily-unique space-age educational LP. Includes the oft-covered “A Shooting Star Is Not A Star” and “Why Does The Sun Shine?” Featuring Leo Leonni cover art and taken from the original atomic-era 1959 master tapes. Written by Hy Zaret and sung by Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans. Zaret (co-author of “Unchained Melody”) turned his attention to educational children’s music in the late 1950s, collaborating with Lou Singer on a six-album series called “Ballads f…
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…
A Face We All Know
'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.
Field Days (The Amanda Loops)
14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater. These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and vio…
Propaganda
Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.
Impur
"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France. He roped in as many of the students as he could, grouped according to their departments (early music, rock, African drumming, classical &c), and set them up in all the rooms in the building. The public wandered around creating their own mix, or sat in the courtyard listening to the sound drifting out through the open windows.
For their part, each group of musici…
Nowhere Sideshow Thin Air
This is Frith's sixth CD of music for dance, featuring three commissions by three different choreographers each sharing, as Fred says ' a certain obsession with melodic deconstruction.' Two of them feature - and were especially written for - the remarkable violinist Carla Kihlstedt.
Fred and Carla perform one of them (Fred playing a huge array of instruments here as on all pieces), are joined by Fred Guiliano, (samples) and Gail Brand (trombone) on another, while the third features Fred, …
Clear Sounds/Perfetta
CD version. After nearly 40 years of silence, Harry Bertoia's Sonambient label has been resurrected in order to release the best of Bertoia's unheard recordings from his recently preserved archive of 1/4" tapes. "Clear Sounds" b/w "Perfetta" was cut straight from the original reels and is a true analog pressing. These two pieces were selected for their minimal, meditative and lush harmonic qualities; lacking in the abundance of dynamics and contrasts found on the original Sonambient records, the…
International Holy Hill Jazz Meeting 1969
CD version. BeJazz is happy to come up with a true “holy” modern/free jazz gems of the late 1960s. The original double LP was issued by Meno Liechtenstein’s CB Records – he was also the organizer of the “International Holy Hill Jazz Meeting” in Heidelberg/Germany. The sound quality on the original album was not really bad – but it certainly was not really good as well. We spent a lot of work on a proper restoration of the live tapes. The result is truly amazing – after almost 50 years we are now…
Spiral Insana
Limited and numbered edition of 1000 copies on black vinyl. Probably one of Nurse With Wounds most deep and mysterious recordings, with 4 indexed tracks containing 20 listed sequences. Such is Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound. The music contained here in, still having it's surreal edge, is more ambient and user friendly than on many other Nurse With Wound outings. Stapleton and guests, Robert Haigh and David Jackman mix prepared piano, percussion, loops and various bric a brac together int…
Same Animal, Different Cages Vol. 2: Solomonos for Analog Synthe
Yellow vinyl edition of 100 with download card. Fabrica Records announces the second volume in the Same Animal, Different Cages series by American composer and improviser David First. On this second installment in the Same Animal, Different Cages series of tonal investigations, David First dons his no-madder-than-you scientist's lab coat and proceeds to fire up and overheat his newest subject, a Korg MS-20. The resulting six tracks are characterized by rapid-fire analog oscillations, relentlessl…
Manifesto of Futurist Musicians
“I appeal to the young. Only they should listen, and only they can understand what I have to say. Some people are born old, slobbering spectres of the past, cryptograms swollen with poison. To them no words or ideas, but a single injunction: the end..”