Reissues
Speedball Experience
In stock now!! Okay, as the title already suggests, this compilation is made entirely of early 70s library music which was recorded for so called music libraries from whose stores, movie makers and TV producers could license certain titles for their productions. In most cases the compositions were a conglomerate of popular music genres such as funk, psychedelic, rock and soul. I have experienced a few French productions of that kind before, but now it is time for some Italian stuff. I am quite p…
Light Flight / More And More
There are synthesizers, there are guitars, bass guitars, real drums and vocals in the first song. Components of rock and pop unite here in this lone 1977 effort and make way for elements of dark slow funk and soul that take you a couple of years back to the early seventies. The garment of swirling synthesizers keep it all together. The atmosphere can be soft and gentle like the touch of a lover’s hand but it can also become more and more mysterious and gloomy generating a feeling of paranoia as …
Astromusic Synthesizer
Another great but late (1928 – 2003) synthesizer artist and pioneer, this time from Italy. His works date back to the early 60s and maybe even beyond considering his age. In the mid to late 60s he became quite active in the field of western movie soundtracks for example. This album I have the honor to review is a concept album on the zodiac signs and the music it contains could not be more diverse.
The elements that unite all the tunes are the entirely synthetic, yet warm analogue sound and the …
The Unexplained
Electronic impressions of the occult, reissued for the first time. The late, great Mort Garson (1924-2008) was a hotshot of electronic music's pioneering days, known for his groundbreaking occult works such as The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967) and Lucifer: Black Mass (1971). A different side of his creativity emerged in his 1976 Plantasia project (FD 5003CD/LP), an inspired album of Moog compositions to be played for growing plants. The previous year he released this hypnotizing album, which ta…
Scelsi Revisited
In the project Scelsi Revisited the tape material is for the first time reflected in the medium of art: seven composers (Ragnhild Berstad, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail, Michael Pelzel, Michel Roth, Nicola Sani) were commissioned by Klangforum Wien to create new works from Scelsi’s tape music; Uli Fussenegger had prepared data packages consisting of excerpts from two to three tapes each, which Scelsi apparently had not used for the elaboration of definitive works, the latter …
Makrokosmos I-III
Makrokosmos Volume I, whose title reflects Crumb’s admiration for Bartók’s piano series Mikrokosmos, contains 12 pieces, grouped into three parts of four each, and Crumb associates each piece with a sign of the zodiac. This is paired with Volume II, which is similarly structured, after the fashion of Debussy’s twenty-four Préludes. Volumes I and II are filled with references to the history of humankind, myths, Christianity, paganism, occultism, literary works, and the composer’s own mental pictu…
Noch sind wir ein Wort
I would like to refer to Annette Bik’s project Bach gedoubelt, which was the origin of this piece, putting Bach’s b-minor partita, BWV 1002, in direct context with contemporary musical comments. Bach wrote so-called “Double” movements to the standard dances Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande and Tempo di Borea, connected to the original as a kind of variation. Annette Bik commissioned four composers to write such “Double” movements to the four main movements of the Partita. This lead to four contemp…
Èclairs sur l'Au-Delà...
“I will say: I have given this flame to these eyes; I have drawn from the ambiguous smile of the moon […] these two naïve stars open to the infinite”, wrote the poetess Cécile Sauvage in 1908 to her unborn son, Olivier Messiaen. It is amazing that the poem in a sense expresses in a prophetic manner Messiaen’s interest in and passion for themes that were to accompany him throughout his life: the cosmos, infinity. It goes without saying that the poetic lifestyle of his mother was to have a strong …
Süden: Gastón Solnicki on Mauricio Kagel
111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …
Yamaon
Yamaon (1954-1958) for bass, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, contra bassoon, percussion and doublebass is one of the wildest and most direct works of Scelsis. Just as the composition I presagi completed in the same year, the title warns of the destruction of a Mayan city. As Varèse in Ecuatorial and Nocturnal, Scelsi in Yamaon works with a differentiated repertoire of vowels, consonants, and syllables. These have no linguistic semantic meaning, but convey heterogeneous values of expression. “Wh…
Les Soliloques décortiqués
Les Soliloques décortiqués for 16 musicians is dedicated to the musicians performing this piece. Each instrument is a soloist for 90 seconds, time dedicated for him or her to experiment with instrumental techniques that I consider rather “daring”. Meanwhile, the other 15 instrumentalists try to put the soloist’s “discoveries” on their own instrument. - Vinko GlobokarVinko Globokar (born 7 July 1934) is a French-Slovenian avant-garde composer and trombonist. Globokar's work is noted for its use o…
Luci mie traditrici
A voice behind the curtain. Antique beauty disappears: It will always return, the same music, and each time it will be marked by the wounds of time. And throughout the entire work it accompanies the events that are not told. Little happens, almost nothing. But every action leaves behind infinite echo. Shadings, insinuations, contradictions that accumulate and change; before and after, full and empty; impenetrable silence, in which question blurs into question and answer into answer. A magnificen…
Como una ola de fuerza y luz - Unfolding Waves
Between April and June 1971, after the democratic election of Salvador Allende’s government, Luigi Nono visited Chile for three months, meeting several artists, composers and politicians, among whom was Luciano Cruz Aguayo, one of the leaders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria). Back in Italy, Nono started working on his next musical composition, which was meant to be a piece for piano and orchestra, for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado. In …
Relativity Suite
**Strictly limited to 300 copies. Clear Vinyl** Finally available again on vinyl! Don Cherry's Relativity Suite, recorded with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra in 1973. At this time, Cherry was becoming increasingly interested in Middle Eastern and traditional African and Indian music, having traveled extensively and studied with Indian musician Vasant Rai. This suite of songs was particularly influenced by the Indian karnatic singing tradition, as can be heard from the very opening moments of the …
The Book Of Serenity
It was Ludwig Wittgenstein, another Austrian, who already in his debut work identified the borders: in his opinion, he wrote in the preface to his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, he had “essentially resolved” those problems accessible to rational thought, and precisely that would demonstrate “how little is achieved that these problems are resolved.” Even greater emphasis is lent to this insight in the famous sentence with which Wittgenstein closes his Tractatus not even a hundred pages later: „W…
The Moomins - ltd
People of a certain age love the Moomins. It was the quaint Swedish children's television show about a gang of woodland creatures who looked something like hippopotamuses. Weirdly, the evocative, dreamy music was made in Leeds by a couple of punk-era musicians Graeme Miller & Steve Shill and Finders Keepers have already issued the soundtrack on vinyl. This version is a Winter Wunderland Edition which is the same soundtrack in more 'wintery' sleeve art.
Schaum
Faitiche is very pleased to announce the release of a Schaum by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek. Since their debut Bird, Lake, Objects they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo’s second album.
Bird, Lake, Objects
Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick ‘getragen’ – without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term’s semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of “expansive, deep, quiet and sombre.” And yet, ‘getragen’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried – two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him.
Does Masayoshi…
Slow Music
Records are almost always more than they seem. For all the sound and joy that they bring, they are works of art in multiple that indicate vast networks of happening, history, and ideas; beacons to be chased, leading to understanding beyond themselves. Particularly in the case of historical works, whether they emerge from dusty crates or as reissues and archival releases, these objects can reveal unexpected creative intersections that defy our notions of what was. Aguirre’s first-time reissue of …
Vernal Crossing
**In process of stocking** Vernal Croossing is Rapoon´s fourth album, originally released in 1993 by Staalplaat. One of the most interesting records released by Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering industrial group ZovietFrance) on vinyl now for the first time.
A magic balance between percussion and electronics, creating mind-bending tapestries of minimalistic patterns and quasi-melodic drones fused with occasional doses of well-placed white noise. An approach much in debt to his 12 y…