In the throes of a truly incredible run of releases, Holidays Records returns once more with two astounding marvels from the global landscape of experimental sound: “The Days Of The Week / Chinese Wisdom”, a remarkable 7" comprising two pieces by the Belgium born sound artist, improviser, musician and composer, Pak Yan Lau - among the most striking prepared / modified instrument and object oriented bodies of work we’ve encountered in some time - and “Nozhet El Nofous” the debut full-length by the Egyptian multi-instrumentalist and composer Nancy Mounir, sculpting captivating imagined histories from archival recordings and her own brilliant musical interventions.

Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music. In the last year or so alone, we’ve witnessed incredible LPs by Sun Ra, Walter Maioli, Henry Krutzen, Andrea Penso, Luigi Nono, and others, building on an already remarkable catalog that includes releases by Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, Jean-Yves Bosseur, James Rushford, Delivery Health, Henning Christiansen, Four Horsemen, Maria Monti, and numerous others.

Born in Belgium, with roots from Hong Kong, Pak Yan Lau is a sound artist, improviser, musician and composer, noted for sculpting singular, electro-acoustic sound worlds from a palette of prepared and toy pianos, synthesiser, electronics, and a vast range of objects. In addition to working in various groups - Dream & Drone Orchestra, Eggstream, Going, Lauroshilau, and others - composing for dance, theatre, and film, she has made her name as a striking improviser, working with Chris Corsano, Akira Sakata, Darin Gray, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Tetuzi Akiyama, Mette Rasmussen, Rie Nakajima, Toshimaru Nakamura, Susana Santos Silva, Giovanni Di Domenico, Audrey Chen, John Also Bennett, and many more.

Despite having spanned the last decade with a furious activity, Pak Yan Lau’s purely solo output has remained relatively constrained, limited to her "Solo Books" trilogy, issued by Silent Water in 2015, and “Bakunawa”, released by cortizona in 2021, making the release of “The Days of the Week / Chinese Wisdom”, that much more of an exciting event.

Broadly speaking, over the last few decades, recorded experiences of experimental music have tended to drift toward durational forms, with the vast majority of releases using the constraints of a given format - CD length / sides of an LP or cassette - to roughly determine their pacing, structure, and time. Within this are carried unspoken presumptions about levels of ambition and expectations regarding the way a listener occupies a given work that overlook the remarkable challenges of working in shorter temporal forms. This is precisely what Pak Yan Lau’s two pieces - “The Days of the Week” and “Chinese Wisdom” - issued on corresponding sides of a 7” by Holidays, challenge, compacting a remarkable sense of arc, structure, and drama into roughly 5 1/2 minutes each.

Recorded in Brussels during August of 2020, “The Days of the Week” and “Chinese Wisdom” deploy a sprawling range of sound sources - dismantled toy pianos, wind up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, and voice - encountering Lau weaving a striking sense of poetry from delicate textures, pulses, and scattered tones and utterances. Manifesting as a maximalist form of minimalism, each track unfolds as its own intimate sound world, guided forward by the bend toward the rhythmical and percussive, each punctuation feeling direct and intuitive as much as it does perfectly balanced and carefully placed.

Absolutely captivating and certainly one of the most striking prepared / modified instrument and object oriented bodies of work we’ve encountered in some time, while its pieces are creatively brief, Pak Yan Lau managed to pack all of the power of a longer work into “The Days of the Week” / “Chinese Wisdom”. It’s a truly magical listen from the first sounding to the last.

One of the most singular and unique voices in the exciting contemporary experimental music scene emerging from Egypt, Nancy Mounir is a composer and versatile multi-instrumentalist - violin, piano, bass, Theremin, and flute / kawala - whose work as a solo artist combines rigorous research, conceptualism, and reimagined histories to produce incredibly unique expanses of electroacoustic sonorities. “Nozhet El Nofous” (Promenade of the Souls), is her solo debut and reached wide acclaim upon its issue as a digital only release in 2022. Holidays’ beautiful vinyl edition of 500 copies marks its first appearance on a physical format.

When constructing “Nozhet El Nofous”, Mounir focused her attention upon a “freewheeling” period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized across the Middle East during the early 1930s, drawing upon samples of recordings of female Egyptian singers in the 1920s who utilised Arabic microtonal scales (maqamat) "to reconstruct a non-existent memory" that she responded to with her own instrumental interventions, establishing a stunning musical space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony.

A fascinating use of sampling and the techniques of musique concrete, drenched in microtonality and non-metered rhythms, “Nozhet El Nofous” represents a fascinating bridge across time, intertwining Mounir’s arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings, creating something that is strikingly contemporary while implying a history that never was. A wondrous, haunting ambient marvel, drenched in so much emotion and creative vision that the album’s immersive and consuming totality almost completely overshadows the remarkable sense of conceptualism that brought it into being, “Nozhet El Nofous” is one of those rare albums that entirely stands on its own and defies categorisation, not to mention nearly all of the aesthetic signifiers that most have come to expect from experimental music.