Electronic / Abstract

In October of 2014 Fracture Mechanics traveled to Ljubljana to play and record. The recording at Radio Student involved the transubstantiation of base liquids into nectar and thence by an alchemical process into music. Fracture Mechanics, the scientific study of cracks in any form of material, is a well-chosen metaphor for the examination of music, sounds, shapes and their breaking points. The fact that this has given the word "fracture" a slight semantic degrading is of particular importance. E…

The Holy Quintet is a new group in Mikroton family with only one artist, namely Johnny Chang, appearing before on Echtzeitmusik Berlin compilation in 2012. Borough documents the singular meeting of Johnny Chang, Jamie Drouin, Dominic Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, and David Ryan. The group was assembled by Simon Reynell for a one-off recording session at the Borough Welsh Congregational Chapel on February 15, 2013, taking advantage of Chang and Drouin simultaneously being in London for an i…

Mikroton Recordings is proud to present a full length release from three masters of quiet sound. Martin Taxt is a Norwegian musican who plays tuba and runs Sofa label, Andrey Popovskiy hails from Saint Petersburg and plays violin with objects, Kurt Liedwart plays ppooll using mostly sinewaves and quiet noises and one can notice his current transition to a more noise oriented sound. "Hjem" is a joint adventure of constructing the soundscapes of mysterious clouds of harmonic and microtonal sounds.…

Their music generates a hypnotic atmosphere out of musical atoms: sine waves, noise and clicks. Very pure, very fragile, beautifully restrained, creating abstract spaces and voids of many dimensions. Both perform on ppooll, a freeware-project driven by Klaus Filip with contributions from various users, including Noid. The instruments they use for Ease are very much tailored to their needs, but freely available to anyone. Klaus Filip's sine wave synth and 2D interface is a result of a more that 2…

Jason Kahn, Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang, all from Switzerland, comprise MKM trio, spontaneously founded in 2006 in Tokyo during their Japanese tour. They immediately achieved very fine results and collaborate since then. Their sound hovers between the at times harsh rhythmic noise of Norbert Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics and the rich sonorities of Günter Müller’s percussion-based samples and electronics. Jason Kahn’s work on analog synthesizer bridges these two worlds, adding high…

The Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based collection of internationally respected Composer-Performers which draws inspiration from many genres and is most comfortable in the creative borderland between composed and improvised music. It is a defiant musical organism that has developed an extraordinary artistic profile - uniting across continents, generations and aesthetics. Utilising a broad variety of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and especially constructed and tailored instrume…

In 2013, Noid and Matija Schellander travelled from Vienna to East Asia to meet up with Ryu Hankil and other musicians from Japan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Europe. Carrying compositions, sound art pieces and workshop preparations in their luggage to be tested by changing social and artistic settings, by everyday tour life and to be used as starting points for debates in various forms. The first CD - “Tokyo Office” - is a trio of Noid, Schellander and their main collaborator on this tour…

Formed in 2011 by Angélica Castelló, Mario de Vega, Attila Faravelli and Burkhard Stangl, the Austrian-Mexican-Italian quartet SQID focuses on live sound art and sound performances that push the bounds of the conventional formats of the concert and recording situation. In July 2012 SQID performed at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen festival and played a four-hour installative concert entitled “240” in the protestant church. The sound performance was so well received by the audience and critics th…

Exploration of time, perception and place is the recurring theme of the work of Simon James Phillips. Blage 3 was an extended installation and performance piece curated by Phillips — a one-off five hour uninterrupted improvisation with an ensemble of six of Berlin’s most visible experimental artists – Tony Buck (drums and percussion), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), BJ Nilsen (electronics), Liz Allbee (trumpet), Arthur Rother (guitar) and Simon James Phillips (piano). The ensemble was placed i…

The international quintet Glück combines percussionists of diverse stripes and their individual pronounced ways of playing. The five musicians are internationally renowned as soloists and with various musical outfits. An extremely sound orientated, fragile and transparent approach to their idiosyncratic percussion sets is what they all have in common. From diverse conjoint long-term projects (Vorwolf, Malatesta/Wolfarth, Misiiki) arose the shared wish to put the musical experiences made within t…

Walking through the night. I’m not even supposed to be here today, and so is Silent Bob.New news of dying migrants. No attention for the paperless, what can the sailors do when the captain feels mean? Meanwhile Guy Maddin tells us his tales of amnesia, incest, death, and transfiguration decked out in low-rent expressionism and dime-store surrealism. Such a joy, joy, joy to meet somebody new. The insonnia of the homeless in the Termini train station addressing Heinrich Heine, trying to convince u…

Rhodri Davies was commissioned by the London Musicians’ Collective to put together an ensemble and present a new work for each of the five nights of the 14th LMC Festival of Experimental Music in 2005. Since then the group has invited a number of musicians to join the core members of the ensemble. The current full line up consists of the trio heard on this CD as well as Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte. Morden Tower is one of Britain’s best-known cultural landmarks. For the past 45 years, hundr…

“…for it feels like being overwhelmed by an external force, entering an alien world, but full of glorioles, and this doesn’t happen anytime but dependent on specific preconditions, and it takes a special nature glowing from inside, that’s that. A strange occurrence breaking off the everyday chest, and it is a copulation of mind, an excess, a secret…” - Friederike Mayröcker. Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling. A veritable mind excitement is taking place when Tamara Wilhelm, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and …

Can you say something about a quartet for guitars? Hmm. Where to start? Well let’s start with why “Affetuoso e sostenuto”? And what about those track tittles: “Ineptitude”, “Awkward”, “Gaucheness”, “Underwhelm” and “Failing”? Google “Affetuoso e sostenuto” and probably a reference to Haydn will appear on the screen, a nine minute section from his String Quartet Op. 20. No. 1 ( the third movement). For the musicians on this recording after an examination of the score their very first instruction …

In Why Is The Sea So Blue Margareth Kammerer continues to explore songs in experimental music contexts, elaborately interweaving lyrics into nine wistful soundscapes. Originally recorded in 2006, with the band consisting of Christof Kurzmann (voice, saxophone), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Burkhard Stangl (vibraphone), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Big Daddy Mugglestone (percussion) and Marcello Silvio Busato (drums), the album’s final shape emerged with the production of Valerio Tricoli in 2011, …

The first Mikroton release featuring Russian musicians Ilia Belorukov, a saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, and Kurt Liedwart, an electronic and computer musician from Moscow who also runs the label. It’s their second longplaying work following Obwod which was released on Copy For Your Records. On the new CD the duo goes even further into the realm of unknown contriving to work with silence, space and chance with their traditional means like sinewaves and saxophone’s long tones. Saxophone prepar…

The recordings for the piece were gathered over the course of a year from Huddersfield, Stirling, Aberdeen (United Kingdom), and s’Hertogenbosch (The Netherlands). These were used to create an installation consisting of over 100 tracks that were remixed in real time during each performance. The set up varied from show to show, sometimes playing through 6 speakers and 3 subs, and at other times, through 12 speakers etc. The performers were positioned at the centre of the audience, who in turn, we…

Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima: “Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental …

eRikm first met Norbert Möslang in December 1998 at the festival More Scratch in Nantes when they first played together as part of ad-lib quartet gig which later became known as poire_z, a prominent electroacoustic improvisation quartet which existed until the split of Voice Crack in 2002. Norbert Möslang has been playing in Voice Crack duo with Andy Guhl since 1972, they’ve been working with “cracked everyday-electronics”, modifying and recontextualising the use of home electronics. After the s…

The French WPB3 trio explores areas between abstract minimalist contemporary concrete instrumental improvised music and energetic noisy free jazz with an uncompromisingly totally free approach. Nusch Werchowska has been involved in improvised music since she met Barre Philips in 1993. A pianist who is able to translate a conversation between Debussy and Cecil Taylor as well as John Cage using all kinds of prepared techniques. She played with numerous musicians in the field of improvised music su…

Limmat is the second CD from Günter Müller, Jason Kahn and Christian Wolfarth, following their first album Drumming released in 2005 on Creative Sources. Recorded during one afternoon in Kahn’s Zürich studio, “Limmat” features three unedited improvisations melding microsounds, percussive mastery and swaths of noise and static into a mesmerizing whole. Originally from Los Angeles, Jason Kahn has lived in Europe since 1990. He has performed or recorded with musicians such as Günter Müller, Norbert…

The ever progressing sophistication of the Internet brings with it not only many positive aspects but also a more and more tangled convolution of data threads, a twisted web that can, like bundles of tangled fishing net, make trawling for and distributing useful and meaningful information difficult or even impossible. Good thing there’s klingt.org, a clear, straightforward forum that for the past ten years has provided a community of musicians and artists with an Internet platform free of charge…

Over three decades Jason Kahn developed his unique sonic language, now exploring the interaction between sound and space using a compact setup of percussion and analog synthesizer. He has performed and recorded albums with Günter Müller, Norbert Möslang, Kim Cascone, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Roden, Dieb13, Richard Francis, Ryu Hankil, Jon Mueller and many others. He ran his own Cut label from 1997 to 2008, releasing 25 albums. Asher is one the most interesting new composers in the United States, …

It is now 5 years that I travel to Latin America. My home base in Buenos Aires; and from there to almost all the other countries. When I arrived there first, I did not know much about the music scene, especially about any scene committed to “New Music” or “Improvisation”, but with the time i encountered a lot of movement, a lot of interesting music (of any form or genre) and I encountered musicians, that if they had been born in the so called “civilized West” would be within the most important p…

Cym_bowl is Günter Müller’s fourth solo CD. On cym_bowl he follows even more consequently the idea he already realized on his last album reframed; focused on the sound of one cymbal and one singing bowl; he feeded his iPods with dozens of variations of processed sounds. Afterwards he conceived with recorded material from sessions he improvised with processed cymbal and bowl sounds only the 4 pieces for his new album. cym_bowl could easily go as a symbol of getting lost in time.

* Limited Edition 300 copies High Quality 180gr Black Vinyl * These musical compositions – which I called Istantanee (snapshots) – were realized with sonic materials issued from experimental studies on the expressive capabilities of the instrument arranged in such a way as to take account of the rhythmic and harmonic peculiarities of the material itself. To maintain the spontaneity of the original musical idea, each snapshot was recorded three or four times on different kinds of tape – the timbr…

How secluded can contemporaneity be? Is every art aimed at an inherent center? Are sound waves soft boundaries? Pack a bag, a sky and a bonfire log to join six exceptional musicians on their expedition to the rough and mellow edges of electronic sound. Periferiya is a Russian-swiss collaboration between Boris Shershenkov (St. Petersburg), Kurt Liedwart and Mikhail Myasoedov (Moscow), Thomas Korber (Zürich), Christian Kobi (Berne) and Christian Müller (Biel) which took place in the remote Vallée …

* Edition of 200 in 6-panel ecopack/digifile * Lastfirst is the brand new project by MB. The work is based on a reworking of his 1999 album entitled First Day Last Day. The original work has been totally reprocessed and reworked into a darker version that reflects even more the dark times we are living in. A symphony that digs deep into our souls and lays bare all our fears. Together with Dead Colours (2003), Lastfirst represents one of the most intense and profound moments in MB's discography. …

* Edition of 200 in 6-panel ecopack/digifile * Nine years after the death of Pierpaolo Zoppo, an unforgettable artist and a forerunner of Industrial Music with his Mauthausen Orchestra 'cult' project, this new CD of completely unreleased material - containing tracks he composed between 2009 and 2012 - is finally released by Standa. The album - a release which has been officially authorised by his family - shows us Pierpaolo Zoppo at the peak of his artistic maturity: after investigating the most…

* Edition of 200 in 4-panel ecopack/digifile * After the critically acclaimed "Pondfire" (Boring Machines, 2015) and "Grey Mornings" (Boring Machines, 2017), Paul Beauchamp has taken a new direction with his third album, "Needs Must When the Devil Drives". With this work, a single track lasting a little over half an hour comprising several movements, Beauchamp has moved away from the use of acoustic instruments as sound sources and has instead followed the mantra of Brian Eno of "the recording s…

*2021 Stock * Formed in 2016 Daimon is the trio of Nicola Quiriconi (VipCancro, Lisca Records), Paolo Monti (The Star Pillow) and Simon Balestrazzi (T.A.C., Dream Weapon Ritual, Hidden Reverse, A Sphere Of Simple Green, Candor Chasma, Kirlian Camera, etc.). Devoted to a vibrant and majestic personal form of drone music, Daimon are exploring new depths as well as highly dynamic soundscapes that will surround you with their overwhelming sense of fluttering memories. In 2017 they toured across Euro…

* 2021 Stock * Simon Balestrazzi and Nicola Quiriconi have performed together many times over the last few years both with the deep drone audio/visual project Daimon and Balestrazzi guesting with Quriconi’s long lived ensemble VipCancro. “Licheni” documents their first meeting as a duo and explores an adventurous sonic territory between free improv and microsound. Balestrazzi (T.A.C., Dream Weapon Ritual, A Sphere Of Simple Green et al.) has been around for more of three decades painstakingly ex…

Abu-l-Hasan al-Nuri primitive Sufi saint writes: "they possess nothing and are possessed by nothing" is the basis for five landscape studies, as an idea of ​​emptying the soundscape in its concept and also in its practice, a laboratory of environmental recordings and sampling. This work is visited by readings ranging from Céline to Novalis passing through Georg Buchner in his "Lenz" arriving at Arthur Schopenhauer, offering insights above all in his writings on music and in the "world as will an…

* Edition of 500. Pink vinyl, with printed inner sleeve * ‘In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle’ finds Mark Leckey stitching together a fantasy travelogue made up of found sounds, spoken word and dismantled tunes like some hallucinogenic mixtape; part audio diary, part YouTube session taking in fairytale folk musics, iMessage notifications and gothic horror that will make you question... stuff. “In the Age before These Times I’d been reading lots of folklore about Fairies, and Changelings and the …

'Lux' is Brian Eno's first solo album for Warp Records and his first solo album since 2005's 'Another Day On Earth'. It's an absorbing 75 minutes of slow moving, glassy harmonics, plangent piano keys and evaporating strings, all bathed in reverb and allowed to serenely waft about the space with a seemingly aleatoric logic. The album breaks down to four long sections, yet in the classic tradition of Eno's finest ambient works, once you've settled into its pace and space it becomes hard to tell wh…

** 2020 repress of the 2011 reissue edition. Seemingly identical. Comes with download card ** If you were to dig through a random neighbor's record collection, chances are you'd come across something with Brian Eno's fingerprints on it. Maybe massive-selling offerings by Coldplay or U2, the still commercially viable art-rock of The Talking Heads and Devo — or, if your neighbor is anything like a TMT reader, perhaps there are a few Roxy Music albums, the Eno-curated No New York no-wave compilatio…

The only true non-places are those of the mind: but being able to give them a tangible form doesn't always equate to the delineation of a balanced, pictorially satisfying landscape, nor does it solve the inner mystery from which it originated. In the creation of an audio document, even the simplest sonic occurrence derives from an idea and a gesture, even if only pressing the record button: and it's precisely the gesture - be it overt, dissimulated, concealed, or mediated - the absolute protagon…

Ahead of the Meakusma Festival 2019 Don't DJ and NWAQ did an artist residency developing new music together from scratch. Their resulting performance at the festival was a mesmerising descent into the artistic perspectives of two singular artists active in off-kilter club music. Some of the eight tracks on this record were recorded live at the festival while others were recorded during the residency. All dwell in distorted and eccentric bliss and play around with rhythmic arrhythmic and post-rhy…

Caught somewhere between environmental sound studies and surrealist sonic architecture, Sugai Ken helps mark the 30th release of Field Records with an ambitious new album. Commissioned by the Dutch Embassy in Tokyo, Tone River is the product of a year's intensive work between artist and label, created in part to examine the relationship between Japan and the Netherlands with regard to water management. While its doors to the Western world were closed during the 17th and 18th centuries, Japan kep…

This super discounted bundle gathers together the five recently issued Vanity Records Box Sets, offering a comprehensive anthology of all the releases by this legendary Japanese DYI label, active in the late 70s and early 80s.and includes 31 CDs in total:Various - Vanity Records 'Music, Tapes & Demos' (11CD Box)Various - Vanity Records 'Demos' (6CD Box)Various - The Vanity Box Vol. 1 (5CD Box)Various - The Vanity Box Vol. 2 (5CD Box)Tolerance - Vanity (5CD Box)Here's details about the contents o…