air near silence
Tip! Truly intrigued as a kid by the weird sounds his DIY electronica building kit could make, Mich L. (aka Mich Leemans of Paper Hats and curator of AB Salon) never stopped his quest for more beauty in hidden frequencies and harmonics of modular synths and old tape recorders. His search into the deep mysterious sound spectrum unexpectedly made a surprising u-turn after a seizure of increasing tinnitus and enduring nausea. The concept of listening, as stated by Pauline Oliveiros as 'the involunt…
Mt. Hadamard National Park
Electro-acoustic composer and instrument designer Matthias Puech uses math to spin filigree "audio-naturalist noise" yarns using processed environmental recordings, dissociated instrumental vamps and sculpted electronix.
The Clear Distance
"I got a note from Stephen. As the consummate archiver he had inherited a tape of an interview with me in 1985 done with Kevin Concannon, in particular about my music production. He points out that in it I mention “a device called a digital delay” that I had been exploring. A Deltalab Effectron II Digital Delay, which let you make little short 1 second loops and manually inject other sounds among other things – nice kind of kluge aesthetic. We knew each other through Electronic Arts Intermix wh…
Arcoiris
*200 copies limited wedition. In process of stocking* "Backwards is really pleased to present the new Fabio Orsi release. This time Fabio offered a monumental work: eight long tracks contained in a huge box set with four compact discs. Musically it stands on the new course of the artist: together with the classic ambient and drone atmospheres that we know well, the work has more dynamic parts with rhythms and pulsations, and more melodic parts. A perfect meeting between ambient music and berlin-…
Manifold Vista
*150 copies limited edition.* Six new floating and dense pieces by Greek sound artist Thanos Chrysakis. Manifold Vista is the new album by composer/producer Thanos Chrysakis. Rarely can something so meticulously assembled together sound so fluid. A distinct, disciplined sense for composition emerges from each of these works, displaying formal integrity while at the same time, they are also effervescent, forceful, fiercely idiosyncratic and beautifully shaped and transformed. The album discloses …
Snoweight
Recorded during two days of extreme weather, Eleh's Snoweight conveys the mesmerizing force of a winter storm with sonic realism and romanticism. These two new compositions evoke both warm security and wild, blanketing intensity in ways that are both emotionally arresting and time stopping.
Sacred Tonalities
Mike Lazarev drops his first album on Past Inside the Present and it's one that reminds us why he has such a great reputation as being one of modern ambient and classical's finest composers. After exploring notions of time on previous records, for this one, he embraces the here and now and that lends itself to a record steeped in mindfulness and meditation. As such, Sacred Tonalities is a perfect accompaniment to introspective moments with textural soundscapes placing you at the centre of them. …
Deep Into The Unknown We Shall Endlessly Roam
Zake's fruitful contributions as an artist to his own Past Inside The Present label continues on this new album Deep Into The Unknown We Shall Endlessly Roam. It is an assemblage of arrangements made using archaic tape machines such as a Sony M-570V microcassette voice recorder and obsolete VSC Soundpacer, all on analogue tape. Of course that lends the music a misty, grainy quality that defines much of Zake's ambient. Here his loops and found sounds meld and melt to create vast open spaces that …
Klangwelt
Weltklang’s 3rd album released exclusively by Orbeatize, containing the very rare Klangwelt album (released in limited edition and sold on cassette tape by Weltklang during their concerts in the 1980’s) and the suite (more than 15 minute of pure electronic-psych trip) taken from the very scarce 1985 album “Gasteig Munich Opening”
Adventures Into Somethingness
Conrad Praetzel is a multi-instrumentalist/ composer/ sound designer based in Northern California. His last five albums were released under the moniker Clothesline Revival, roots Americana with a modern electronica bent that Lucinda Williams acknowledged as an influence on her album “West” in No Depression Magazine.
Conrad Praetzel’s Adventures Into Somethingness is the first album of new music released under his name in twenty-four years. Gone are the traditional roots music instrumentations he…
The Transition Recordings
*2023 stock* Astral Industries’ fave Hanyo van Oosterom (The Chi Factory) re-enters the label’s orbit in duo with fellow dutch ether explorer Radboud Mens for a minimalist but lush ambient trip. Following the 2019 death of The Chi Factory’s J. Derwort, ‘The Transition Recordings’ see Hanyo continue to expand the group’s legacy, looping in explorative sound artist and producer Radboud Mens to assist in unfurling his vision of diaphanous pads threaded with silvery solo piano keys, murmuring ether …
Form & Feeling
Nein Rodere is the moniker of the Berlin-based music maker and visual artist David Roeder. Having played in bands for more than 20 years - often times making improvised music with other “non-musicians” - Roeder was trained in painting and psychodynamic art therapy. This multifaceted background underpins the complex humour and multiple dimensions of meaning (and double meaning) that bubble below his work. The body of solo efforts that has slowly emerged over the last five years brings to mind the…
Ecological Plantron
"Ecological Plantron" was a CD released in 1994, the audio document of an installation held in 1994 at a gallery in Tokyo. The Plantron is a bioelectric interface developed by botanist Yuji Dogane; it was designed to give voice to plants, using electronic means to make audible the energy of the natural world, prioritizing the non-human aspects of nature. Dogane was assisted in the project by composer Mamoru Fujieda, who helped to convert the vegetal energies into audible sounds. Though they stre…
Soul Jazz Records presents Space, Energy & Light
*New edition* Soul Jazz Records' new Space, Energy and Light is a collection of music by early electronic and synthesizer pioneers (from the 1960s through the 1970s), mid-1970s proto-new age gurus and 1980s guerrilla D-I-Y cassette-era electronic artists, spanning in total over a near 30-year time frame. "All of these artists used electronic advancements in music technology as a means of exploring not only space and the idea of the future, but also of looking inwards to the soul and of creating …
The Living City
Part of a series of three new archival releases from Ndeya that showcase Jon Hassell and group in the late 1980s exploring a radical tangent on his Fourth World sensibility.
San Francisco Moog: 1968-72 Vol. 2
The first volume of San Francisco Moog: 1968-72 introduced the world to a trove of recordings from a little-known hinge point in electronic-music history. Vol. 2 brings to light the rest of tapes—and the rest of the story.
Snowmelt
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* Snowmelt asks the question, “What does climate change sound like?” Recorded during two field trips to Kunama Namadgi (Mount Kosciuszko), the record compares and contrasts the physical shifts in the region’s flora, fauna and landscapes brought upon by the changes in season that occur at higher altitudes. The Australian alpine regions are increasingly stressed by the effects of climate change. Rising temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events add to …
Windy Weather Always Makes Me Think Of You
*2023 stock* Tomasz Bednarczyk makes a long-awaited return to 12k after his 2009 debut Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow (12k1055, 2009) and a couple of follow-up releases on Australia’s Room40. On Windy Weather Always Makes Me Think Of You Bednarczyk has collected sounds via a smartphone dictaphone and Sony field recorder over the past 10 years with a goal to transform all gathered recordings into new, multilayered harmonies. Field recordings come from voyages around the globe and originally …
Eidetic
American singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer Thomas Meluch, known musically as Benoît Pioulard, returns with his most structured and vocal release to date. Titled »Eidetic,« a word denoting the ability to recall mental images with extraordinarily rich precision, the album presents unprecedented clarity and vitality for Benoît Pioulard. To access its thematic ground, Meluch looked inward with an affinity towards the people he loves during a period marked by his move from Seattle to Brooklyn…
Forget The Curse
"Troth is unknown colours, mist-soaked dreamscapes, strange misshapen cities belonging to forgotten lands. Troth is also a pop duo, though not of the kind nowadays subjugated by the algorithm. Forget the Curse is the group’s best demonstration yet that somewhere in the murky fields between song and sound, there is a lot of untilled soil. There are elements from previous recordings here: the diaphanous synth-pop of Oak Corridor; the bleary hypnagogic ambience of Flaws in the Glass and Small Movem…