Being Below
Being Below is a mini-album of short songs created with digital and analogue instruments, recorded in 2020. Written with a structure that reflects shifting states, overlooking the past and future as a split pathway with the present endlessly fluctuating between. The pangs of rumination. An exercise in loop-less writing.
"Staring out, tense. Looking down isn’t so different than looking up, but it passes by faster. Contentment at the accomplishment that I'm here, and the fear that what I’ve always…
Wood Land
Wood Land is a story of a nameless worker caught in the mundanity of placid bureaucracy. Wood Land is a story of buried towers and subtle rebellion. Wood Land is a story of unsubtle rebellion and totalitarian overthrow. Wood Land is a story of deep space awakening and astronaut spiders. Wood Land is a story of return and reconciliation. Wood Land is a story. Scored by Joseph Minadeo and written by Curt Brown with imagery by both. Sonically, 'Wood Land' was an extension of Joseph Minadeo's first …
(An) Exterior
Mini-lp gatefold sleeve courtesy of Stoughton Printing. It will also feature an extensive booklet featuring the artwork of Bertin. Edition of 200 copies. Frans De Waard. When he is not writing reviews for the long-running Vital Weekly column he helms, records an incredible amount of music under many different monikers. Each one has a personality. The name Quest (not to be confused with QST) is De Waard's ambient outlet. Vintage synths, wet ware, hiss, harmonics. The history of Quest goes back to…
Vacuola
Coming in from Spain only recently is "Vacuola", the latest album effort created by long standing - we're talking a debut cassette tape album under his real name in 1990 here... - electronic music composer Javier Hernando in collaboration with Angel Lalinde. Released via Wet Dreams Records the hand-numbered twelve tracks and roughly 42 minutes spanning album starts off on an immediately threatening and most of all hostile tip with earth shaking bass movements creeping up from gargantuan subsurfa…
Journey Test
'Journey Test' is composer and pianist Tristan Eckerson's first album under the moniker of Purple Decades, his new ambient project. While his past work has focused largely on solo piano, Purple Decades is an exploration into soundscapes, electronic textures, and hypnotic musical environments. While many tracks on the album still feature piano or keyboards in some form, the compositional approach is accompanied by extensive work with reverb, foley, and orchestral electronic arrangements, and some…
Inside The Head Of Gods
*300 copies limited edition* "Inside the head of gods" is an EP of music made to accompany the paintings of Taichi Kondo for his exhibition "What’s my name?" at Finale Art File in Manila, Philippines, April 6 – April 30, 2016. "When I first saw his paintings, they gave me a very clear sound of music. I had many ideas, and there were many elements of each of his paintings to represent through music. When I began creating the music, I made many different kinds of tracks with different lengths, str…
Balcony Sunset / Sonnenaufgang 4:46 Uhr
The first collaboration between Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters, “Underrated Silence” has been one of Bureau B’s most successful releases so far. Ulrich Schnauss (famous for his three solo albums as well as for his remix work) teamed up with Mark Peters (bass player, guitarist and singer of the British band Engineers) to create a bacchanalian instrumental combination of ambient, electronica and shoegaze sounds. “Balcony Sunset” is a track from this session that was not released on the album.
Kurt …
Abisso Del Passato 1
'Be Maledetto Now! (a pairing of Be Invisible Now! and Maledetto/Nihil is Me) adopt the unusual practice of issuing an album as separate parts, the first, Abisso del Passato pt. 1, on 180 gram vinyl and the second, Abisso del Passato pt. 2, on CD. Generating the releases' hour of material using analogue synthesizers, effects, and treated guitar (after three years spent jamming and recording), the outfit takes its inspiration from Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle , Do Androids Dream of …
ABoneCroneDrone
“The artistry of ABoneCroneDrone is in the attention to detail. The album is beautifully performed, mixed and compiled with intelligence and strong sense of structure. It makes good use of a listener’s valuable time while issuing a challenge to hear in a fresh way.” John L. Walters.
Random and emblematic: The sound of space
"It’s a pleasure to bring together, on this album, musicians with whom we feel a very special connection, namely Felicia Atkinson, Büşra Kayıkçı, Carmen Villain, Kuniyuki Takahashi, Pavel Milyakov, KMRU, Ana Quiroga, Abul Mogard and Pedro Vian. All of them have been very generous in their willingness to participate in an artistic experiment: to build bridges between architecture and music.
Each of these artists chose a space and translated it into a piece of music, and the result is a sonic kale…
Like Floating Leaves
*200 hand-numbered copies limited edition* Wil Bolton is a London-based artist whose work uses synthesizers, guitars, acoustic instruments and effects to create warm and emotive melodies, fragmented and submerged among beds of droning ambient textures and environmental sounds. Wil has released albums on labels including Home Normal, Hidden Vibes, Krysalisound, Audiobulb, Hibernate, Eilean Rec, Dronarivm and Sound In Silence. He has also shown his sound and video works in exhibitions at ICA, Inch…
Like Floating Leaves
*300 hand-numbered copies limited edition* Wil Bolton is a London-based artist whose work uses synthesizers, guitars, acoustic instruments and effects to create warm and emotive melodies, fragmented and submerged among beds of droning ambient textures and environmental sounds. Wil has released albums on labels including Home Normal, Hidden Vibes, Krysalisound, Audiobulb, Hibernate, Eilean Rec, Dronarivm and Sound In Silence. He has also shown his sound and video works in exhibitions at ICA, Inch…
Musik Ohne Ende
"In the 1970s, serious music lovers had a reel-to-reel tape deck. My father certainly loved music and had one to tape classical music off the radio. I recorded my first musical experiments with this machine, fascinated as I was by slowing down the speed so my pieces last longer. Later on, I had some more experience, and my father turned to playing CDs, so the reel-to-reel machine has used a lot less, and I was allowed to drag it upstairs, and I borrowed one from the likewise serious Phillips emp…
I - Kamermuziek
Biggest Tip! "Muziekkamer is a minimalwave project by Martin Keuning and Cees van de Oever, based in Leiden, the Netherlands, in the 1980s. The first album, 'I' (aka Kamermuziek), is a self-healing calm unified by hushed-toned electric guitars and faint synths, while the second album is a more experimental and pop minimalist/electronic sound, similar to Kubus Kassettes' work. The guitar harmonics are hazy. The long, dreamy parts, with a vague layers of guitar harmonics, is one of the best ambien…
Music From The Temple Of Light
Peter Culshaw was described by Malcolm Mclaren as “the Indiana Jones of World Music” and has tracked down music from the Amazon to Siberia and lived with Pygmies in Central Africa and dervishes in Istanbul. Culshaw interviewed many of the greats including Fela Kuti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Caetano Veloso and Ibrahim Ferrer. His book Clandestino, now published in ten languages, was a biography/ travelogue on the road with Manu Chao. The result of decades of research is this, his first solo album. …
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 …