Trace: Sound Design Works 1986-1989
Never released until today! A collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic album Nova.
Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's company, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way).
Morning Brings The Light
This album is about the micro world of a garden in a small coastal town. For two weeks either side of the 2021 summer solstice Kieran Mahon routinely made field recordings of his garden from pre-dawn until the first stirrings of people beginning their days. “After ending up with hours of recordings”, Kieran explains, “I then spent a long period listening and immersing myself in the environment - the ebb and flow, the subtle changes in atmosphere, the conversations between birds and insects, the …
Sounds From Phantom Islands
** 2021 Repress ** Faitiche presents a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas.With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A master…
Electro-Symphonic Landscapes
**2020 stock** This 1979 album, by the husband and wife composing-performing electronic music duo of Priscilla and Barton McLean, showcases two pieces, “Invisible Chariots” by Priscilla and “Song of the Nahuatl” by Barton. Begun in 1975 and completed in 1977, “Invisible Chariots” is a three-movement piece, named after a Carl Sandburg poem, about the “intuitive creative force” that shapes composition. Composed in 1976, “Song of the Nahuatl” was underwritten by a grant from the National Endowment …
The World Music Theatre of Jon Appleton
**2020 stock** This 1974 recording by electro-acoustic music composer Jon Appleton is designed to take the listener to different musical landscapes. Appleton notes differences in context that will make the music more and less effective (“not everything I intended will be heard by the listener because no two listeners share the same aural experiences…because we are continually expanding our aural vocabulary, the sounds used assume a different significance as time passes”). Liner notes contain a b…
Visions - Music for Orchestra, 2 Pianos and Computer-Generated Tape
**2020 stock** This 1979 record is a five-movement composition for large chamber orchestra by David Cope. First presented by the Santa Cruz Chamber Symphony in 1978, the work attempts to demonstrate the relationships between sound and physical space and to translate them to recorded sound as well as performance. The tapes in the piece were composed at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and were “spliced” digitally rather than physically. Liner notes contain drawings of the way that Co…
Navajo Dedications
**2020 stock** This 1976 Folkways release by David Cope presents modern music based on Cope’s intensive research into—and respect for—Navajo ceremonies, and Navajo music in particular. Ranging from pieces for large chamber ensemble to a work scored for a single performer, the four compositions are unique interpretations of Native American Indian myths and culture. The liner notes include detailed explanations of the inspiration, organization, and arrangement of each of these complex works.
This …
Digital Soundology #1 Volk von Bauhaus
Official reissue of Takashi Kokubo essential ambient/minimal/environmental album: "A musical expressions that shatters the old values". Originally released on King Records in 1985, composed and written by Takashi Kokubo. Includes liner notes of an interview made with the artist. Remastered by Music Matters Mastering from source material. Pressed by Pallas.Takashi Kokubo makes archetypal Japanese ambient, new age and experimental synth sounds. But not only that, he also created the nationally-use…
Ocean Front Property
**CD in gatefold carboard wallet, 300 copies. To be released in mid July 2020.** Ocean Front Property represents a desired experience juxtaposed with a banal reality. The work investigates the idea of longing to be somewhere else, a mirage of aspired imagery and sound, made within the landlocked province of Alberta, where the nearest ocean is over 1000 kilometres away. The objects, spaces and sounds act as metaphors, part of a concrete existence they reside in, but contrasted with the imagined e…
Teredo Navalis
**in process of stocking** "This work represents a further step into my on-going research on the Venetian Lagoon. I was interested to keep an ecological perspective while focussing on a precise aesthetic. In fact, I considered field-recording practice as a tool for critically investigating the territory. The album is based on sounds recorded via electromagnetic sensors, binaural microphones, hydrophones, contact and condenser microphones. It combines compositions where the sound of water, in its…
Four Letters - Life
Tiheäsalo & Ahti are Topias Tiheäsalo and Niko-Matti Ahti from Turku, Finland. Four Letters – Life was first released by Glistening Examples in the US and is now being released as a CD in Europe by Passing Tone.Four Letters – Life touches on the very basic issues of human condition, life and death, and the preparedness for something that is impossible to be prepared for. The work could be described as a fragmentary and associative piece of sound art more coherent than the sum of its parts. It to…
Nostalgia Por Mesozóica
Tip! File next to Andrew Pekler's Tristes Tropiques, highly recommended. **100 copies** "After four years of silence that have elapsed since the release of Ode To The Sea LP back in 2016, Muscut is bringing out Nikolaienko’s next collaboration, a duo with Arthur Mine, a Kyiv-based keyboard maestro and an ex-member of the Blacklazer band.Nostalgia Por Mesozóica is an exploration of "experimental exotica" consisted of synthesized tropical attributes — an artificial landscape isolated behind the g…
Oto No Wa: Selected Sounds of Japan 1988-2018
"For the fifth entry in our Collector’s Series we enlist the skills of Japan-based musical connoisseurs, Ken Hidaka, Max Essa, and Dr. Rob. Their compilation Oto No Wa sets out to map the evolution of chilled Japanese sounds across 3 decades. Collecting 14 tracks, produced by a wide range of artists. From ambient pioneers to dance-floor veterans. Roping in 9-piece reggae band, Little Tempo, percussionist Kotani Kazuya, and organic, psychedelic collective, Olololop.Beginning in the late 1980s, th…
Black Metamorphosis
**Edition of 100 copies** From Sierra Leone via Berlin, Lamin Fofana elusive new work. Steeped in afro-futurist aesthetic, this is the first part in the hyper-conceptual trilogy by global drone and noise artist Lamin Fofana. Not getting a digital release and only 100 copies world wide, we're getting a handful direct from Berlin. From Lamin himself: The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic. – Fred Moten Black Metamorphosis is the first installment in a …
The Gloaming
**Edition of 200 on 180 g vinyl with a hand-made silkcreened cover** Relict records steps into the game with The Gloaming, the full length debut LP by composer Chris Berkes. The Gloaming is the consequence of intensive reflection on the expressive potential of sound based structures. The result culminates in potent electro-acoustic compositions that form a complex and visceral narrative of arresting nature. relief draws from the tradition of Musique concrète but translates it into a contemporar…
Build a Diorama
ISAN’s Robin Saville speaks to the salubrious qualities of a good mooch in a very sweet album inspired by what he sees and feels during his daily perambulations and incorporating field recordings, drones and acoustic instrumentation.
Hollow Body
Quietly brooding and enchanting debut from multi-disciplinary artist/researcher/field recordist Remo Seeland, accompanied by Reinier van Houdt (Current 93) and Norm Westberg (Swans) for a nocturnal record channeling experiences from New York City, Reykjavik and Zurich.
Hodokeru Mimi
"The cold December day freezes the atmosphere, making it eternal. Birds pass by. A construction site. The sound of the shijou opens the zazen. Humble gestures and wooden marbles. Steps across the hallway. The floor creaks break the audience’s breathless silence. Air flows between the maple branches. Frogs, water, and forest remind us of the transient beauty of nature. The organ’s mechanical imperfection and resonant glass tubes echo, warming the space. Raw tones, distant spaces, sound molecules …
IsoMonads
Killer. edition of 50 copies. “For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.” ― Eugene Thacker - Jarra’s artistic exploration started with painting abstract artworks in which he aimed to minimise his part as a painter. The technical approach, craftsmanship and the concentration devoted to this process should define the artwork in its final state. Jarra’s perspective on sound has been in a similar way when he started with field recordings in the late '90s. He consequ…
Twelve Atmospheres
**2019 stock** David Janssen is best known for his work as Ted The Loaf in Renaldo & The Loaf. When the band split up in 1987 after The Elbow is Taboo, Janssen took a long break from music until his return in 2006 as The Darkening Scale. After the first two solo albums under this name, he started a new collaboration with Sylvie Walder as The Tapeworm Vessel.This project produced three albums, the first one being Twelve Atmospheres which is now available on CD for the first time. It was originall…