King Of The World
*2022 stock. In process of stocking.* Formerly a musician, cinematographer and lighting designer with The Residents and a student of "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Philip Perkins issued this astounding release on his own Fun Music label in 1983.
Perkins often worked in topographical realms, crafting environment-enriching soundscapes, albeit on a micro level. Taking cues from minimalism, environmental field recordings and home-baked ceremonial mantras, King Of The World is a meditation on the lives of thre…
Nothing Left Behind
*200 copies limited edition* Tomotsugu Nakamura is a musician and graphic designer residing in Tokyo, Japan. His primary artistic practice is to compose music with some fragments of minimal acoustic and electronic tones and some field recordings. In Concert, he has played with various genre of musicians and his works have been released by Kaico, Audiobulb Records, and more recently by the recent label LAAPS. ’’Nothing Left Behind’’ is his second release on LAAPS after his well acclaimed album "L…
The Wetland Remixes
*In process of stocking.* Son of Chi returns to Astral Industries, alongside Spanish artist Clara Brea, for the collaborative release of AI-29. A product of fate, chance experiments, but most of all, sensitive artistry - ’The Wetland Remixes’ exists as a confluence of two kindred musical spirits, a wayfaring epic that draws together a rich archive of ecological field recordings, live instrumentation and higher inspirations. Ahead of Hanyo’s concert at ‘Avalovara listening club’ (Madrid) at the e…
Rings Of Water
These two contrasting pieces explore the age-old human quest to comprehend the transformative powers of life. The overlapping disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, the culture of memory, cognitive psychology, and environmental studies, are conceptually layered to extend the idea of formative traits of sound and to deepen the notion of listening to historically dense spaces.
Limits
*200 copies limited edition* Andrew Tasselmyer is a musician from Baltimore, MD currently living in Philadelphia, PA. He utilizes samplers, field recordings, and lo-fi recording techniques to make textured and tactile sounds. In addition to his solo catalog on labels such as Seil Records, Eilean Recs, Constellation Tatsu, Home Normal, and more, he is a member of Hotel Neon, Gray Acres, and Mordançage.
The Sacrifice
Tip! In 2020, a year shaped by stringent COVID-19 restrictions, many of us paused for thought about our collective futures. For First Light Records, this reflection, plus the support of Sound and Music's Composer-Curator programme, led to the development of Unbuilt Sound, a new series of commissions centred around acoustic ecology; the relationship between listener and environment. The first iteration of the Unbuilt Sound series sees Flora Yin-Wong retreat to an isolated cabin outside Machynllet…
Making Eye Contact With Solitude
*70 copies limited edition glitter gold cassette* Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spont…
All Auspices
*2022 stock. 40 copies limited release* "In the Spring of 2021 we were finally able to travel outside of 5km from home. To take much needed breaks from being in the city, my colleague and I would drive to the seaside, choosing a new beach, a new town each trip as we were both foreigners in a new city, observers to the landscape. Walking and listening, we would take in the fresh air, the smell of saltwater, the call of gulls, and the drone of the ocean. The field recordings on this album are fro…
Spectral
Madeleine Cocolas’s Spectral is a reimagining of the familiar. It is an attentiveness to the inciden-tal, and a reaching out towards the unheard. Taking these acoustic microcosms as a source of focus, she unpacks these transient flickers and memories, and repositions them; exploding them outward and shifting perspective. Spectral, celebrates the shadows of melody and the after-thoughts of rhythm. It breaths with a sense of calculated intensity that reflects on Cocolas’s focus throughout the proc…
Too Ne
Yui Onodera’s work is patient. He invites a sense of dwelling with his pieces, an encouragement to pause and to allow sound to swell up around you. On Too Ne, he charts out a very specific sonic exploration. Across these five works he creates a lilting passage of sound, a liouidous flow that confirms the adage of Ambient music existing as constant, but never solid. Too Ne also invites a sensing of the self, in that the works ask us to examine our own memories as a way to unlocking a deeper reson…
Him, Fast Sleeping, Soon He Found in Labyrinth of Many a Round, Self-rolled (Tape)
'It is to the detriment of our understanding of musicality that we mostly measure it by the capacity to produce, and much less by the capacity to receive some sort of acoustic information or event. The virtuosity of listening, of understanding the sonic situation and its potential, is, however, that which defines one's capacity to interact – with other musicians, with the audience, and with the environment. This could also be taken to mean that an ethical act is implied in the situation of liste…
In the Open
*Limited edition of 300 copies.* More than five years after Federico Durand (12K, Spekk) released his solo record Adormidera through Dauw, the label announces his first collaborative full album together with Tomoyoshi Date (Home Normal, Baskaru) and Asuna Arashi (Faitiche, Home Normal): »In the Open«.
When Durand, Date and Arashi were touring together during the Spring of 2017 in Japan, they decided to visit the old city of Kanazawa. On one hand they wanted to wander through the streets, visit …
London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993, Vol. 2
*2022 Stock.* Talk about a time capsule. While the obvious nostalgists out there scour and share their cassette eight packs, desperately converting the mixes they contain to digital files before the inevitable unspooling renders the original recordings obsolete, here comes Death Is Not The End - a record label that lends its name to (well, hosts) a show on NTS Radio - with the ultimate trip back to a time many weren't lucky enough to live through. As the name suggests, this is literally a collec…
Lady's Mantle
*2022 repress* Sublime, smudged and looped ambient/pop layering from Jake Muir (Further Records, Touch), the third release on Sferic following Space Afrika’s excellent Somewhere Decent To Live album. Huge recommendation if you're into Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Conjoint, Studio Pankow, Andrew Pekler, Fennesz... Sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, where he’s previously recorded and released albums under the Monadh m…
Captive
*Limited, numbered edition of 100 copies.* New York City-based Kjostad is the moniker of Stefan Aune, who is also involved in Form Hunter and Breaking the Will, in addition to running the New Forces label. Capturing highly personal sounds focusing on northern Minnesota, Aune adds layers of electronics and magnetic tape, weaving an organic tapestry of man-made and natural sonics. Captive explores the physicality of organic sound and the productive tension that arises when it is captured via analo…
R.S.F.
*In process of stocking.* 'Meth.O.Tapes' catalogue opens up on a programmatic framework in the form of Gil.Barte's first LP. Developped as an experimental exploration rather than a narrative, this object called « R.S.F » is a recollection of intriguing sonic pictures. Tracks neither really start nor they finish, pieces of an apparently unreasolvable puzzle like pages of a fantastic bestiary long forgotten.
The Maze
*2022 stock* The Maze is a map of different territories I covered in my recent travels. But the mapped territories are not contiguous: I am the tunnel that links these places and times, I am the border that keeps them together. Now, a geographer who makes a map doesn't make a survey: these are two different things. The survey - the gathering - comes first, but the mapping process includes several subsequent steps: scaling, removing, enhancing, and adding. Scale allows to grasp a large territory …
Everything Perfect Is Already Here
When words trail off at the beginning of Claire Rousay’s “Everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music…
The Mont Aigu Tapes
**Red tape Limited Edition to 90 numbered copies ** Sound and Radio Frequencies captured in location in Mont Aigu. Part of Fieldworks#26 .
Music For Listening
*In process of stocking* Music For Listening, the sophomore album by Michael Scott Dawson. The album is comprised of twelve ambient works for guitar. It follows his 2020 debut Nowhere, Middle Of which was built around generative synths. Not wanting to repeat himself, Dawson entirely abandoned the synthesizer, his primary instrument, on Music For Listening. The resulting guitar pieces lean heavily on tape loops and manipulations, and are accompanied by field recordings and spare piano elements. T…