Still Life - Requiem
Conceptualized (2010-2013), composed and produced (2014-2017) by Carl Michael von Hausswolff in Palma (Majorca) and Stockholm. Still Life - Requiem is a musical piece consists only of sounds emitted and extracted from physical matter using emission spectroscopy as the sole basic technology. Acknowledgements to Linköping University (IFM), Sweden. Still Life - Requiem consists of one piece with the same title and is divided up into two to fit the LP format. The piece is, as the title suggests,…
Musikaliszer Pinkos
This music was inspired by “Musikaliszer Pinkos” – a collection of more than two hundred Hebrew religious hymns and Chassidic songs compiled and published by Abraham Berenstein in the year 1927 in Wilna (nowadays Vilnius). The selection of songs from “Musikaliszer Pinkos” was used by Arturas Bumšteinas as a source of fragmentary pitch material and re-interpreted in a new context of electronic sound and cut-up composition. All music was recorded with the use of Soviet-era Russian synthesiz…
Saturday’s Notes
The debut LP by Chicago-based artist Guido Gamboa, Saturday’s Notes is a multi-faceted collection of sonic studies born from a day of studious and diaristic note-taking. The music flows in idiosyncratic segments taking on a form akin to an artist’s sketchbook, constantly crossing and challenging the line between the aesthetically curious and the personally candid. Various influences are apparent as the listener is weaved in and out of hollowed concrète construction zones, beds of frayed a…
Film Works
As part of the 2016 festival Night of the Experimental Film, French duo Opéra Mort (= Èlg + Fusiller) performed a live soundtrack for two films that centre on the paradoxical symbiosis of love and death: The Potted Psalm by Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, and Dream Work by Peter Tscherkassky. Both films convey love and death as both direct opposites and kindred concepts, turning to cryptic surrealism, poetic hallucinations and flickering alternations between flesh and ecstatic abstraction. …
First
Following numerous small run releases and years of private development First is the debut CD release by Benjamin Nelson. Recorded and mixed in the summer and fall of 2015 in Oslo First represents the culmination of Nelson's live and studio practice since 2008 focused on long form, reductionistic, and near-static electronic music. First explores the perception of time, interference patterns, room reflection and hearing fatigue as primary compositional elements. Favoring textural over tonal …
Hotel Record
For many, the geography defying partnership of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi is the likely source of envy and awe - a creatively rigorous adventure in sound, egged forward by the romance they share. Ambarchi needs little introduction. Over the last 20 years, he has risen as a leading light of experimental and electroacoustic practice, as recognised for his collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Sunn O))), Keith Rowe, Fire!, John Tilbury and countless others, as he is for his solo work.…
Several Circles
LP version. Richard Scott’s ‘Several Circles’ is a seamless blend of improvised performances and forensically detailed electronic music that bristles, writhes and grows like some mutated living organism. Recorded between 2013 and 2015 in both Manchester and Berlin, this vital new album is a combination of instant, improvised performances and highly structured acousmatic compositions that have been, in Richard’s own words, “microscopically edited, constructed, layered and mixed over many hours in…
Traced
Hugely impressive second album from Jasmine Guffond landing again via the collectable Sonic Pieces imprint and sounding something like a much more disturbed Holly Herndon or this years mind-altering new album from Felicia Atkinson. It’s a compellingly immersive study of digital surveillance technologies and the way they, along with myriad other machines, impinge upon and frame our waking life.
In Traced, Guffond takes the textural and spatially sensitive ambient aesthetics of her previous L…
Reconstructing Debussy
Double LP version. Includes download code. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of the most popular and forward-thinking composers associated with impressionist music. His innovative and at this time new way to compose music with non-traditional scales and chromaticism inspired countless artists from the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock. Remarkable attributes of his music include the usage of parallel chords, bitonality, and the many compositions using whole…
Eine Menge Papier
“Eine Menge Papier” assembles 20 minutes of sounds derived from using paper as the sound souce. Two tracks originally came out as a limited 7” record on the austrian Syntactic label in the 1990ies and appear here for the first time on CD. The other two tracks were planned for a follow up 7” on the same label that never materialized. The fifth track is a study of sonic material in the same series. There are two further tracks from the P.I.G. series that are considered by the artists as failed att…
Passive Aggressive
Superb dreamy collaboration between Jonny Nash and likeminded ambient soul, Suzanne Kraft. Produced in 2016 and “in close proximity to the M56 Motorway”, which, weirdly enough, lulls me to sleep every night. We’d imagine that Passive Aggressive is intended to do the same thing, operating at such lowlit and hushed levels that it’s almost hard not to be seduced to slumber by its sandman tones. It really is best consumed whole, but if you’ve got a shorter attention span or need some highlights, che…
The Petrified Forest
Norwegian ambient maestro Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere maintains his fascination with natural landscapes in The Petrified Forest, in a sort of impressionistic illustration of Archie Mayo’s 1936 film of the same name. After imaginary trips taking us to Trømso, the Wolski forest on Poland, and more esoteric corners of his mind, this time his music inhabits a noirish world on the edge of the desert, populated by nervous and disillusioned characters who crop up in snatches of sampled dialogue ac…
Ideas Of Beginnings
Mark McGuire reminds us why he is among the most beloved guitarists of our new age. McGuire returns to VDSQ with a beautiful album of fractal introspection, a succinct collection of deeply melodic and emotive themes. Ideas Of Beginnings a direct statement of modern guitar, running the gamut from brightly focused acoustic compositions to late night electric vapor trails. Ideas Of Beginnings is another highlight from this …
Removed
In 2000, The Wire wrote of Richard Chartier’s work: “it’s worth stretching the ears in search of Chartier’s sequences of exquisitely sculpted sonic events, as gorgeous detail bodies forth out of the shadows”… the same holds true today. Formed over the course of 5 years, Removed was a process of removal/erasure. Only trace elements appear from what was. Their interactions merely a ghost of a composition - subtle echoes across the sound spectrum. A glacially paced progression of discreet relat…
Wound Burner
Wound_Burner is an audio project based on field recordings which took place in various locations in New York, USA, Gotland, Sweden, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and the Greek countryside. The project consists of three main parts, and moves along high frequency slow-motion sentimental delirios to heavy bass ambient soundscapes, periodically colored by the voice of the soprano Irini Kyriakidou. Some of the sounds were constructed by using exclusively digital and electronic media. Wound_Burner demo…
Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain
In the years following his reemergence into the world of music in the 1990’s, until his untimely death last year, Tony Conrad was a towering presence in American experimental music. He was it’s grand patriarch. A monolith. A beam of light shining on the future and past. Beginning with his efforts during the early 1960’s, Conrad set the terms for how experimental practice is currently understood and pursued, yet with a vision and being so completely focused on the present, it was often hard to re…
Pythagoron
Bridging the worlds of fine art, drug culture, high New Age thinking, and musical Minimalism, Pythagoron’s sole LP is a near perfect artifact of its era - a mysterious sonic wonder, emerging from the fog of time. Privately issued in 1977 - sold via advertisements in High Times - America's iconic stoner publication, the album is thought to be a product of Usco (The Company Of Us), one of the earliest multimedia art collectives based in New York - pioneers in the field of immersive sound and light…
The Last Man in Europe
Reality had the honour of working with pioneering electronic composer Zbigniew Karkowski on two occasions. In 2007, as part of the Recording Angel Ensemble’s accompaniment to Wojciech Has’ film “The Saragossa Manuscript” at the National Film Theatre and finally, for the last time on the 31st October 2013 when, already gravely ill after learning that he had advanced pancreatic cancer, Karkowski premiered his music to the BBC 1954 teleplay production of George Orwell’s “1984 - The Last Man in Euro…
Deflections
Fabio Perletta and Asmus Tietchens’ hermetic micro-cosmos of Deflections unfolds by exploring instability and physical decay of sound. Built upon liminal forms and atonal passages, the six near-silent pieces of the work traverse empty space by means of elementary sonic emissions and drifting nano-structures. Among sound collisions and evanescent masses, the almost immaterial yet corporeal nature of Deflections, embodies sound in its most subliminal and contradictory form.
Fabio Perletta cr…
Imer Zeillos: Asian Variations
Discrepant presents another unique document of Kink Gong's aka Laurent Jeanneau's collection of surreal soundscapes of augmented field recordings, this time using two very different source recordings to create his own unique brand of alien music. Using contact mic recordings of various turkish instruments, Saz, Cura and Tanbur (played by Remi Solliez), Laurent Jeanneau alchemically collages them with his archival recordings of South East Asia to create a surreal space between the instrumen…