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…
Anthropological Constants
Who is Kymatik? Kymatik first appeared on Paradigm Discs back in 1995 with a spontaneous composition created alone in the control room, with all the sounds being derived from a simultaneous improvisation being played in the studio by Morphogenesis. Three years later Paradigm released the full-length Kymatik CD Dar-As-Sulh Vol.1 (PD 015CD), a selection of pieces, some based on purely mathematical ideas, others are more hypnotic pulse based psychedelic soundscapes, some works being performed live …
Transpandorem
UnicaZürn, David Knight and Stephen Thrower, build their long, ceaselessly evolving musical compositions through a process of improvisation, followed by careful editing and processing. Their music, drawn from subconscious associations while recording, is frequently aquatic or oceanic in overall mood and texture. Knight has spent most of his life living on the banks of the Thames while Thrower resides on the East Sussex coast, and their musical flights of imagination tend toward rolling ri…
The All Most Quiet
Anyone who has experienced Swans live on one of their recent tours will know who Norman Westberg is: the almost stoic, tall man, who coaxes rhythmic sounds from his guitar with an incomparably minimalist power and elegance. The play on words in the title can be applied to Westberg's own musical work, because whereas Swans are hard to surpass in terms of brute force, the artist's solo work is much more subtle, and therefore also quieter. The resulting juxtaposition between the dense metropolis of…
De Overkant
**2015 re-edition of 300 copies** A collection of seven intimate pieces about detachment, the inner world, timelessness, silence,… Instrumentation : Hammond organ, voice, piano, guitar, harp, flute, percussion, field recordings. Gosh this is lovely - a suite of spellbinding ambient folk meditations from Timo Van Luijk, the boss of Belgium's exquisite Metaphon label. A regular collaborator with the likes of Andrew Chalk, Raymond Dijkstra, and Christoph Heeman, among others, Timo operates at the c…
Here Is Where We Used To Sing
2011 Release. Die Stadt and Janet records are extermely happy to announce on the release of the new Fovea Hex album. "There have been few albums that I remember waiting so impatiently for. Several years have gone by since Clodagh Simonds' first transmission under the Fovea Hex umbrella and finally a full length has appeared. Continuing on from an exceptional string of EPs and singles, Here is Where We Used to Sing finds Simonds and her ever shifting group exploring different aspects of their son…
What?
"What?? is a focused and grounding work produced by Swedish composer Folke Rabe in 1967. From his interest in sound phenomena and harmonics Rabe was able to make one of the most deep, moving pieces of sustained sound generated in this formative era of minimalist electronic composition. Initially reissued on Dexter's Cigar in 1997 and now available on Important with expanded packaging including archival materials furnished by the composer. Amplified infinity." "My interest in the makeup of variou…
Lassithi/Elysium
2012 repress. "The first full length release by the UK based Aeolian String Ensemble. Although originally set to be issued on the legendary United Dairies label, this material has now been remastered, includes a new piece, and is instead available in the US. The work was produced by David Kenny, a long time collaborator and engineer on many Nurse With Wound and Current 93 projects. Consisting of two evolving compositions, Lassithi (1992) and Elysium (a specially commissioned new work), this CD o…