School of Elea
100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * Swirls of guitar artifacts, collateral noise, percussive events, and synthetics all processed, looped, layered and mystified in improvisations by No-Neck Blues Band members Pat Murano (aka Decimus) and Dave Shuford (aka D. Charles Speer & The Helix). Scary textures and ticklish surprises. In some distant future? No, you say. Now, there’s a logic in being skeptical about seers, b…
Hide Behind The Silence EP 3
Vladislav Delay presents the third EP in his "Hide Behind The Silence" series with five 10" releases coming throughout 2023. Intuitive and raw music, momentary and reflective, released on Ripatti's own label "Rajaton". Stillness is a myth. Consider concepts such as ”still water”, or ”still air” for that matter. Go to a restaurant, ask them for a glass of still water, hold it against the light and see where we’re at. Even though the water itself has been captured and imprisoned in the glass, it n…
French Archives Vol. III 1964-1989
An absolutely astounding accomplishment, Black Sweat's 4 LP Box set of previously unreleased material by Ariel Kalma - French Archives Vol. III - is a mind-melting immersion into the composer and saxophonist's radical experiments and stunning ambient harmonics made between 1974 and 1985. Venturing far beyond the territories for which he is most well-known, the collection takes great strides to accurately framing ambient and New Age musics as rightful extensions of the avant-garde, and is easily …
Nothing Blues
*200 copies limited edition* Nothing Blues – LA-based musician, NTS resident and label founder Nick Malkin's record – presents seven vignettes of exactly that: nothing blues. Continuing in his signature vein of jazz-tinged, “live-band ambient” work with releases on Geographic North and Soda Gong, this record sidesteps his previous urban nocturnes and instead presents the listener with music made for solitary, homebound introspection. It's daylit and stalled, plateaued and simply present. It's li…
Three Music Machines
300 copies limited edition From 1985, the beginning of their collaboration in Amsterdam, Peter Bosch and Simone Simons have been involved in performances, concerts and theatre productions. Since 1990, however, they have focused in particular on the development of autonomous music machines.
All these machines are dynamic: Sound and movement are constantly evolving. »Krachtgever« is their best-known piece for its Golden Nica, received at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, 1998. The other projects on the …
De Leon
De Leon returns to Mana, following their 2018 LP, offering a suite of new material that adds further waypoints to the map of their cryptic sound world, deepening and expanding the direction of travel they began within the Aught collective. The dual legacies of Javanese gamelan and minimalist composition remain clear touchstones on this second, untitled album, which employs architectures of repetition and microtonality and evokes the musical heritage of the Bay Area whilst folding in the arid lan…
Every Day
*100 copies limited edition* ‘Every Day’ is a new collaborative piece by two Hungarian contemporary composers and artists, Ábris Gryllus (The Death of Rave, Farbwechsel) and Dávid Somló. Originally conceived as an installation and premiered at the 2022 edition of Budapest Autumn Festival, ‘Every Day’ is a document of grief, and an attempt to render the dry daily statistics of the Covid-19 pandemic iInto something that is both physically and emotionally tangible.Transposing the Hungarian daily da…
Hearing Music
Deeply enchanting, original new age flute and electronic compositions with an elegant, classical minimalism. A total must have for fans of Maggi Payne or Iasos. Flowering from studies with at the esteemed Mills College CCM and with Robert Ashley and Terry Riley in the ‘70s, the breathtaking and little-known recordings in Hearing Music are testament to the lush, earthly beauty of Joanna Brooks’ privately issued new age tapes made between 1981 and 1985 in The Bay Area, west coast USA.
Channellin…
Not K.M.K.M.K
*30 copies limited edition C60* Collaboration between K.M.K.M.K. members, but with a different sound approach the two are known for.
Hide Behind The Silence EP 2
Vladislav Delay presents the second EP in his "Hide Behind The Silence" series with five 10" releases coming throughout 2023. Intuitive and raw music, momentary and reflective, released on Ripatti's own label Rajaton.Stillness is a myth. Consider concepts such as ”still water”, or ”still air” for that matter. Go to a restaurant, ask them for a glass of still water, hold it against the light and see where we’re at. Even though the water itself has been captured and imprisoned in the glass, it nev…
Epic Ellipses
Puce Moment is part of the French contemporary music scene. Their music is climatic, often inhabited by a strong emotional power. A procession of harmonic structures organized in a ritual way, sometimes close to trance. It can be written or improvised, vocal or instrumental. The electronic and electroacoustic arrangements summon new spaces and abstract landscapes, which can go from the purest sound to the most raw distortions. Vast, slower, deeper - distant echoes of half-faded things - and when…
ARIA (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
*100 copies limited edition* ARIA is a short horror film by Bruce Tetsuya.
"After the sudden death of their reclusive father, Aria and her sister Ava venture deep into the woods to his home, in order to clear it out. Aria's mind is pulled in two directions. One way towards her regret for not being closer with her father, and the other towards the stage play she's supposed to be rehearsing. Ava tries to help Aria practice lines, and console her about their loss. As the two begin to clean out the …
Anonym
*Packaged in an old school, tip-on sleeve. Includes hi-res digital download* Legendary debut album by Junko Tange (mystery woman who showed up on the NWW list), originally issued by Osaka’s Vanity Records in 1979. Dadaesque recitations and sparse guitar, piano and electronic meanderings combine for a beguiling, hypnotic dreamworld. Officially licensed from the custodians of Yuzuru Agi's Vanity Records archives, this edition has been fully remastered from new transfers of the original analog tape…
Temporary Requiem
Temporary Requiem is a mass for dance - the music score to “Known Mass. No. 3: St. Maurice.” A collaboration with Ann Glaviano, a dance maker and choreographer (and friend since our time together at a girl's Catholic school in New Orleans), it utilizes heavily dissected and altered passages of the traditional Latin requiem mass as the accompanying text across 6 movements. As the mission of “St. Maurice” is to build and break down a lost church over the span of the performance, the music serves t…
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…
8 Quadrants
Not much is really known about the production process behind the sprawling works of Japanese composer Yosuke Tokunaga, nor about the artist himself. Whatever the process may be, its outcome yields unique soundscapes that lunge and retreat in near mechanical movement, while warm volleys of low flung claps and thumps disperse over a bed of textural hums and lingering chords. At times, Yosuke’s work manages to somehow form an atmosphere that can both feel airy and yet dense simultaneously; it is th…
Ratchets/Motors
*300 copies limited edition* "Jens Brands has created a large number of installations, musical performances, and interactive media works. He uses the concepts of parallel activities rather than ideas of fusion. The pieces presented on this recording focus on sonic events related to electronic music (such as intense volumes and dynamics, white noise, square or sine waves) but stay entirely acoustic. On a live performance of the ratchets, the sounds are generated with the idea of a physical, scul…
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…
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…
Norimono Zukan
50 years ago, Hokkaido-born singer-songwriter Morio Agata released his debut single, Sekishoku Ereji (Red Elegy), an emotive, shuffling piano ballad that (shockingly) sold half a million copies in Japan. While he would never have another Top-40 hit, Agata would spend the next half century issuing a series of idiosyncratic, experimental pop albums. Today, he’s a beloved cult figure, still actively touring and recording in his seventies. In his first decade as a recording artist, Agata released a …