2015-2020
Under the production moniker of Material Things, 12th Isle co-founder Stewart Brown unveils a part debut album part compendium of musical collaborations spanning from 2015-2020. Some recordings began as long, one-take improvisations (How's Life, Peckham) spliced together and revisited years later. Others were based upon chance opportunities to record with musicians operating a long way from the parameters of 12th Isle. Cult private-press loner folk guitarist Bob Theil, whose 1982 album So Far co…
La Sorcière de Rochefort-en-Terre
*300 copies limited release* Folklore Tapes first foray into overseas finds them in a rural Breton village known as Rochefort-en-Terre. Once inhabited by the renowned witch Naia, who along with her ‘spirit stick’ familiar ‘Gnami’ cured ills, cursed locals, split in two and crushed hot coals into dust! Naia is a collaboration with Brittany arts group Le Bon Acceuil and features two distinct sonic explorations into the infamous witch, largely based around the article and photography of Charles Gén…
Return to Archive
In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized th…
No Middle Without The Beginning
Zach Rowden's new album, titled "No Middle Without The Beginning", radiates the current musical concrete. Two pieces, each spanning a single side of the LP. Distinct & comprehensive as a whole. Letting Such Evil Occur samples and resamples acoustic instrumentation with minimal effects, allowing the artifacts of the source to seep into the composition. Grainy and slowly groaning along. A singular loop respirating upon each hit, holding itself to its core, living all its own. It's The Light That M…
Détails
*2023 stock. 100 copies limited edition* "Since I started to experiment with sound in 1989, I always used acoustic sounds even if my music has always been mostly electronic (apart of some field recordings compositions). This album is the first solo album I do that mostly contains acoustic sounds and few electronic ones.
On most tracks, the computer was used for basic editing (reverse, pitch, cut, paste, mix, in rare cases effects). Bethink is the only purely electronic piece, mostly made of reco…
Alternate African Reality – Electronic, Electroacoustic And Experimental Music From Africa And The Diaspora
*2023 stock* "Alternate African Reality is a follow-up to several compilations I have published on Syrphe since 2007 (the first one, Beyond Ignorance and Borders included various artists from Africa and Asia), and even earlier on my defunct tape label in the 1990s (the last tape, Archives Humaines vol.1, was published in 1996 and included 25 artists from 25 countries, including non-Western ones : South Africa, Japan, Chile, Brazil).
Alternate African Reality could be seen as a drastic improvemen…
Body Of Immanence
*100 copies limited edition* Intense electroacoustic music pieces, whispering voices, screams, heavy electronics, subtle and well crafted melodies, delicate distortions, this could be the soundtrack of your nightmares or your favourite film score. Whether you enjoy academic electroacoustic music, dark ambient, ambient industrial and so-called experimental music, this album might well please your ears.
Ni Zheng is a sound artist and composer of electroacoustic music and musique concrete. She cre…
Auris
*2023 stock* Organ Of Corti is the new collaboration of Swedish masters Dan Johansson (Sewer Election), Mattias Gustafsson (Altar of Flies), and Joachim Nordwall (iDEAL, The Skull Defekts). Each artist's individual brilliance shines forth in Organ Of Corti, but this is much more than the sum of its parts. "Auris" takes the familiar murkiness of Johansson and Gustafsson, injects a healthy dose of Nordwall's crisp electronics, and assembles everything into a series of spacious, brilliantly execute…
Inside Outside / Other Rooms
*2023 stock. 40 copies limited edition transparent records in numbered silkscreened sleeves * "picture a club, a venue, an event of contemporary dance music. you’re outside the main room, maybe in the toilet, in a corridor, upstairs, in the cellar, or maybe outside the building. sound comes through walls and round corners. these are some of the ‘other rooms’. other beings are in these rooms, playing, maybe interacting, coexisting. some other rooms inside that outside are you inside, and rooms in…
Echos Through The Desert
*2023 stock* "This project would not be possible with out the support of Unsilent Desert Press, my family and all the ancestors and cousins who have been lost and forgotten. I hope sharing these stories with the world will help honor their spirit and stand testament to the effects of colonialism and assimilation on indigenous people. This album explores themes of echoes as a physical overlap of time, space, and memory. The noise of our environment reflects the histories of erasures of the indige…
Globe Et Dynastie
*2023 stock* Utterly engrossing, sometimes terrifying second album from Reines d'Angleterre - a collaboration between the mighty Ghedalia Tazartes and "electronic botanists" èlg and Jo aka Opéra Mort. LP version, limited to 500 copies. Bo 'Weavil is totally psyched to have the opportunity to release the second album by Reines d'Angleterre -- this time, a thoroughly studio affair. Reines d'Angleterre is a fascinating collaboration between avant-outsider musician Ghédalia Tazartès and two electron…
Free Time / Dead Time
Free Time/dead Time is the first full-length 12" LP from Robbie Judkins’ long-running experimental sound project Left Hand Cuts Off The Right. The album combines elements of focused minimalism, experimental electronics and twitching musique concrete to create a series of meditative compositions that reflect on the precarious boundaries between labour, leisure, and the quality of lived experience under late-capitalism. Judkins exploratory practice of sonic experimentation invokes the work of Blac…
pearly
Pearly is a fizzing, hallucinatory noise release from Tom Betteridge, consisting of two oleaginous sound poems, entirely improvised with minimal stitching and post-processing. Phantasmatic vocal improvisations are mulched into something oblique to speech, becoming sharded utterances part-lost in swathes of noise. Working with cassette tape recorders & close miking techniques, Betteridge upends the standard listening hierarchy of aural objects; tipping the scales, the human voice brushes against …
Drainage, In Six Parts
Francisco Meirino is a sound artist based in Switzerland. His music explores the tension between programmable material and the potential for its failure. His interest lies primarily in what is not supposed to be recorded : the end of life of electronic devices, electrostatic noise, magnetic fields and the unconventional use of music hardware and sound systems and how to exploit these sonic failures in radically different ways in his sound pieces. His music combines intricate textures, sonic prec…
Outside Supercolor
"Lionel Palun and I met in 2003 in a context of social struggle. Aware of an inevitable downfall, we decided to discuss our respective practices. Sound for me and image for him. Then there were the basic questions: "What does it do if you connect a video output to a sound input?"; "What does a sound output do to a video input?" Then the tinkering that goes with it, like opening a Scart socket and plugging directly into it. And to finish, we discovered that as always, everything has already been …
Underlying The Vast Ruin This Civilization Has Caused, Is Not Human Nature, But The Opposite: Human Nature Denied.
"In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud defines the term as follows: “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” To this end, a feeling of uncanniness distinguishes itself from just being afraid because of its relation to what we already know, a disturbing variation of what we expect to see when we look in the mirror or the kind of horror that comes from inside the house. The uncanny valley, for instance, describes t…
New Rules, Same Game, Less Instruction
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* The second release in the new CD series "SYM" from Drone Records, sounds from realms of Symbolization & Symmetrization! These are new recordings from Chicago's Illusion of Safety: microscopic audio events, loops, heavily processed material of all kinds form seven multi-layered tracks that seem to be full of electro-magnetic static, morphing and transforming like a hallucinogenic object.
Satanic Inventions
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* "Seeing such a political statement on an RLW CD is something I don't recall seeing before. It is about the pandemic and the conspiracy theories that spawned, which I (too) believe is the true disease of our times. "I can read", usually means, "I like to cherry-pick popular notions", and "science is an opinion" is usually said by someone who has no clue as to what science is. Or, as I challenged someone: "How do you prove that all swans are white" to which…
Magnetic Stencil/ 1
Tip! The first installment in a series of albums produced by John Wiese using an expanded ensemble of recorded sound contributions. Musique concrète and collaged aural expanse featuring input from a collection of international collaborators, including Aaron Dilloway, James Fella, Hair Stylistics, Aaron Hemphill, C. Lavender, Charmaine Lee, Lasse Marhaug, Katsura Mouri, and C. Spencer Yeh.
Reconfiguring the Landscape
An artistic research project led between 2019 and 2022, investigating how 3-D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can evoke and provoke a new awareness of our outdoor sound environment. The integration of art and technology was central to the investigation that focused on sound, space, time and the utility of outdoor areas. The ideas were tested in artistic creations, and during a three-year period Natasha Barrett created a series of site-specific, outdoor sound installations. These works …