Inwards Opened The Floor.
The Israeli/British collective Staraya Derevnya made an album of pure psychedelic experimentation recorded in the performance space at Cafe Oto. Staraya Derevnya are the Tel Aviv/London based collective that are paving their own path through the world of experimental sound. The band, named after a historic district in Saint Petersberg, certainly cannot be pigeon-holed into a geographical generalisation. The lyrics on the album are directly influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arth…
Hibiscus
**Limited edition of 30 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download** J. Zunz a.k.a. Lorena Quintanilla - better known up until this point as one half of Mexican duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - with her second release ‘Hibiscus’ marks a move on sonically from earlier comfort zones in her work, arriving at a soundworld in which cyclical synth patterns, eerie ambient textures and cathartic vocal exhortations coalesce into a beguil…
4 Track Guitar Music
4-Track Guitar Music is the unassuming title of a cassette by Swedish composer Mats Erlandsson, which was originally released on Kali Maloneʼs and Maria W. Hornʼs XKatedral label in 2018. Composed using only, as the album title implies, a 4-track tape deck and an electric guitar, the music was later modified on the computer and re-amplified in the machine hall of Ställbergs Gruva, a disbanded Swedish iron mine.
The music is primarily composed using melodic motifs and canonical structures in whi…
Upstream
German pianist and composer Hauschka returns to Sonic Pieces with music for the experimental film Upstream. Together with filmmaker Rob Petit and acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane he has created a slow-moving dream-flight into wildness and winter through an eerie, hypnotic soundtrack of the Scottish highlands.
The film, which is shot entirely from the air, follows the course of the River Dee in Scotland all the way to its source in the Cairngorm mountains, the highest of any river in Britain. T…
Love Is A Stream
**Edition of 300. 10 year anniversary edition. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Design by Farbod Kokabi.** From the original press release: As a member of San Francisco legends Tarentel and Type’s premier astral travellers The Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it’s hard to believe that ‘Love Is A Stream’ is his first Type solo album. Previously releasing on Arbor, Spekk and his own Root Strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacop…
Tenno
For over four decades, Reiko Omura and Tori Kudo have endlessly woven themselves throughout the avant-garde and underground scene of Japan. While internationally appreciated in countless incarnations and contexts (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Guys & Dolls), if one were to seek out an early moment in which the two artists created something truly awe inspiring, 1980’s Tenno (天皇) would be it. As Noise, the duo experimented with the juxtaposition of Kudo’s extended organ based dirges (be they eerie and/o…
Rat Tapes One
* 2021 Stock * With 18 untitled tracks, there’s no shortage of the mutant voices and clanks from the darkness that I’ve come to expect. However, I was most surprised by the amount of rhythmic material found here, especially on the second half of the disc. “Track 10” could very well be a backing track left over from the Rock and Roll Sessions. Strangely enough, “Track 12” is a techno song with little of the Nurse With Wound signature other than some operatic elements and the oblique, gaping maw o…
Fabulous Paris
* 2021 Stock * An excellent release of classic Trevor Wishart material. Fabulous Paris was commissioned by Swedish Radio, Malmö, and the Birmingham Rumours Festival. This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live, through the medium of the human voice. CD release includes extensive liner notes on the 3 pieces.
Dark Ballads
* Edition of 300 * Dark Ballads is the obvious title of this LP, as if this music pre-existed the duo that, without any other choice, was formed around it. Since then, Giotis Damianidis and Audrey Lauro have continued to advance along this straight line that runs through their inner landscapes.
Their music creates a "stretched" emotional space, which evolves in slow motion and captures the fragility of the tone, the tension of the path. Each stage of the record is a mineral evocation of the inti…
Eliksir
* Pro-dubbed clear tape in smokey brown case, cover image printed on transparency film, insert card with a stamp * Alicja founder, painter DJ and problem child Tomasz Kowalski presents his first collection of confounding audio objects: Eliksir. The title track, centrepiece and key to the work as a whole, Eliksir is an augmented radio play that is loosely based around Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room. But instead of an intense focus on auditory phenomena, distraction and interruption divert t…
A New Instability
In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability, a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in Paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to the founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive s…
The harmless dust
The Harmless Dust is a unique release in the discographies of both David Grubbs and the Athens-based cellist Nikos Veliotis (Mohammad). In 2005 the duo were on tour in the U.S. in support of Grubbs’s album A Guess at the Riddle when they took a most productive break at John McEntire’s Soma Studios, over the course of a day laying down something utterly different from the song-based set they were playing most evenings. The Harmless Dust presents the same composition in two arrangements: one for p…
SMDSii
** Edition of 150. 2021 Stock ** There are two ways to use sound: in one way sound is close to music, however, it is also close to sculpture. In fact, it is not the medium that’s important but that you have a beginning and an end and that you can move around in the space. Noise is a material aspect of sound. SMDSii is an exploration of noise, space and time - as they are constituted formally through sound as well as through the tangential relations within and between audiences and the practice o…
Impedance
** Packaged in a deluxe, heavy duty tip-on gatefold sleeves printed by Stoughton; cut by Golden Mastering and pressed at RTI ** Alina Kalancea's Impedance is an entirely instrumental album spanning four sides, contains powerful rhythmic sequences, heart-beating frequencies and hypnotic loops that are paradoxically encapsulated in carefully crafted compositions which are full of secret passages and hidden doors. Kalancea's work creates ungraspable sonic experiences, which overtakes you, immersing…
Nerve Net
Reissue of Brian Eno’s 1992 album which found him returning to a more rock-oriented sound, albeit skewed through an aesthetic that is simultaneously playful, funky and claustrophobic, and featuring a mixture of vocal and instrumental excursions. Includes contributions from Robert Fripp, Robert Quine and John Paul Jones.
Wa
* 2021 Stock * Musician, composer and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music-scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals, collaborates with long standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics).
In Wa (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their express…
Threnody for Judas Iscariot
* Edition of 100. Housed in high quality folded card stock Silk Screened. * Spit-tested veterans of frontal-lobe extermination, Key of Shame’s Pat Murano (Decimus, NNCK) and Mark Morgan (Sightings) discharge focused algorithms of unease and decay in split-second intervals on their third LP, Threnody for Judas Iscariot. A sly codicil of dim textures and gestalt arpeggios, Judas Iscariot shudders itself open and stays gaping, bum notes skittering and splitting out of the electronic backwash like e…
Harpist
**100 copies** Pentiments introduces the fourth addition to its slowly growing catalogue, this one by contemporary New York based artist Derek Baron. Listeners will have the pleasure to witness a total ferment of detrital percussive palettes creating a space redolent of a mutant Han Bennink transported into the “junkyard bedroom” aesthetic of some of the more iconic Vitrine outings. An engrossing wade guided by whispers and cutlery. Feedback, ground buzz and clipping for the initiated. In an edi…
Scribble
* Edition of 100 * 'Scribble' is truly a befitting name for this collection of miniatures created by composer and sound designer Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie. Recorded at his home this past Summer, the short, sweet pieces really are like aural scribbles in a notebook. Slightly chaotic and seemingly unintentional, the 7 tracks exhibit a childlike wonder, a fascination with how various sounds or rhythms work (or don’t work) in tandem.
At the time of writing, Sachs-Mishalanie was particularly interested …
Deathstar
Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone — in Marina Rosenfeld’s hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action—a plexiglas orb housing a 7-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt …