Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
Sale Quanto Basta
Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…
Animast
** Edition of 200 ** Ferns Recordings proudly presents Animast by Francisco López. Few albums would be as fitted for vinyl release as this one. Drawing on both analog-material and digital-immaterial undisclosed sources, “Animast” plays with the sonic textures and responses most suited for the characteristics of this particular analog medium: noisy crispness, compositional ‘loopiness’, contrasting sharp-and-thick textures and cycling dynamics. A must for experimental heads and adventurous DJs ali…
Drumming in the Dark
Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick
Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…
Rhythm Voice
The Swedish dancer, choreographer, and performer, Greta Lindholm, has remained, since her emergence during the late 1960s, a singular and unique force on the global contemporary dance scene. Having developed a synthetic and experimental approach to movement and generative sound, her boundary pushing body of work can be understood as a celebration of the body and its languages, and their intimate relationship with the voice; using primarily foot drumming and vocal rhythms, her body is transformed…
Verses
Another Timbre presents Verses, five chamber and solo works by the Canadian composer Barbara Monk Feldman. "I have been thinking about what is inside and what is outside. The everyday life and tragedy of what goes on around you, and the fact that to accomplish anything you need the isolation in the studio - I think about this moral issue. And then on another level, I think about an inside and an outside for art itself, and how ephemeral that is.... What I am looking for is a way to notate the mo…
Ballad
Two pieces for cello and piano by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, both performed by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) and Kerry Yong (piano). "In Ballad (45 minutes in duration) I was extending myself into a longer work; I wanted to make a work that could be the entire concert, that could unfold over a longer time. With Through the Low Hills (10 minutes), I was working with a very restricted vocabulary in a process of constrained variation, working and re-working just a few elements. I felt like …
Me Hollywood
Another Timbre presents Me Hollywood by Oliver Leith. 5 chamber works by UK-based composer Oliver Leith, performed by Explore Ensemble. Cover drawing by Susan Te Kahurangi King. ‘Me Hollywood’ sees a hired ensemble soundtrack their patron's evening. He is hoping, or, knows even, that the music will elevate each banal gesture. Films will eventually be made about him, so he’s just making it happen now, his life is filmic, it just needs a score, he drinks, he sings, he plays the piano, he cares for…
Lazzaro
Spellbinding electro-acoustic constructions born from stringed instruments, percussive onslaughts and emotionally charged song craft. Maselli's uncanny skill to create non-conformist drama recalls the wind swept post-rock oblivion of Set Fire to Flames at their most layered and dense, The Haxan Cloaks doom-ridden worlds of grain and texture and the edge blurring of instrument and electronics so expertly honed by Emptyset. “There’s no solitude in art, since it truly only exists in the light of th…
Magneto Mori: Vienna
** Limited edition of 200 ** A fragmented sound portrait of Vienna constructed from found sounds, buried tapes and field recordings. In Magneto Mori sounds from Vienna’s past and present are conjoined in a stew of semi-degraded audiotape. Using a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder sounds from around the city were recorded direct to tape over a two-day period. This tape was then cut into fragments and buried in a hole in the ground with a number of souvenir fridge magnets that erased the portion…
#IV
Toronto’s infamous psychedelic multimedia collective, Intersystems, make a surprise return with a new release, #IV. Coming via Waveshaper Media, #IV is Intersystems’ first new material since 1968! Intersystems’ pioneering avant/electronic music sounded positively alien in the 1960s, and more than 50 years later, this latest body of work sounds just as otherworldly. When they arrived on the scene in the late 1960s, Intersystems stood out from their peers. Comprised of architect Dik Zander, light …
Grünschall
** 2021 Stock ** This is the first solo release by Swiss drummer Peter Conradin Zumthor. "Another good example of the consistently high-quality musical output and the vitality of the scene in the supposedly oldest city in Switzerland. On his solo debut, released on the label of the highly esteemed Swiss percussionist Christian Wolfarth, the self-taught drummer from Chur presents a refreshing musical potpourri of his sound repertoire, developed over the years, in the form of seven interwoven comp…
Retusa – Santuario de Mariposas
Santuario de Mariposas aims to explore the audio characteristics of musical instruments of pre-Columbian origin. They are complemented by a variety of instruments of an ethnographic order, associated with indigenous groups throughout Mexico. After more than 40 years of atnomusical research, Itxoneztli recorded this album trying to give life to sleeping instruments and reflect what the music of the Mexicas ancestors was like.
Nine Hundred Fifty Seven
Francesco Ziello is a multi-instrumentalist musician and electroacoustic composer, born in 1984 and based in Rome. From the beginning his contact with music is dominated by strong contrasts: on the one hand the classical aspect with the study of piano and on the other the influence of the roots of popular music and improvisation with the self-taught approach to other instruments, such as percussion and guitar. In 2012 he graduated from the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, where for a period he st…
Madre
Alma de Nieto presents Madre by Fonemi. All tracks by Vito Santoro. Tracklist: Madre, Pietra Bianca, Cobalto, Attesa , Crepuscolo, Lungo i Binari, Uter.