Elements
Tip! Surface World is pleased to share David Lee Myers (aka Arcane Device) and Toshimaru Nakamura’s Elements, a remote collection written and assembled in tandem at the suggestion of the label. Sharing an idiosyncratic approach to feedback-based sound generation and a commitment to their signature instruments (respectively, the Feedback Machine and the No-Input Mixing Board), the pairing lands during an especially fruitful period in their individual discographies. Harmonically dense, energetic a…
Kinetic Vision
Composer Masamichi Kinoshita, cellist Tomoki Tai, and composer/computer musician Takumi Ikeda perform on electrical equipment and electronics in the electric noise project Electric Powered Music. Kinoshita and Tai started playing sessions together around 2008 and were joined by Ikeda soon thereafter. This album includes two live improvised performances presented at Ftarri, Tokyo. The performance on track 1 (42 minutes) took place on February 26, 2023; the track 2 performance (31 minutes), on Oct…
Engines In Unity
A main architect of one of the most exciting and innovative groups of the last decade, Guerilla Toss, Arian Shafiee has recorded for labels as varied and iconic as Sub Pop, DFA and Tzadik. Engines in Unity is the brilliant follow up to his 2018 VDSQ debut solo album, A Scarlet Fail. The record presents a retrospective of Shafiee's singular relationship with the guitar thus far, reconciling his interest in slow, languorous music and deep sound design. Vivid and often destroyed, the pieces on Engi…
Live At Ftarri
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Yoshiki Ichihara (synthesizer) and Naoki Nomoto (computer, synthesizer) are musicians based in Tokyo. Ichihara first performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February of 2021, and the following November he invited Nomoto to play a duo concert there. The performance was so terrific that the two agreed to collaborate again soon, and gave another duo concert at Ftarri on January 23, 2022. This CD includes two 30-minute pieces performed at that second concert. What mak…
To Live
American indie label File 13 Records released what was already Martin Rev's sixth solo album in the autumn of 2003. The previous year, Rev and his musical partner Alan Vega had struck out in a new direction on their "American Supreme" album and Rev's solo works continued in a similar vein. If "Strangeworld" from the year 2000 actually felt more like a timeless abstract of Martin Rev's entire spectrum of musical influences, "To Live", three years later, introduces more contemporary elements, incl…
End of Life
Latest LP for Darksmith of California on Second Sleep. Darksmith of California (Tom Darksmith) combines wilting electronics, floppy turntablism and sun-baked cassette protocols and destroys them in a claustrophobic void
Pleasure Pressure
New Forces presents "Pleasure Pressure," Joe Colley's latest LP of expert sound composition. Damaged wires, crackling speakers, and the existential dread of droning electronics are woven together into Colley's trademark juxtaposition of haunting minimalism and industrial wreckage. Never before has Colley's ability to bring to life all that seems broken-down been so prominently on display. Buzzing, hissing, corroded sounds are wrenched from machines that seem on the brink of imminent collapse and…
Axolotl
The trio Lotto consists of: Łukasz Rychlicki (Kristen), Mike Majkowski (Hailu Mergia Trio, Oren Ambarchi Hubris) and Paweł Szpura (Hera, Wovoka). By publishing two completely different materials at the same time, they can cause considerable embarrassment to listeners and journalists or bloggers willing to pigeonhole and define them.
The basic tracks for the Axolotl album were recorded at the end of September 2021 in Szczecin, and the recording engineer was Adam Sołtysik (Dynasonic). During the s…
Electronic Works
This vinyl release is a 2x12-inch with printed sleeve and inner sleeves. Also there is a a CD insert of all the tracks. Osmo Lindeman is one of the main developers of electronic music in Finland. He was active in Europe, USA and Finland from 50s to end of 70s. In the beginning Osmo Lindeman studied and worked as a modern classical composer. During the 1960s he shifted making electronic music only at his home studio. Lindeman is a Finnish hybrid of Monty Norman, Krzysztof Penderecki and Edgar Var…
Potential
Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow. Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound i…
Damaged Goods
Listen to Location Location Location’s debut, Damaged Goods, and it’s easy to visualize the three musicians sweating it out in the recording studio, locking in on a groove and just jamming. With, it should be noted, occasional breaks to contemplate the basics, then add subtle overdubs: some bit-crunched guitar here, a marimba there, perhaps a harmonized line or a spacey reverb effect. But essentially live, essentially just three guys in a room, giving their all. But that’s not how it went down a…
Sort of
*Limited edition of 500 copies.* In 1972, the left-wing intellectual film critic Uwe Nettelbeck suggested to Anthony Moore that he should write some (relatively speaking) straight songs. He took up the challenge, inviting his old school friend Peter Blegvad over to Hamburg to form the band Slapp Happy. They were joined for a session in Wümme by the young singer Dagmar Krause and Faust as their rhythm section; the recording became the album Sort Of. After getting the band back together for reunio…
Tuokioita
300 copies limited edition "On this LP you hear two kanteles built by the Master Luthier Rauno Nieminen. One of them is a copy of a historical instrument built by the folk poet Ontrei Malinen in 1833. It is carved from single piece of pine, and it has five bronze strings. The other one is carved from a single piece of spruce. Its lowest seven strings are bronze, and highest three strings are English iron. On most tracks the two kanteles are played simultaneously. For me, playing these instrument…
Predictability Failure
Sergey Senchuk aka Tungu was born in Chernihiv, Ukraine in 1999. He started playing in the spontaneous-intuitive band Kollektiv, and in the hard core bands Remorse and Keepleer 18. He begun to record using the nickname Tungu with his first release "Opus Hereticus"in 2013. His idea was to make of Tungu a project that would contain field recordings, cut ups, samples and live instruments. Four albums were recorded since then : "Dense arrays" 2014, "Ilf and Petrov with us" 2016, "Burst of exsessive …
Tuxford Fumble
Magnetic pickups, analog electronics, and consumer detritus (springs, styrofoam, metal sheets, motors, magnetic tape, wood, dental floss) generate evolving/shifting/mutating sound-textures. Born in Canada, currently residing in Kobe, Tim Olive's discography includes releases on BISAD, Caduc, Chocolate Monk, Copy For Your Records, Dasa Tapes, EM Records, Hard Return, Humanhood, Intonema, Kirigirisu, Korm Plastics, Minimal Resource Manipulation, Notice Recordings, Pilgrim Talk, Steep Gloss, Tsss T…
Superior State
*300 copies limited release* Superior State is the second Leitmotiv Limbo album released by Port Adelaide’s De la Catessen Records, after the 2022 CD Spiritual Disturbance. This time, Leitmotiv Limbo’s isolationist studies have been bumped to vinyl, which feels like the perfect format for these twelve miniatures. The project of Adelaide artist Elijah Värttö, Leitmotiv Limbo has, over the past few decades, tracked a history of quietly insistent experimentation, embracing several technologies – in…
Bronze
*2023 repress* A giant step from abrasive pastoral into amped-up avant-folk. Hypnotic interludes, ranging from archaic, electrified stomps to enraptured harp and guitar duets, industrial spaces and fragile, ghostly vocal choruses, represent important development as well as a singular musical expression from one of Britain’s most unusual outfits. Mastered for its CD debut by Jim O’Rourke.
Momentary Lapses
*100 copies limited edition* Spoken word, synth, modules & beats invite the listener into an electronic landscape where smell is colour and sound has weight. 'Momentary Lapses' is the second collaborative album from London based artists BAG (Jody DeSchutter and Daniel Allison), and Collapsing Drums (Charlie Behrens). This is a deeply artful work that is simultaneously engrossing and challenging, and one that benefits from repeated listening.
Spalona Ziemia
The trio is a perfect composition for broadly understood improvised music, sufficient in terms of minimum and generally reflecting to the maximum what the musicians want to convey to the listener. In the case of the Wrocław-based trio Marek Otwinowski, Michał Sikorski and Marcin Witkowski, this "width" of understanding improvisation is particularly visible. This is not a classic free-jazz band or even free-improv, because the musicians go far beyond these frames, touching noise, avant-garde, ind…
babel
Dauw presents 'babel', the debut album from Belgian duo Zonderwerk. The duo’s name means ‘’without work’’, but it also comes from “bijzonder werk”, where bijzonder is particular, special, unique. They like to work with images/paintings that are “bijzondere werken”, odd works.