Rough Tongue
Beam Splitter (Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø) is a duo for amplified voice and trombone. Beam Splitter‘s debut album Rough Tongue on Corvo Records is one part, a timbral collage of carefully extracted sound material and in another, a longer moment taken from an intimate room below the din. All tracks are taken from three live concerts in 2016. Utilizing the pure sounds of acoustic and closely amplified trombone and voice, the record exemplifies the joining together of these two i…
Pop Art
Catherine Anahid Berberian (July 4, 1925 – March 6, 1983) was an American mezzo-soprano and composer based in Italy. She interpreted contemporary avant-garde music composed, among others, by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Silvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and Igor Stravinsky. She also interpreted works by Claudio Monteverdi, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Kurt Weill, Philipp Zu Eulenburg, arrangements of songs by The Beatles, and folk songs from several…
Live at White Cube
In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. This performance is from Okkyung Lee.A native of Korea, Okkyung Lee has been developing her own voice in contemporary cel…
Tapesongs
Tapesongs (1977) is the second of two crucial Joan La Barbara reissues on Arc Light Editions, following Voice Is The Original Instrument (1976) (ALE 005LP, 2016). Joan La Barbara is a composer, performer, sound artist and actor, renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques, which have influenced generations of composers and singers. This reissue is presented in full collaboration with La Barbara. Tapesongs makes use of early electronics, and multi-tracked…
The Heliopolar Egg
Documentary recordings of Hartmut Geerken and Michael Ranta’s November and December 1976 tour of the Middle East and East Asia. Geerken is known for his long relationship with Sun Ra (including compiling a discography), but he wears many other hats too: musician, film-maker, archivist. Ranta is a percussionist best known for his famous “Improvisation Sep.1975” collaborative record with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi. This is a CD reissue of an LP boxset, originally released in 2010 as the …
Mauricio Kagel Ludwig van
Mauricio Kagel’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist F. Blondy and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other …
Beginnings
The pieces in Tzadik's collection of early works by Meredith Monk have either never been released before or are heard in performances released here for the first time. Since her 1981 album Dolmen Music, Monk has recorded for ECM, and these selections (including some live performances) all predate that release. The album begins with a disarmingly simple version of Greensleeves, made in 1966; it's intriguing to hear Monk's distinctive voice conventionally used in a folk song. Monk tends work in la…
Voice is the original instrument
Collection of Joan La Barbara early works and her first vocal compositions, originally released on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s on her own Wizard Records. "One of my earliest pieces, "Hear What I Feel", was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and not touching a…
L'Ombra di Mezzogiorno
An extended voice album by Enomìsossab (or, vice versa, Simone Basso) suspended between rock and experimentation, between popular culture and avant-garde roots, to testify of a complex artistic personality and of a “physical” and “emotional” attitude, absolutely uncommon. Overtone chant, guttural sounds, linguistic deformations, the “calembour” and the vocal contortions.Sometimes few notes or a little melody are enough to fell in love with an artist. Sometimes you need to search, to go deep in t…