Shaking Studies
Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her LP, Shaking Studies, is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject. In addition to an arsenal of techniques for registrable shaking, Hamann's conception of the term emphasizes micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity. Hamann begins with a sphygmological reading of …
Vent
In a rain forest of moments. the eye hears what the ear sees. through each moment of Karin Johansson’s and Finn Loxbo’s music runs the firm conviction that all points and layers of sound – in true democratic spirit, carry the same weight. Or lightness. as precise as scattered bird calls may be crucial to the totality and the outcome of the drama as a whole, as cautiously do they take care of the phrased line by being extremely exact with the gaps and the charged rest, where that very thing appea…
Magnet Hill
* Edition of 200 * "Jesse Dewlow from Philadelphia follows up two great albums on Siltbreeze (Tricephalic Head, 2014) and Blackest Ever Black (Gunshots At Crestridge, 2016) with his first vinyl 7". Compared to earlier recordings, Magnet Hill is rather minimal and mainly based on guitar, that "a murky sub-underground feel resembling South Island NZ pop played inside of an armored car" line may still be somewhat on point, but these two downer gems are deeply rooted somewhere else. Both sides ends …
Ajaeng Ajaeng
To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls “the third ear”. The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.
The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights…
Concentration Patterns
* Hand-numbered limited run of 300 copies * C.R. Gillespie is a Canadian musician and sound artist. Born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, coastal living on Vancouver Island influenced his textural overlapping of “waves”; focused layering of soothing tones that tremulate and merge in a vast and expansive synthetic ocean. This aesthetic is at the forefront of his new release, Concentration Patterns, a sprawling 75-minute ambient suite which envelops the listener in a vibrating collage of drifting tex…
Parallel Voices
* Edition of 200 * Chicagoan Brian Case is returning to Hands in the Dark with his fourth release under his own name, Parallel Voices.
In a sense, the album is elliptical: Whilst, musically speaking, the American artist comes back to the start of his solo work by producing a fully instrumental album, he also delivers a story which informs the landscape Case lives in now, and always imbibes it with a sense of tension and dark undercurrents. You might think at first that the voice he uses is abstr…
Vol. 9 After the Circle
Outsider Portuguese artist Filipe Felizardo delivers a singular album of 21stcentury loner folk from the confines of his apartment. Performed, recorded and mixed at home over the course of two days during the Summer of 2019, the music captured on this record resonates now more than ever to our current housebound times. Construction site noises, leaking sinks, random conversations, cat meows and guitar strums all interact with each other in this origami field recording from the interiors of one’s…
Aeriola Frequency
Black Truffle announce the first vinyl reissue of Rafael Toral's Aeriola Frequency, originally released by Perdition Plastics in 1998. Toral made his name in the world of mid-90s experimental electronics with two releases, Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) and Wave Field (1995), both now recognized as classics and reissued on vinyl by Drag City, which saw him exploring the potential of electric guitar and pedals to immerse the listener in seemingly endless waves of sustained tones. On Wave Field, ins…
Vertigo KO
A compilation of unreleased material from the Light Sleep and Voice Hardcore sessions alongside specially recorded new material, including a cover of “The Void” by The Raincoats. Both formats include a 20 page zine designed by Studio Tape Echo featuring photography from Masayuki Shioda and writing from both Disciples and Phew. It follows on from a limited edition cassette and digital release of Phew’s music on Disicples called Vertical Jamming, which compiled some of the cult Japanese artist’s l…
Mara
* Picture disc edition of 300 copies * Maja S. K. Ratkje is at the forefront of the musical avant-garde. Her music is bold, original and it is meant for sharing. At its heart lies Ratkje’s own voice, an open door to her individual musicianship and a constant tool for realigning her work with natural expressions and human truths.
On Mara, layers of vocals overlap and layer their way through the reverberant woodwork of an early baroque parish in Austria. At times slow and beautiful, other times fr…
Horizon, Volume 1
* Online Color Vinyl Edition: “Clear” – Includes Limited Edition Art Print. 2020 stock * Almost completely unknown in the west, Masahiro Sugaya has been composing and producing music since the 1980s in an exceptionally wide range of fields and practices. From arrangements for musical acts like the acoustic guitar duo Gontiti to acousmatic diffusion at spaces like Paris’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Sugaya’s reach is almost exhaustive in its breadth, but it was in the 80s bubble-era kan…
Commissions: 1977-2000
Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita’s Inoyama Land project spans nearly four decades, still active to this day. A portmanteau of their family names, the “Land” of Inoyama hovers between imagined mythical space and concrete reality, extending beyond physical releases into installations, site-specific sound design and theatre scores.
After their famed Haruomi Hosono-produced 1983 release Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo became involved in the budding environmental music business that was taking shape in …
Agua Viva
* Edition of 100 * Tsss Tapes presents Agua Viva, a new Daphne X cassette release. The album is composed of experiments and interactions performed with water on various materials: polyester, metal, skins. Sounds have been captured with Blazej's LOM's (mikro)Uši binaural microphones.
Recorded in Montseny, 2019 and released on September 4, 2020. Mastered by Francesco Covarino.
Ashioto
Black Truffle announce Ashioto, the first international solo release from Japanese drummer-percussionist-composer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Active for over a decade, Yamamoto has performed and recorded extensively with artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, and Akira Sakata, as well as participating in innumerable improvised and ad hoc groups. Ashioto presents two wide-ranging pieces that combine Yamamoto's percussion work with piano, field recordings, electronics, and contributions from guest …
Cantus, Descant
**2CD Edition** The new double album from artist Sarah Davachi is an 80 minute, 17 track meditation on impermanence and endings, framed by minimalistic organ études and careful harmonic layering, with two tracks featuring the artist’s own vocals for the first time.I spent a lot of time while working on this album thinking about impermanence and endings, which led me to change my understanding of “vanitas” and “memento mori.” These concepts arise allegorically across classical antiquity and Buddh…
Sub
2025 stock ** The most enigmatic of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Marc Zeier is the man behind G*Park; and here, he presents his first major album since the acclaimed 2008 album of cryptic electro-acoustics entitled Reuters. Many years in the making, Sub is a sprawling masterpiece of modern day musique concrete, reflecting the early pioneers' use of razor cut tape with a grandiose revelation of an existential horror. Zeier describes this album as the manifestation of amorphous conditions that lead to …
Ozeanische Gefühle
irr. app. (ext) is the work of California-based sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work is far too important to continue to be forgotten. During the past decade, only two full albums -- Dust Pincher Appliances (2003 on Crouton) and An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation (1997 on Fire, Inc.) -- have seen the light of day despite the fact that perhaps a dozen albums have been completed. The public silence for irr. app. (ext) was never by Waldron's design, a…
We Share a Shadow
Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is not the terminus of McGinley…
Samoa Highway
**Edition of 500** RV Paintings were born in California. Humboldt County, to be exact. It is nearly impossible to imagine their origins being elsewhere since the brothers Brian and Jon Pyle, who currently pilot RV Paintings, constantly mine the metaphysical properties of their homeland through a heavy-lidded psychedelia. The redwood trees that majestically rise from the rugged terrain may have been one of the endemic objects that inspired RV Paintings to “jam nature”; but Humboldt County’s other…
Peaks
Black Truffle present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring. Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from roo…