Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 - 1994
After two years of digging, hunting, unearthing archives, digitising and a lot of correspondence, Nyahh Records is very excited to finally be announcing the release of ‘Under the Island: A Compilation of Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994’. Ireland, a country known mostly in the pop music arena for U2, Thin Lizzy, Stiff Little Fingers et al and of course, the Show Band era of the 60s’ to the present, the country is not known for producing a lot of ‘cutting edge, Avant Garde music. A few v…
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…
jouent pour Stephane Guillaumon qui danse sans faire de bruit
Duo live electronic improvisation by Jean-Marc Foussat and Leo Remke-Rochard. Recorded at the Dojo in Villeurbanne, France, on January 7th, 2023.
Kris Gruda Plays for You
"It's tempting to view guitarist Kris Gruda, a North Carolina resident, as part of a lineage of demented Southern avant-pickers stretching back to Chadbourne, and while that's not false, it's unnecessarily reductive. Gruda is but one particle in a contemporary wave of traveling minstrels plying the interstates and unnumbered highways of the Deep South, navigating between pickup gigs in urban centers from Asheville to Baton Rouge to Jacksonville to Amarillo, dipping into the free jazz songbook an…
Nokivesi
*230 copies limited edition* Ahti & Ahti is the duo of Finnish sound artists Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti. Operating on the fringes of the musique concrète tradition, their work combines recordings of spaces and events, beings and objects, carefully aligned in an associative way.
Nokivesi (soot-water) embraces sound montage and cut up conversations alongside instrumental and electronic sound, combining the complexity of the field-recorded sounds and compositional sensitivity. Originally create…
The Pit
*200 copies limited edition* Born in 1943, Lance Austin Olsen is a Canadian artist and composer. He started painting in his youth and has continued his work as an artist up to the present. In the late 1990s, Olsen became fascinated by experimental music. He has released numerous CDs and digital recordings of both solo performances and collaborations with other musicians. In his creative process, composition and painting are closely related and draw inspiration from one another.
Olsen released a …
Gondolas
Erstwhile Records announces ’Gondolas‘ by Graham Lambkin and James Rushford. Two very unique voices, two hours of sonic magic.
Orpheus Prayed For Me
In 2021 The Weirdo From Another Planet, known to family and friends as The Craven Wizard, announced that he had been dead since 2017. Musicologists, concerned with what would become of the legacy of the polymath artist and winner of the illustrious "World's Saddest Turntablist" prize, sifted through the droves of recordings he left behind. Of the 900+ songs in The Weirdo's archives, the team in charge of the project decided to delete all but 11, which are gathered here. This material serves as a…
Mirage
Dragonfly's First Flight, taking up the full side A, features Simeon Coxe and Kawabata Makoto jamming over familiar Silver Apples hypnotic rhythms. Fans of both groups will delight in the interplay between Simeon's keyboard and Makoto's drone guitar feedback soloing. Side B ranges from free-form freakouts to ambient poetry readings by Simeon with Japanese translation spoken by Makoto. Future Reminiscence, which closes side B, is a song that sounds like a long-lost Silver Apples track. Mirage is …
Guitambients
This is the 3rd record of Ambienti Coassiali on ADN, this time officially shared with Riccardo Sinigaglia. Riccardo was already active on all tracks of "Spare Rooms" but here he is mentioned in the main titles. Side A consists of two long tracks and starts with "Guitambient 1" where a subtle treated guitar slowly crawls accompanied by small percussions, flutes and noises. Ten minutes wrapped in a calm climate evocating an ethnic eastern feeling. "Guitambient 2" proposes an intense interchange be…
F(r)icciones
“F(r)icciones is a complicated piece of miscellaneous works. A set of experiments in preparation for a gig at a noise convention in Orozco that never happened, an 18 women choir piece composed for a soundtrack to a documentary that doesn’t have a release date yet or trying to create a drone piece by accumulating guitar noise. The result? Burnt psychedelic blues with electronics.
Partly an official soundtrack to “Durangas”, a documentary focusing on women and heritage, discussing civil war, edu…
Hotel Spojár
The Czech and Slovak experimental/improv scene is currently experiencing a thriving renaissance. Numerous collectives, groups, and bands are emerging, and venues across both neighboring countries are eagerly hosting their live performances. Among these ensembles is Škvíry & Spoje, a CZ/SK quartet that has been an integral part of this enchanting music environment for the past ten years. Their first physical release, "Hotel Spojár," serves as a double vinyl celebration of their anniversary, featu…
erosion and growth
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in Cardboard String Sleeve with Liner Notes and album art.*
"In loving memory of Kathryn Eagle.
This piece uses a record (a data structure) resulting from a field recording. It began with a waterfall in Washington (Little Mashel Falls) near my parents’ home, which I recorded in my mother’s final months of life. A brain cancer slowly took away her abilities, beginning with her speech. A loquacious person her entire life before this, I had to learn to hear and underst…
Soma
*2023 stock* The duο’s work focuses on the creative fusion of composition and improvisation, where links between experienced and ideal sound are constantly being formed and deformed. This double CD reflects the two dimensions of Soma. The first CD presents the close musical liaison between Anisengos and Atzakas, along with three additional trios with Michalis Siganidis. The second CD features guest musicians, Savvina Yannatou, Maria Thoidou and Michalis Siganidis, who form trios, quartets and qu…
Jump On It
2023 repress; LP version. "It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One (EMEGO 173CD, 2013), a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar -- and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of e…
DnT
*2023 stock* The album ‘DnT’ shows a collaboration that shares pure rock energy and electroacoustic manipulation, amplified drums and distorted tape, feedback and re-injection, live processing and diversion. A large tape loop was also set up on two supplementary reel-to-reel tape recorders to create a random memory, delayed and unstable, acting like a distorting mirror. This recording is the result of two days’ work at Centre Culturel André Malraux de Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France, in July 2018.
Farewell to Faraway Friends (Wurlitzer Improvisations 2021-23)
Stunning recordings from Norwegian pianist Anja Lauvdal, who follows-up last year’s Laurel Halo-produced ‘From a Story Now Lost’ with an album of improvisations made on a Wurlitzer electric piano, featuring the great Lasse Marhaug on mastering duties.
As Long as the Sun, As Long as the Moon
"For the ear hears sounds from various combinations in accordance with the character of the melody and the instrument.” ─ Abraham Abulafia
Eight collective improvisations based on small musical ideas extracted from modern classical guitar works that make a beautiful suite of music; evocative, spiritual, hypnotic... The pieces found here are the consequence of a de-composing/re-composing process where each musician previously immerses into the music, transforming and combining the notes and rhyth…
Wuwei
*2023 stock* "From the beginning, the focus of the orchestra has been on listening, and improvising in the moment. A group of people truly playing together and focusing intently on the present can be a powerful thing. the use of natural objects (stones, shells, pine cones etc.) as opposed to more conventional musical instruments, can help the players to not fall back on learned habits of musical play. There is no canon or book of rules to refer to when using everyday things as sound makers, and …