Kasveille Ja Elaimille
What is music about? It can be about anything, I guess, but that’s not what we are talking about. That’s not why we are here. What makes the difference is if music, any music, is worth it. Then it’s something else. Like this piece, Juho Toivonen’s solo album. What I suggest as a simile to music on this vinyl, is the experience of sauna. Savusauna (smoke sauna) to be exact. The thing about savusauna is that because of the method of heating, the room gets really hot, and the smell of smoke is all …
Empyrean Traces
"Exquisitely performed by the Benaud Trio … a meditative stillness and a quality of confiding sincerity … heightened by the unpredictability with which notes appear and disappear … there are special joys here.” - Graham Strahle, The Weekend Australian
Six Studies
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR* The pieces in this collection are studies, of a sort, and all written in 2021 or 2022. Along with most other things I’ve produced in thesame period, there’s an unintended, relentless sentimentality to them – inevitable, I suppose, if working with diatonic clusters.They’re all very simple, and, with the exception of Piano and Accompaniment, aren’t really “compositions” so much as demonstrations of what instruments are busy doing while we might be busy thinking about…
Love-In-A-Mist, Edible
*300 copies limited edition* Well this is a dream, Ukrainian experimental composer Natalia Beylis put together "Love-In-A-Mist, Edible" over the course of three years, recording pianos she would find at other people's houses or on holiday, in Ireland, Amsterdam and Morocco. Ghostly and emotional musical polaroids - it draws immediate parallels with Dominique Lawalrée’s 'First Meeting’ which - you prob know by now - is all the comparison it needs to have our ears fully pricked.
Presented “like ho…
A Grain Of Earth
*In process of stocking* ‘A grain of Earth’ is the first solo venture and expression of several years of working with instant compositions and the timbral possibilities of an acoustic piano. This has been wrapped in an idea of realities beyond our perception, and a thought that we are a part of a big organism where everything goes endlessly bigger and smaller in scale of size, time and speed. Everything moves in constantly interfering waves of energy; echoing and reflecting, in ceaseless dance o…
Music For Piano
Zeitkratzer's boss revisits the piano guts some years after his much acclaimed and genre-defying album Inside Piano (2011). While Reinhold Friedl's first solo album defined the practice of playing on the strings of a grand piano and revealed the source of sounds we couldn't identify on some of Zeitkratzer's recordings, Music For Piano, ... Spring/Flower/Cracker/Stream, brings concrete and quasi electroacoustic sounds together with clearly articulated piano notes. In the enigmatically titled Musi…
Herewith
[herewith] is Danae Stefanou’s first full-length solo piano release. The album centers around the tactile exploration of the piano interior as a sonorous surface, and as a resonant chamber. The resultant eight tracks, at times sharp and abrasive, at others densely immersive, aim to convey a physical sense of listening to the piano “from the inside”, rather than upkeeping the convention of appreciating the performance “from a distance”. The tracks were recorded as one-take improvisations over tw…
Real Time
Reinhold Friedl and Dirk Dresselhaus come from really different backgrounds: Dirk Dresselhaus has released several experimental-electronic freak-pop recordings as Schneider TM since the late '90s. He started making music in the late '80s and developed his personal approach to sound and structure as an autodidact, starting with guitar effect devices and four-track home-recording. Reinhold Friedl studied mathematics and music, won scholarships and international commissions, and built up the ensemb…
Capsizing moments
A veritable tour de force of 'inside' prepared piano playing - preppiano extensif. The whole of a solo set performed at Les Instants Chavirés near Paris. Sophie Agnel's preparations, neither static nor fixed, evolve during the course of her playing as she adds, moves or removes an object, or replaces one artefact with another. These preparations include disposable water cups, nylon fishing-line, bouncing balls, aluminium ashtrays, aluminium foil, industrial nylon, inner-tube rubber and polished …