Motives For Recycling
2024 stock. The fashionable term “remix” is often based on a misunderstanding. To re-mix a piece of music means to mix all tracks of a multi-track recording in a new way. Putting the complete piece (the sum of all tracks) through the wringer means “recycling”. Before starting the recycling two questions might arise: “Why recycle this piece?” and “Are the structure and sound of the piece convenient for recycling?” The ability to answer these questions depends more or less on the artist’s percepti…
The Sky With Broken Arms
*2023 stock* CD in 4-panel, full-color gatefold digisleeve. Cover artwork and foreword by Roberto Opalio. Design by My Cat Is An Alien.
‘The Sky With Broken Arms’ is the brand new studio album by My Cat Is An Alien which officially opens the duo’s 20th anniversary in 2018–a year rich of exciting projects, collaborations and releases. Brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio have been active as radical instantaneous composers since the beginning in early 1998, their work always characterized by the w…
Zeeschuim
*100 copies limited edition* Zeeschuim is a continuation of Zeemijl, a long-form piece from 2020. Through their density and movement, these two works become sonic sculptures of the North Sea and the Irish Sea. Consciously or not, life on an island is about crossing water. Crossing the river in a city or the country; crossing the sea to leave the state. When water surrounds you, it defines your existence.zeeschuim considers what happens under the surface of these waters, and the chaos both above …
The Seismograph
*100 copies limited edition* "A large mound of igneous rock beneath the earth’s surface, sometimes attaining the size of a mountain. The vent associated with a volcano which no longer ejects molten lava or ashes, but continues to give off steam and gases. A hole in the earth’s crust from which steam and gases, such as carbon dioxide, are emitted under pressure. A large basin-shaped crater bounded by steep cliffs, usually formed by the subsidence of the top of a volcanic mountain, and sometimes o…
Isolario
Limited edition of 59 copies (!) An additional 100 copies are signed and numbered by Dario Calderone and only available through him at art events and concerts. Isolario is a cycle of 9 duets, which can be performed, or just imagined, by any instrument or voice. The inspiration of these compositions comes from a compilation of texts by medieval writers from the “Arabic” world, describing a special and wonder-full island. Beyond the fact that these islands really exist, what interests me is the de…
Lineaments
Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diverging tempos and structures. Humming voice, sine …
♥ / Lamb
Soccer Committee has always been an consistent exercise in restraint, and offering space. And on ‘♥ /Lamb’, this approach has been taken to perfection. The arrangements are still minimal, with plenty of time for the tones and melodies to resonate with maximum impact. Mariska Baars still carefully selects each note, and lets the sound evolve with precise care. Her songs are definitely rooted in the folktradition, but at the same time very ‘ambient’, in the true sense of the word. And still: there…
The Target Has Disappeared
*200 copies limited edition* Australia-based baroque violinist Lizzy Welsh has recorded three new compositions for solo baroque violin—the astounding result of a decade-long process of commissioning repertoire of such work during her doctoral research. Each of the works on « The Target Has Disappeared » initiates an intimate conversation between Welsh and her instrument, outlining the contours of memory and loss, weaving together fragments of old and new traditions in the sound of gut strings.
Cerchi Cerchi
2025 stock ** Limited edition of 100 copies. "Oorsprong is a tube, a line in a forest, a sound sculpture. Acoustics to be revealed. Activated by entering, it becomes a giant flute producing a tone that is so low, the body crashes into waves of pure pressure instead of sound. Untranslatable energy. Cerchi Cerchi is a quest in a forest to find traces of that untranslatable sound, its impact, its imprint, its memory. A hide and seek in which the body is concealed in the instrument, becoming its sec…
Fantasy Sex
* Limited LP. Two-sided insert with liner notes by Matthias Andersson. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug * Utmarken was a combined venue, record shop and recording space in Gothenburg that existed between 2008 and 2011. A short-lived under the radar hub for outsider art and fringe music, the place quickly became an oasis for an wide variety of local misfits and a hotbed for interesting sounds. The creative, multifaceted atmosphere spawned acts like Ättestupa, Lust For Youth, Street Drinkers and Arv & Mi…
Pale Bloom
**Black Vinyl LP edition** Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilizing everything from pipe and reed organs to analog synthesizers, this prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for a radiant work of quiet minimalism and poetic rumination.Recorded at Berkeley, California's famed Fantasy Studios, Pale Bloom is comprised of two delicately-arranged sides. The first – a three-part suite…
A Practice In Taking Up Space
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR* "All of the following are improvisations and workings-outs, captured at the time by whatever recording device I had at hand. I don’t know what they are: does the act of recording change the nature of a thing?" - Lottie Sadd
Limited Edition CDR in Cardboard String Sleeve with Liner Notes and album art.
Spaces
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR* Spaces, for solo vibraphone, was composed in 2021 for percussionist Tony Oliver in celebration of more than thirty years of musical collaboration and friendship. The work is nearly 80 minutes in duration when performed in its entirety, but its eight 10-minute iterations (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b) may also be programmed individually or in suites. Each iteration labeled "a" begins with a group of three pitch-classes that gradually combine with a second trichord…
Still
Efraín Rozas’ "Still" posed this question in the form of an installation made for quadraphonic sound, architecture and light. Still was first developed at Queenslab as part of a one-month residency with The Kitchen, New York City in April 2021. This album is a live, stereo room recording of Still as it was presented over three one-hour viewings.
Palazzo
Domotic − the alias used by musician Stéphane Laporte − composed and mixed this new album, Palazzo, at the invitation of Ina GRM, and it is a wonderful addition to a career full of projects and numerous releases. Recorded with his favorite analog synth, the SH01, his four-track MT4X and a Copicat tape echo unit, this electronic piece was subsequently mixed in binaural and stereo
Unknowable Determinism
Konrad Zuse, who built the first programmable computer (the Z3, in 1941), suggested that the universe is a computer: underlying the known laws of physics is an algorithmic system like a cellular automaton whose computational output is the matter and energy that make up the universe. In this theory, the world is computed through the interaction of billions of simple elements, and the directional time and 3D space that we experience are emergent properties of this computation. The computation is d…
Live In Antwerp
*In process of stocking* Nuke Watch wade out into liquified ephemera and ride their muggy percussive loops to safety. A foamy, landfill jazz collage originally performed in Antwerp now committed to tape.
White Dove Dream
* Edition of 300 . In process of stocking* Icebear is Eilis Mahon, a musician from Kildare, Ireland, currently based in Limerick City. The liminal space between storytelling and dreaming is full of noise. Like whispers, flickering lines of static travel to the rhythm of tension, moving through moments of stillness and chaos. The sharp details of the hyper-personal become shared memories.
Dreams can be stories, their fabric transient and their logic malleable - like folk songs carrying ancient…
Borderland Melodies
Three wonderful recent compositions by acclaimed Swiss composer Jürg Frey - ‘Movement, Ground, Fragility’, ‘L’état de simplicité’ and ‘Borderland Melodies’. All beautifully played by Apartment House"The original idea had been for a CD of pieces that use both clarinet and bass clarinet, which would have given me the opportunity to play alongside Heather Roche, Apartment House’s regular clarinetist. However, the pandemic intervened and limited my activities as a player. Then I was seriously ill fo…
Naiads
A series of five haunting chamber works by UK-based composer Martin Iddon. The titles of the pieces are taken from different kinds of water nymphs in Greek mythology. Apartment House perform a set of five evocative and enigmatic chamber pieces by Leeds-based Martin Iddon, whose last CD ‘Sapindales’ sold out earlier this year."The naiads are freshwater nymphs from Greek myth. There were five different sorts of naiads, each one of which provides the name for one of the pieces in my cycle, Naiads: …