Sen
*200 copies limited edition.* Guitarist Clara de Asís and flutist Mara Winter established Discreet Editions in order to locate and highlight links between ancient and contemporary, experimental approaches to music making. Adrián Demoč’s Sen, the label’s third release, treats that mission with especial seriousness. Dusted’s review of Adrián Demoč’s Žiadba meditated upon the ways that the Slovakian composer’s practice confounded the limits of statehood. This time, he has expanded one of that album…
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.
Mouths Without A Head
*200 copies limited edition* Music composed in resonance with Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ (ca 1555-60). The Sibylline Prophecies are a 16th century collection of vocal motets that could be considered prophetic, because they open up the music of its time to chromaticism beyond diatonality, posing new challenges to tuning. On the other hand, the sung text is an unambiguous appropriation of ancient Greek Sibylline oracles, claiming these predicted the coming of Christ —a fictional re…
II (LP)
From the London based imprint, Hegoa, comes one of the most beautiful and striking records we've heard all year, the Basque trio, Carcáscara’s second outing “II”. Issued in a very limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, its elegant arrangements of tonality, texture, and cascading arpeggiations and drones, sculpt a stunning, acoustic middle ground between a number of Spanish folk traditions, American primitivism, and musical minimalism. A likely strong contender for more than a few year-end lists.
Cerchi Cerchi
*100 copies limited edition* 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 second voice, hidden…
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…
22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream / How to Avoid Ants
22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream is a perceptual trap. Inspired by an experience of intense perceptive disorientation while crossing a market in China, Eve Aboulkheir reinstantiates, in the field of sounds, the swirling and anamorphic universe of thwarted perceptions, surrounding multitudes and shifted sensations. She thus constructs a dreamlike and artificial universe, suspended and hyperactive, which is both an electronic vortex sucking us in and a mechanical ballet developing its arabesqu…
Minos Circuit / Transfiguration 4
Minos Circuit is the resonance of a double exploration, that of an instrument, the bassoon - an instrument dear to Dafne Vicente-Sandoval - and that of a listening, of a gaze, almost. The first exploration deconstructs the instrument, tearing it apart, reducing it to an archipelago of sound bodies stimulated by an electro-acoustic device that generates feedback and infiltrates each part of the bassoon, in order to carry out a methodical, systematic examination. The second exploration is the inne…
Empty Homes
Talking about the nature of Loud As Giants, Dirk Serries marks that for both him and Justin K. Broadrick the project is more like ‘a trip down memory lane.’ Thirteen years after their collaboration as Fear Falls Burning and Final, these two kindred spirits return with an album that symbolizes their mutual fascination for the 80’s culture in which they grew up and all the relevant and groundbreaking genres Justin and Dirk were influenced by.
“Loud As Giants is our collaboration not to invent new …
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…
In Hell
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* It’s not like we’ve been long time followers of Eve Adams. We found out about her around the release of her third record ‘Metal Bird’, in early 2021. A great album that led us to dig through the rest of her discography. We were delighted to find out she’d already put out an ep and two albums. It was ‘In Hell’, released on cassette in 2017, that struck us in particular. An album that, in our opinion, demands to be listened to on vinyl. Eve Adams makes ‘Am…
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.
Divin
*Packaged in a deluxe, gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket. Hi-res download included* Junko Tange’s second and final album - a minimalistic, phantasmagoric masterpiece of distant, dreamlike voices woven through pulsating, dubbed-out drum machines, synths and static, originally issued by Osaka’s Vanity Records in 1981. Did this unassuming dental student (who vanished from the music world following this release) inadvertently invent dub techno? You be the judge. Label head Yuzuru Agi said this was hi…
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
In C Pour 11 Oscillateurs Et 53 Formes
Julien Sénélas, Jérôme Vassereau and Soia present a new version of "In C", Terry Riley's seminal work: a musical interpretation with two modular synthesizers (11 oscillators) and a graphic interpretation of the original score.
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…
Melodies
*In process of stocking* An extraordinary project arising from Frank Denyer’s ethno-musicological studies in the 1970’s, which forced him to go back to basics and ask himself ‘what is a melody?’ and ‘what is a note?’ Frank answered these questions by composing a series of 25 pieces starting from single-note melodies, through melodies with 2, 3 or 4 notes, ending with more complex pieces with 14- and 15-note melodies. A wonderful double CD, with a 24-page booklet containing an essay by Frank de…
Skal_Ghost
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* 12k continues in its tradition of collaborative releases presenting a first-time pairing between German artist Arovane and 12k’s Taylor Deupree. Having become aquainted through their shared love of music technology, Uwe Zahn (Arovane) and Taylor Deupree only found it natural to work on a project together based around one of their favorite synthesizers. As Zahn recalls: “After a long email conversation, Taylor and I came up with the idea of recording an albu…