Time Images
Katharina Schmidt is a percussionist, composer, researcher and radio host. A frequent collaborator, her artistic portfolio includes film music, sound art installations, and radio pieces as well as multichannel compositions. After years of playing drums and piano in various bands, her solo work is influenced by indie, experimental, and improvised music.
The pieces experiment with emergent harmonies, rhythms created by interferences between sine waves, and textures abstracted from field recordings…
Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics
In this collaboration, Maryam Rahmani and David Esser investigate the sonic and expressive potential of the Santur and Kamancheh beyond the frameworks that traditionally define them. Both instruments, central to the language of Iranian classical music, are repositioned within a new constellation where inherited structures meet contemporary sound practices. Tradition and modernity are not treated as opposing forces but as interwoven layers within a shared field of resonance, a dynamic that rarely…
1 - 7
*150 copies limited edition* Headlights Recordings presents Manuel Mota's new work 1-7. Manuel Mota is known for the personal vocabulary he has developed for the guitar. His music draws inspiration from a multitude of references loosely rooted in the blues tradition to craft a sound which was highly regarded by Derek Bailey. Actual but transmitting an enigmatic sense of timelessness. The moment of creation- composition, and the instrumental execution- playing, are to him indistinct, and that's w…
The Third Mind. A Sonic Tribute to the Dreamachine
On The Third Mind. A Sonic Tribute to the Dreamachine, a constellation of contemporary artists tune themselves to the flicker-frequency of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Hypnotic loops, drone hallucinations and cut-up sonics seek not to illustrate the Dreamachine, but to let it hear itself thinking.
Zonal Disturbances III
The next installment in Dirk Serries’ “” cycle. As with the previous chapter, the musician recorded material using electric guitar coupled with numerous effects. He recorded four more longer compositions that further develop Dirk’s direction, constructing his signature ambient style. Organic, somber, and eerie. The entire piece was also recorded live, in a single space, resulting in music that reveals the artist’s penchant for minimalism and slow, repetitive sound clusters, thus drawing on his r…
New Spring
*300 copies limited edition* Pianist Fumi Endo, alto saxophone player Kanon Aonami and Tokyo-based British guitarist Sean Colum have performed together several times in duo and trio formats at Ftarri, Tokyo. The year 2023 saw the release of "Kanon Aonami Composed Works" (meenna-954), an album consisting of duo and trio performances by these three musicians. On January 3, 2024, Taku Sugimoto, a guitarist/composer renowned on the international improvised/experimental music scene, joined the three …
Lemures Loci
*200 copies limited edition* The latest release from Makoto Oshiro and Takahiro Kawaguchi, who have been collaborating since around 2008. Side A, loco, reconsiders the nature of improvisation by weaving together sounds from self-made devices and (non-)instruments—air horns, electromagnetic relays, air compressors, washers—alongside environmental recordings captured outside the studio. Side B, loci, brings together field recordings captured by both artists, each starting to record at the exact sa…
Unfurling
*200 copies limited edition* Pefkin is the alter ego of Gayle Brogan, a Sheffield-based creator of slowly-unfolding, ritualistic hymnals that draw deeply on landscape, nature, and the histories that bind them. Her sound is built from a mesmerising layering of voice, viola, analogue synths, harmonium, melodica, zither and field recordings manipulated with a kaleidoscopic array of effects. Hereby she blurs the boundaries between folk, psychedelia, and experimental music. Over the years her work ha…
D'Est en Ouest
*250 copies limited edition* Tamagawa is the solo project of Bertrand Gaude, member of Temple Solaire and Le Club des Gens Speciaux, two noise groups released by the label Standard hi fi...but it is with Tamagawa that this almost fifty-year-old, originally from Saint Etienne in France, is the most active, and this, for almost twenty years... Building the mystery around his apartment cell from which he practically never goes out, except to tour a bit everywhere on the planet (more than 300 concer…
Practical
*300 copies limited release* Commissioned in 2019 to bridge two bathing cultures—one Japanese, one American—Practical translates the healing steam of Beppu's legendary Kannawa Mushiyu Onsen into immersive sound for Washington Baths, a neighborhood public sauna and artspace in Portland, Maine. The result is a vapor-bath of sound that hovers somewhere between foley and ambient composition, inspired by the mind-altering fragrance of sekishō (石菖, Japanese sweet flag), an ancient medicinal herb whose…
Is This The Land I Wish Death To Find Me
»Is This The Land I Wish Death To Find Me« was recorded on June 26, 2024 at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The recording is based on a slowly shifting set of ascending just minor thirds: 6:5, 7:6, and 13:11. Magnetic geophones were attached directly to the Tank’s steel exterior, allowing the performance to be captured through the physical resonance of the structure itself. Only a minimal amount of the microphones inside the building were mixed in for clarity. The work draws…
Einheitliches Geschirr
*250 copies limited edition* Einheitliches Geschirr is a new album by Marie Vermont, Vienna based sound artist, musician and visual artist. Sound of Einheitliches Geschirr (Uniform Tableware) springs from techno-creative playfulness in which basic tape manipulation melts together with sounds of found objects, trash or self-made instruments and welcomes listeners to the unique dream cave netherworld of Marie Vermont. Einheitliches Geschirr was recorded between November and December 2024 in Vienna…
Forming - Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
In late fall of 2018, Ryan traveled to Valencia, California to meet with Michael for a weekend of informal conversations at California Institute of the Arts. Before Ryan returned home to Colorado, Michael gifted him a recently released recording of Teodora Stepančić, Assaf Gidron, and Martin Lorenz’s realization of Michael’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation, a recording that profoundly impacted Ryan and served as the impetus for this recording.
A thrumming monadic field; a constellation o…
When you rub your eyes, you see things you can’t describe
"In the emergence of consonance out of vapor, in shapes slowly forming from static sounds, Szymon Wójcik’s music gestures toward the movement named in its title: the appearing of what cannot be described. We hear it in its porousness: despite the dense mist, the music retains a transparency, recalling Feldman’s image of a full glass that never spills, no matter how many pennies you add. We hear it in the free singing, which does not so much break away from harmonies in Just Intonation as reveal …
Any sense of where we were gone
Any sense of where we were gone is music obsessed with the infinite within the minute, with the mercurial, breakable, with shifting, sifting, cohering, and digressing. It is an improvisational framework in five parts for chamber ensembles, prepared piano, and electronics, written for and played here by my good friends. It steals inspiration from postmodern fiction, obscure geometry textbooks, and poems about time. This is a live recording of the first performance
“To do. To do something, to do g…
Perpetual Guest
For a few days at the end of July 2023, I curated a series of concerts and recordings in a few spaces in the historic, now-defunct Kreenholm Textile Factory in Narva, Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border. In Kreenholm's reverberant rooms, these sessions reflected on the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that have shaped the factory and the constantly re-evolv- ing border city. A large and unexpected part of this project involved the restoration of an anti…
SSI Solo 2024
A leading saxophonist on the Japanese improvised music scene, Junji Hirose also gives performances using self-made analog noise instruments. It was in the 1980s that Hirose started presenting noise performances on his SSI (self-made sound instrument), made of various everyday objects. Over the years he continually modified the instrument, for each version attaching a different number to the name SSI. On the Hitorri label, Hirose has released the CDs "SSI-4" (hitorri-997 / 2013), "SSI-5" (hitorri…
Evoke
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Biosphere
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Uchidome
Seijiro Murayama is a Paris-based drummer, percussionist, improviser and composer. It was in 2009 that he first released CDs on the Ftarri labels Hitorri, Ftarri and Meena. He has since released over ten CDs of performances in solo, duo, trio and quartet formations.
"Uchidome," Murayama’s fifth solo album from the Hitorri label, consists of three tracks recorded in France in January 2025. All his drum solo albums are outstanding, and this CD, with its unique and inimitable performances, is no ex…