Tonic 19-01-2001 (LP)
Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the s…
Coast
Super Tip! Limited edition of 300 copies. Mike Majkowski is a double bassist / music-maker from Sydney, based in Berlin. Active across a wide range of experimental music since the early 2000s, he has released music with numerous projects. Coast is his twelfth solo recording.
I'm in it. The music on Coast doesn't beckon,it purely compels you closer through sheer insistence on its existence. insistin sistins isti nsistinsist'Spiral' presents full gorgeous tones, timbres and textures.Round throbs l…
Grande Massa D'Agua
*In process of stocking* Mauricio Takara and Carla Boregas have long been key players in the experimental and underground music scene in São Paulo, Brazil and have recently relocated in Berlin. Grande Massa D'Agua (Great Body of Water) is their second album as a duo and it sees them continue to explore themes related to water as they dive into uncharted musical depths. In discussing the duo's relationship with water, Mauricio said: “...In the beginning of the pandemic we decided to take a turn a…
Scosse Elettriche
*2022 stock* 'He took off his earphones. Around him only fog and no sound. Where had the countryside gone? In his ears the music he had been listening to persisted. The final exploration on the piano tailpiece in search of rhythm and resonance still dilated time and space. In that music the grey that now surrounded him was not there. He had 'heard' and glimpsed yellow, red, sometimes ochre, blue, black (the shiny black of the piano, to be precise). He resumed walking, and with his steps, his tho…
Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth
Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth is a recording made in the United States whilst CM von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser were undertaking an exhaustive tour in 1991 alongside Hafler Trio and Zbigniew Karkowski. This, now legendary, tour was both arduous and rewarding. Living in a van for many weeks at a time, travelling between cities with the most modest of means meant Phauss came to know a very particular vision of the United States, one that existed below plain view. Their’s was an experience ha…
Audiodrome
Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser. Formed in the early 1980s, Phauss operated amidst of generation of uncharacteristic Swedish artists concerned with reshaping the edges of practices in sound, light, performance and vision. It was a monumentally fertile period for Sweden in that a confluence of factors allowed artists to dedicate themselves to the relentless excavation of ideas, drilling down to the absolute core of their interests and ways of making. Von Hausswolff and Pause…
The Sounds of VÖ
From the opening seconds it’s clear that the debut recording of the improvising sextet VÖ is not just another free improv session. The deeply meditative sounds may conjure disparate folk traditions from around the globe, whether Scandinavian fiddle tunes or the way Alex Zethson’s meandering pump organ evokes the exploratory harmonium lines in Pakistani qawwali music, but these associations are mostly coincidental. The ensemble members are devoted to improvised and experimental music mostly as an…
Musica Liquida
*In process of stocking* Ingar Zach’s new album Musica Liquida is the first audio document of his ongoing artistic research project at the Academy of Music in Oslo. The project is called The Vibrating Drum and focus on vibration of the membrane, activated by vibrating speakers in contact with the drumskin. Musica Liquida is Ingar Zach’s 7th solo album, and we find him diving into an ocean of sound and orchestrating the complexity of interfolded layers in the impressive acoustics of Emanuel Vigel…
On the salt of a seaside
*Limited edition of 100 copies. In process of stocking*
Pierre Gerard : guitar _ improvisation
recorded & performed 2019
mastering : Giuseppe Ielasi
Threads
The new solo album, threads by the California-based trombone player Mattie Barbier is a multilayered personal investigation. It was recorded in The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangley, Colorado in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
a feeling of place. a calm space to be present in during a space of chaos. of quarantining in a very conservative place as a non-binary person where your welcomeness is tenuous. of uncertainty of where non-binaryness fits as a parent- of still being a dad? or treat…
De Bon Astre
Tip! Under the moniker Sourdure, Ernest Bergez works within a hybrid sound field, combining raw electronics (modular synths, feedback), acoustic instruments (violin, voice, foot percussion), and non-musical sounds (field recording, spoken voice). As a guideline, he keeps an underlying effort to melt experiment into popular music and vice versa, taking traditional songs and dancehall themes from the French Massif Central area as the starting point for experimentationFor the first time, I wrote a …
Tree of Life
Midori Takada's 1999 album Tree Of Life is set to be made available on vinyl for the first time as part of a forthcoming reissue from WRWTFWW Records. The record, which was only Takada's second solo LP after the release of 1983 debut Through The Looking Glass, was originally made available on CD only by Japanese label BAJ Records. The album has been specially mastered at half speed for this updated release. Reissues of Takada's music by WRWTFWW, including her work with Mkawju Ensemble, triggered…
Models of Duration
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* The latest from the uncompromising John McCowen is a split release between Dinzu Artefacts and Astral Spirits. Models of Duration follows the same trajectory as McCowen's other amazing solo releases - Solo Contra (International Anthem, 2017), 4 Chairs in 3 Dimensons (Astral Spirits, 2018), Mundanas I - V (Editions Wandelweiser, 2018) but is also a whole world beyond those. McCowen continues to focus on extended possibilities of the clarinet family as well as acou…
Galaxy Heart
Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, "few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them." Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous …
Un Cacho de Metal, Un Resto de Vaivén
Nichunimu is a Chilean improvisational trio working at the edges of free jazz, ritualism, noise, minimalism and krautrock music. Since 2014, Benjamin Vergara (Trumpet), Nicolás Carrasco (Synthesizer) and Matías Mardones (Percussion) have been inspired by repetition, textures and friendship through the sound, focusing on circular shapes in music that bind them together. Based between the cities of Valdivia and Santiago, their members have also collaborated on projects like La Kut, Cariñito 3, Dub…
Within Reach Of Eventuality
The debut album from Swedish duo David Bennet & Vilhelm Bromander features their co-created piece Within Reach of Eventuality. Following a semi-open score by Bennet, the duo is treating elements such as complex textures, non-pitched sounds, microtonality, beatings and intense pauses in an improvisatory and careful manner.
From the liner notes, by Peter Margasak: "This isn’t music where we need to know exactly what’s happening or trace how it proceeds. It exists to entrance the listener within th…
Shebang
Tip! Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the s…
Duo Geloso
Black Truffle is thrilled to continue its program of archival releases from Arnold Dreyblatt with a recently unearthed concert recording from Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen’s "Duo Geloso". While isolated examples of Dreyblatt’s collaboration with the legendary Dutch multi-media artist appeared on the CD reissue of Propellers in Love and Black Truffle’s wide-ranging archival Second Selection, this is the first release to document the variety and playfulness of the concerts that Duo Geloso performed…
From The Machine: Volume 1
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 200 copies.* The first volume in an ongoing collaboration between composers Kenneth Kirschner and Joseph Branciforte, From the Machine explores the application of software-based compositional techniques — including algorithmic processes, generative systems, and indeterminacy — to the creation of new music for acoustic instruments. Featuring members of Flux Quartet and International Contemporary Ensemble. Although digital approaches to music-making are …
Magazine
*200 copies limited edition* Magazine is a new work for solo cowbell by Sean Meehan. It began with the serendipitous purchase of a small cowbell from the bric-a-brac section of a charity shop, and was composed initially on walks in the city and country, as the bell was an easy companion. As the piece was beginning to take form Meehan was visiting Governors Island, off of the southern tip of Manhattan. There he happened upon the powder magazine of Fort Jay and began finishing the piece over retur…