Moulins
Tomasz Krakowiak's latest work on Bocian Records is a purely sonic affair. Performed on acoustic percussion instruments, it has little to do with percussion music. Each piece is named after a particular location and or a sonic event present there. Krakowiak's monotonous playing a specific instrument seems to achieve an effect of a field recording made at the given location. What makes this effort successful is a broad range of his techniques and sonic intuition. These excellent recordings…
Mutanza
This CD presents compositions for piano using the instrument in an unorthodox way. The strings are bowed with nylon strings, stimulated by E-Bows, rubbed with metal, the keys' sound is examined as a corrugated surface and staccato rhythms are repeated in a narrow register. On the one hand, the pieces introduced here explore new ways of playing the piano. In this sense they are enlarged playing techniques, as they have been developed for most instruments in the second half of the twentieth …
Calcutta Gas Chamber
**This special picture LP is limited to 444 numbered copies** An awesome album by an underrated composer, the idea for this project came about after a visit to Calcutta in 1990, and through the nightmarish experiences during that short visit. The concept of aurally conveying the horror of a gas chamber was realised through field recordings in an abandoned electrical power station in Brisbane in 1992. The sounds are grating and harsh, a mixture of field recordings and electronic manipulations. On…
Montreal Sound Matter - Montréal Matière Sonore
Works by Francisco López / Louis Dufort / Steve Heimbecker / Hélène Prévost / Mathieu Lévesque / a_dontigny / Chantal Dumas / Tomas PhillipsMontreal Sound Matter / Montréal matières sonore brings together eight Canadian and international sound artists. The project began with a workshop on environmental sound collecting by Francisco López and led to the development of a collective sound project including an album, a sound installation, and a concert. This is the recording.The artists create an im…
Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna
In scandinavia, it's not uncommon to hear of someone's mother, grandfather, uncle, or plumber who drank him-or-herself to death at an early age; and the swedish drone artist bj nilsen has felt the alcoholic pangs which may foreshadow his own demise. in recent years, nilsen has turned to his icelandic neighbors Sigtryggur Berg sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson (collectively known as stilluppsteypa) in existential sympathy over the problems of their collective lust for alcohol. drykkjuvisur ohljodanna…
Vikinga Brennivin
Brennivin is an Icelandic liquor vulcanized from the humble potato and flavored with cumin, although you’d be hard pressed to taste much beyond the astringent burn that it leaves in your mouth. Bottled in matte black glass and stamped with ominously simple labels, brennivin appears less like something to imbibe and more like poison; and in that creeping slow death kind of way, it is. For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit Stilluppsteypa, brennivin has soaked into every fiber of their being; …