Aprilnacht
Originally released on tape by SicSic in 2014, Aprilnacht commemorates a decade of music from Brannten Schnüre and marked the spring in a tetralogy of albums about the four seasons when it came out. Back then the Würzburg-based project consisted solely of Christian Schoppik, who later welcomed Katie Rich to take over the vocals. He used to perform as Agnes Beil, but dropped the name when, while making this album realized his music was becoming "much gentler and more fragile". Aprilnacht already …
Mental EU
New output from Primorje, the collaborative project between Giovanni Donadini (Ottaven, Canedicoda) and Matteo Castro (Mercury Hall, Lettera 22, also founder of Second Sleep label).
Psychoacoustic Electronics
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Andy Ortmann owns Nihilist Records, of whom we also reviewed The New Blockaders and Diana Rogerson's works last week. And before I say anything about the music on this album, I would love to show you a bit of the inside of my head. Because when I read the title of this impressive triple vinyl totalling over two hours of music, I was thinking about something completely different. So: What is psychoacoustic music, and how do psychoacoustic electronics fit into the…
Strange Times
Strange Times is a virtuosic realization of contemporary electroacoustic soundscapes composed and performed by Stephen Ruppenthal and Gary R. Weisberg. With masterful employment of electro-acoustic techniques and tools, including the original 70's Buchla Music Easel Ruppenthal used in the Electric Weasel Ensemble, these two artist create an essential, psychedelic, electro-acoustic experience. Strange Times is a hallucinatory journey into our epidemic-ridden times through a collection of startli…
Rhetorical Islands
Tip! First vinyl edition of the album Rhetorical Islands, originally released by Giuseppe Ielasi in 2012 as a limited-edition CD on his Senufo Editions label, with recordings made in 2011 as a commission for l’Audible Festival, Paris. The album’s ten tracks have neither titles nor accompanying text, standing for themselves as what Ielasi himself has called “isolated sound worlds”. They are nonetheless unparalleled in their plasticity, acoustic events with a rare degree of tangibility. Ielasi evo…
Polonius
Edition of 350 copies. Pressed on 180g vinyl, including insert and sticker by Luca Salvatori. Aleatory. Rhizomatic. This is the beat broken free of metrics and binary quantization. The beat, with its bindings shattered, charging loose onto the dancefloor and subsuming it in a storm of gnashing teeth and whirling steps and ecstatic free dance, ecstatic free play. The beat, set free to grow in infinite folds and spores and to be carried in endless fractal blooms across the four winds, from dimlite…
Faraway Vicinity
*2023 stock. 100 copies limited edition* In this era of uncertainty and shaken normalities, we are forced to confront a different landscape in society - one which has modified our interactions with people and nature. There is a sense that the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, has shifted further into the dystopian territory. "Faraway Vicinity" is the amalgamation of these landscapes - human and non-human, familiar and unknown - to construct a sonic world that mirrors these strange times. But m…
Library Of Sticks
*80 copies limited edition* Natalia Beylis' latest instalment picks up where her last solo release left us: in an audio universe of Beylis' own transient design: a perpetual arrangement of notes, chords, voices, rattles and rhythms that seem to constantly flow though all her work. 'Library of Sticks' brings us in deep to her vast archive of found sounds and field recordings. A moment in sound captured by Beylis' ears and recording device, stored away until it's time becomes apparent and then nes…
Vhoysee
*200 copies limited edition* The first Manon Anne Gillis release was a single-sided mini-album titled “Angebiguë”, which was Manon’s self-release in 1983. “Angebiguë” was 6-track mini-album in a cold-minimal-synth vein, and any track from “Angebiguë” were not included in her retrospective 5CD Box “Archives Box 1983-2005”, which Art into Life released in 2015. “Angebiguë” was privately released in tiny edition for her friends only and has been a highly sought-after item among collectors. “Vhoysee…
T.O.
"Last time we heard the powerhouse duo of Chris Shields (Marcel du Swamp, Ro) and Alexander Holm (Sensorisk Verden label boss), they called an audience member during the show on a homemade telephone while shaking dice, giving each other unidentified signs and cues, and presenting their special flavor of musique concrete. Voice, tape, synth (?). Beautiful sound. New record is bonkers" - L. Dusk.
Signs and Accuracy
Big Tip! *Limited to 70 hand-numbered copies.* "Signs and Accuracy" is the first collaborative work between Jon Wesseltoft and Niklas Adam and the austere title sets the mood from the start. The composition process as well as the interaction between the two artists, constitutes something new for both of them. The signs possess accuracy; they are a unified whole, materialized and executed within a singular and unexplored surrounding space. "Signs and Accuracy", out now on Coherent States, is musi…
India Vibrations (Revisited)
Tomáš Niesner has been making a name for himself in recent years by way of his solo ambient/drone excursions and the intricate melodicism of his collaborations with Jakub Šimanský. But it was “India Vibrations,” a digital self-release of lo-fi manipulated field recordings captured during a trip across North India, that really caught my ear: the cacophony of street festivals juxtaposed with the solemnity of houses of worship, all recorded on an “obsolete cellphone” and then looped and layered, ab…
Turning in Space
*200 copies limited edition* Turning in Space, a new cassette box set by Áine O’Dwyer, compiles a series of sonic choreographies conducted at the artist’s living and studio space in suburban East London. Since summer 2015, O’Dwyer has been a resident of the Lady Helen Seymour House, a former hospital, in a building-wide unit that gives the artist a stereophonic impression of the auditory surround. Inspired by the “natural musics” of the house’s structure (its acoustics, creaks, and room tone) an…
Kofu III
** 180g heavyweight vinyl in 12" debossed sleeve with capped obi, 32pp booklet (22x14cm) with words in Japanese and English from Meitei. Offset printed, full colour on premium matt paper. ** Hailing from Hiroshima, Meitei, unveils the final chapter of his transformative Kofū trilogy. “Kofū III” marks the apex of a musical journey that began in 2020, unraveling an introspective exploration of the artist's psyche while delving deep into the essence of Japanese culture. This latest release invites …
Micropenis Envy
*50 copies limited edition* Torschlusspanik is the experimental moniker of the multi-talented, Tennessee-based artist Luna Mitchell. A follow-up to last year's "Intersexual Healing" on No Rent Records and her second release on Orb, this new tape features more of her unique and intricate style of sound collage that has come to be expected from this project. Garbled incantations, chopped field recordings, and the indecipherable in-between collide in beautiful, hectic harmony across these 8 new tra…
Hey Let Loose Your Love
Pieced together with musty samples from children’s exercise records, vintage drama, clunky British jazz and library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, an exploration of the power of not only childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Julian House’s own The Focus Group; oddly assembled sampledelic collages, stitched together from fragments of library cues and forgotten soundtracks. A beautiful, unhinged stream of consciousness that seems to prod at buried memories."Julian Hou…
Transmissions From The Radio Midnight
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* This project, entitled Transmissions From The Radio Midnight, started around 2006, when I acquired a Sony TCM F59 — an AM/FM radio and cassette recorder combined in a slim, handheld body. Since then, whenever I went on a trip, I would throw it into my suitcase and take it around with me. No matter which country I was in, upon returning to the hotel room I made a habit of listening to the radio into the late hours of the night. As soon as I would snuggle into bed…
Love / Hate
Originally intended as the intro to a special edition of the radio broadcast “Abenteuer Forschung” (Adventures in Research) on “sexuality and romance in digital postmodernism”, the composition collages countless “love” samples from the R&B genre. The “collage of digital passion” had a devastating effect, acting as an aphrodisiac that turned the recording session into an orgy. No further details were revealed by the broadcaster. Unfortunately, the programme wasn’t broadcast live so the secret is …
Räkna evighet som intet
*300 copies limited edition* “Räkna evighet som intet” is an electroacoustic composition in two movements and as much an incantation as it is a process of mourning embodied in an aesthetic structure. Throughout the piece Enocksson weaves taut strings, tense static and veils of feedback with fragmented voices, all the while extracting verses from acclaimed Swedish poet Lotta Lotass into emotional chorales on the impermanence of life. Merging the geist of Enocksson’s prior work – the industrial do…
For Franz
*150 copies limited edition* "It starts very simply. March 1988. The birth of an elephant. Basically, not exactly. Hair and teeth, we were told, it’s like that, it happens more often than you think. He was hungry and he was dirty. There he sucks the vacuum cleaner. We couldn’t stop laughing ! There he purrs. Time flies so fast and he has grown. «Aggression, like love», he used to say, «is first projected onto an individual who then introject them». In the introjective phases, identification with…