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It all started with a crashed computer and it certainly didn’t end there. »Cinnte le Dia« is the third collaborative album by Hanno Leichtmann and Valerio Tricoli, their first entry into Ni Vu Ni Connu’s duo series that focuses on Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik scene and beyond. Having already released two joint records on the now-defunct Entr'acte label, the two musicians wanted to document a 2018 concert in Berlin, but technology failed them. Undeterred, the sound artist and percussionist and the electroacoustic composer went to the former’s Static Music Studio to record six of the eight tracks on this record straight to tape, with two additional ones being recorded during a performance at Eupen’s Meakusma festival in 2019.

After 2016’s »The Future of Discipline« saw the duo enter the studio for a one-take session with added synth-bass overdubs and 2018’s »La Casa delle Chimere« documented a live gig in Kyiv, »Cinnte le Dia« presents a synthesis of the two approaches. Mixing the album together and adding overdubs—Leichtmann with his synth-bass again, Tricoli with his trusted Revox B77—the duo combined the special energy of their performance in front of a live audience with the intimate atmosphere of a studio session between two exceptional improvisers and composers. The pieces are accordingly marked by their sonic density, but also a rhythmic intricacy that makes the album as a whole negotiate its place in music history between bass-heavy, dubbed-out club music and electroacoustic as well as musique concrète techniques.

Leichtmann worked with a mix of acoustic percussion routed through a modified looper and a granular live sampler as well as electronic drums consisting of three modular sampleplayers, a Syncussion drum synth and a bass drum module. Depending on the current set-up, the two fed this input through Tricoli’s B77 either individually or collectively to further manipulate single elements or the entire sound. What might look complicated on a tech rider sounds intuitive on record: these are two versatile musicians engaging in a play of difference and repetition, acting and reacting to each other in real-time, but also creating additional layers by inserting new elements after the fact. In a very literal way, »Cinnte le Dia« is the duo’s most refined album, yet at the same time a testament to the uncanny energy they unleash during their improvisations. It’s solemn and moody, spontaneous and driving at once. Of course a computer couldn’t handle that.

After spending much of the last years focusing on the evolution of his own instrument, the drummophone, the release of ZERO,999… reveals a new paradigm in La Foresta's work and career.

In this album he collects fragments of live performances and site-specific installations conducted over the last decade, with and without the drummophone — reimagining and repurposing them as compositional elements that he has interwoven with recent studio recordings and collaborations to form eleven viscerally powerful pieces of overwhelming rhythmic and textural density.

La Foresta weaves together these captured moments in time, while employing combinatory strategies inspired by Italo Calvino's tarot stories in "Il castello dei destini incrociati," forging relationships and connections between recordings from the collaborators and his own. In approaching accompanying and augmenting these recordings, Riccardo, in the role of percussionist and composer explores the tension between his personal and academic focus on rhythmic structures and his fascination with repurposing the drum as a durational instrument.

Contributions from collaborators include the synthetic textures of Valerio Tricoli, Anthony Pateras, Aleksandra Słiż, and Renato Grieco, the vocalizations of Antonina Nowacka and Sara Persico, and the guitar experimentations of Ale Hop and Stefano Pilia, bringing together a distributed ensemble of musicians pulling apart the orthodoxies of their own instruments and techniques. Through the interaction of these elements, La Foresta imagines a causal network that binds, integrates and informs fragmented contexts, performers and performances, exploiting new possibilities of the drummophone.


ZERO,999… is conceived as a suite where sound and time are communicated simultaneously at different orders of scale, a single strike of a drum is a drone if slowed down one thousand times, an hour-long drone is a brief tick in the clock of geological time. A seemingly static object, such as the number 1, can both be defined by its fixedness, and as a process in which eternally approaching (0,999...) is the same as arriving.











k 11: EyeContact (Nereo`s) feat. Stefano Pilia

Debut full length vinyl from the UK/Italian duo of Ecka Mordecai and Valerio Tricoli, working together as Mordecoli. Individually these two travellers have carved out a path of ghostly musique concrete (Tricoli) and textural cello wandering (Mordecai). Alter is proud to present the album Château Mordécoly a result of two musicians (and friends) coming together to explore the middle ground of their individual investigations.

The results of a red wine induced residency at London’s Cafe Oto, Château Mordécoly is a panoramic audio field exploring both the physicality of sound, informed by the voice, cello and pictish harp of Mordecai, and the artificial manipulations of Tricoli’s revox tape machine. The delicate tension between the physical ‘real’ and the distortive ‘new’ leverages this release far beyond a tipsy residency and shifts it into a top tier electroacoustic take on the zeitgeist. Solo cello and voice appear rooted in the timbre of time. The magnetic tape is both a friend and covert manipulator.

The physical elements open themselves to disfigurement as a means of propagating the fantastical audio that unfolds from the initial enquiry. There’s no witchery or wizardry on part of either player but rather a symbiotic passing of the baton as the line between the real and the non-real flow in and out of themselves. The results are at once sedate, shocking and subversive.

Château Mordécoly is a disembodied sonic landscape; a phantasmagorical world of fantasy unfolds as the delicate beauty of Mordecai’s playing and singing is transformed into a playful and unusual landscape. Epoch’s are evoked as the visual stimuli resulting from these alchemical transformations conjure everything from a haunted house to the Middle Ages.

Returning to Die Schachtel with his fourth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music - overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, - “Lacinia” stands as a high-water mark in Pilia’s already remarkable and forward-looking career.

Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi ArchettI, Valerio Tricoli, etc. Running like a spine through the label’s output is a deep dedication to the work of the Italian guitarist and electroacoustic composer Stefano Pilia. Now Die Schachtel returns with “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth full-length with the label and their first release of 2024. Building on the ground of deeply personal engagement with metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, explored within his previous LP with Die Schachtel, 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, “Lacinia” encounters the composer working in close calibration with various ensembles, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze and Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, weaving synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion into an astounding reconfiguration of immersive, contemporary minimalism that stands among Pilia’s most noteworthy releases to date. Issued by Die Schachtel in two special double vinyl editions and a CD edition, “Lacinia” features artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano, and is an absolute marvel that draws you in and doesn’t let go.

First emerging during the early 2000s, over the past two decades – via solo releases and numerous collations with artists like Oren Ambarchi, Valerio Tricoli, Alessandra Novaga, Z'EV, Andrea Belfi, David Grubbs, and numerous others - the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia has presented a singular voice within Italian experimental music, harnessing visceral energy and hands-on immediacy within delicately woven tapestries of sonority, each investigating the sculptural properties of sound and illuminating its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time. “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth solo venture with Die Schachtel, encounters the composer reentering his longstanding practice of collaboration with various ensemble forms, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze, for the albums central piece, “Lacinia Off Axis”, spinning stunning string confirmations by Pietro David Carami and Elena Maury on violin, Alessandro Savio on viola, and Mattia Cipolli on cello.

A new, important cycle of compositions by Pilia, “Lacinia” (meaning "lace" in Latin) builds upon the exploration of the metaphysical, spiritual, and divine dimensions through numbers, geometry, and the creation of tonal forms explored by 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, mirroring archetypal, immutable forms at the juncture of the abstract realm of mathematics and architectural structures in the physical world, expands the poetics and compositional ideas featured in its predecessor. Regraded by Pilia as both a series of individual compositions and a single work, “Lacinia” was conceived to “define a circular path (a sort of "rhizomatic lace") where the beginning and end touch, suggesting the concept of time not only as linear but also cyclical and ritualistic—an eternal return, a process of transformation where matter changes, its state changes, but without altering the invisible internal principle of mutation”, embarking upon a a series of “steps, degrees, and energetic quanta in a progression of archetypal whole numbers and transcendent creation.”

The resulting 16 tracks unfold as a series of complex sonic meditations. While deeply resonant with the minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Eliane Radigue, Pilia digs deep and moves far beyond the predictable tonal relationships and structures of that idiom, echoing the ancient liturgical and devotional music of composers like Gesualdo da Venosa, Monteverdi, and John Dowland, at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music.

Fascinatingly structured as a whole to include a number of motif returns, across which we encounter works like “Lacinia Off Axis” appearing in slightly different rendering, states, or evolutions three times, and compositions like “Eve” appearing twice in subtly different forms and arrangements - first for four oscillators, guitar and voice and then for string orchestra - as well “Maris Stella”, which similarly makes two appearances, first for horn trio, organ and percussion, and then for string orchestra, with “Lacinia” Pilia delves further into the world of chamber music than ever before, creating a deeply inward, mediative body of work the totality of which, guided by its rich string arrangements of arching, sorrowful tone, feels almost like a mass for some unproclaimed loss; simultaneously locked in the nuances of a moment, while managing to suspend time.

Perhaps most remarkable is Pilia's ability to create a remarkable sense of sonic cohesion while using such a varied number of ensembles and instrumentation. From the sprawling string arrangements delivered by Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, under the direction of Paolo Mancini, and Ensemble Concordanze, and a flute trio (Cadux / Plectere) brilliantly played by Manuel Zurria, to pieces for sax, organ and percussion, violin duo and percussion, organ and percussion, Pilia manages to create a sense of singular, encompassing world that flows forward like a shifting stream.

Overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, “Lacinia” is unquestionably a high-water mark in Stefano Pilia’s already remarkable, forward-looking career. Nothing short of a marvel of contemporary Minimalism that, through its shifting arrangements of harmonics, tonality, and texture draws flickering images of ancient forms of music into the present day, “Lacinia” is Issued by Die Schachtel in two special editions on double vinyl and a CD edition, featuring artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano. This is an immersive all-consuming listen that can’t be missed.

A quietly influential figure among electronic and experimental circles since the late 90s, Berlin based sound artist Hanno Leichtmann has been developing a sprawling and idiosyncratic vision both as a creator and curator.

With a keen sense for charting new territories, Leichtmann's work spawns a multitude of languages that go from deli-cate ambient excursions to techno explorations or abstract sceneries on numerous sound installations, releases on such esteemed labels like Entr'acte or The Tapeworm and collaborations with artists like Valerio Tricoli or Jan Jelinek. A reflection of his keen sense of discovery.

Centered around the Villa Aurora Organ, an intriguing and mostly unknown instrument built in 1928/29 by the Artcraft Organ Company in Santa Monica, California, 'Outerlands' presents a deeply personal approach to the instrument's particular properties, very much in line with Discrepant's ethos. Consisting of a pipe organ, a wall mounted marimba and a two octave tubular bells/chimes ensemble, remotely controllable by MIDI, the Villa Aurora Organ's rich palette of sounds is translated into 12 short tracks capable of conveying the mesmerising spirits of minimalism, exotica and de-votional music.

Starting with the ecstatic sound of the pipe organ, 'Lucero' sets up the hypnotic mood for 'Outerland's excursions through moments of spiralling repetition - 'Tramonto' -, blissful contemplation - 'Sunset' or 'Notteargenta' - or underly-ing tension - ‘Coperto’. 'Espera' amps up the unease, with queasy organ tones lurking beneath marimba harmonic motifs that wouldn't sound out of of place on some survival horror movie, while 'Miramar' or 'Revello' bring an uncanny sense of familiarity through its repetitive melodies.

Drifting seamlessly through a variety of moods that somehow feel connected - the outerlands are within you, if you allow yourself to let go.

A compilation of contemporary Italian tape electroacoustic and musique concrete artists featuring Valerio Tricoli, Mercury Hall, Ezio Piermattei, SEC_, Giovanni Lami, Giulio Nocera, kNN.

Promise & Illusion is the first LP from Ecka Mordecai, following the release of her solo Critique + Prosper on Takuroku in 2020. Cello, voice, horsehair harp, violin and field recordings combine to spin narrative melody, rich intimacy and melancholic landscapes. Composed around an exploration of la charnière (from the French ‘hinge’), Promise & Illusion begins with the sound of footsteps and a door opening and closing repeatedly, unsure whether to let us into the mysterious interior beyond. We are reminded of the house of Penny Slinger in An Exorcism, an abandoned mansion of gothic hallways and inky corridors. “woe are we” twists violin and voice together into the sort of tension and high drama heard in “The Executioner” - Henning Christiansen’s soundtracks made for the films of his partner Ursula Reuter Christiansen in the 1970’s. Then things begin to soften, almost despite themselves. Distortion on ‘a unit has no unity’ can’t quite smother a rising tune on warped harp. The cello on ‘indigos’ - its voice pizzicato with a velvety sustain - brings comfort and clarity. Mordecai hums a line, feeling out the edges of a song in an intimate release of tension. We are across the threshold - into a romantic sort of nocturnal gloom that feels somewhat out of place in London’s experimental music scene. Trained on viola da gamba as part of a renaissance youth group in the historic midland town of Stafford, Mordecai went on to study performance art in Brighton, later graduating in sound art in London. She performed with David Toop and Rie Nakajima as part of Allan Kaprow’s Yard at the Hepworth Gallery, as well as performing scores by Yoko Ono and George Brecht solo at White Cube Gallery as part of Christian Marclay’s Liquids exhibition. Later, various moves across the north of England found her working with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (forming the trio CIRCÆA), Miles Whittaker (of Demdike Stare) and performing alongside free improvisers. A myriad of influences have crossed her path, her work slowly taking shape across music concrète, improvisation and performance art. A more recent recording with Valerio Tricoli as ‘Mordecoli’ made during the development of Promise & Illusion found its final form as a cassette - a collage of sustained tones, ominous atmospheres and brief 4th wall dissolving vocal interaction. With both CIRCÆA and Mordecoli, Mordecai deals with landscapes - playing with the imaginary over the real and using improvisation as a useful way to dream. On Promise & Illusion, Mordecai sharpens her focus and pivots toward the interior over the exterior - the landscape becoming a personal, psychological one - both comforting and strange. Tracks 4, 5, 7 & 10 recorded and mixed by Adam Matschulat in December 2020. All others recorded and mixed by Ecka Mordecai. Mastered by Shaun Crook at Lockdown Studios, London. Artwork by Ecka Mordecai. Layout by Zofia Sobota.

Track list: 1 la charnière I 2 woe are we 3 a unit has no unity 4 indigos 5 study of a flame 6 la charnière II 7 promise & illusion 8 hush now you say 9 tempera 10 mistakes & continue

Distilling Sounds From The Now 70 Years Old Archive Of The Darmstadt Summer Courses For New Music, The Berlin Based Electronic Artist Hanno Leichtmann Presents A Stunning New Album Which Is Remix, Collage And Homage At The Same Time. Mastered And Cut By Rashad Becker At D&m.

On His Latest Work "nouvelle Aventure", Berlin's Hanno Leichtmann (who Besides His Solo Works Also Plays With Jan Jelinek And Andrew Pekler In Groupshow And Recently Released His 2nd Album With Valerio Tricoli On Entr'acte) Presentshis Very Individual Approach To The Task Of Remixing And Reworking The Imd Archive. As In His Previous Installations (e.g. "skin, Wood, Traps" For Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Celebrating The 100th Birthday Of The Drumset), The Electronic Artist Distills His Sound Material Exclusively From A Thematically Fixed Archive, In This Case: Concert Recordings, Lectures And Discussions Fromthe Now 70 Years Old Archive Of The Famous Darmstadt Summer Courses For New Music (stockhausen, Nono, Ligeti, Xenakis Et.al.). Originally A 6-channel Installation As Part Of "historage" At Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, The Composition Is Here Presented As A 46 Minutes Stereo Mix. Leichtmann Sent Thesubjectively-chosen Sounds Through His Unique Machinery Of Voltage-controlled (micro-) Loopers, Re-recorded Them And Then In A Last Step Pieced Them Together In His Studio, Primarily Applying The Traditional Parameters Of Early Electronic (tape) Music (amplitude, Pitch / Speed, Playback Direction, Series / Cuts, But Most Of All: Repetition. The Result Is A Stunning Albumwhich Is Remix, Collage And Homage At The Same Time - And A Highly Psychedelic Affair, As Mirrored By The Amazing Artwork By Caro Mikalef (cabina).

- Astonishing solo debut by acclaimed cellist and composer Lucy - A daring, non-conformist and deviant approach to composition and instrumentation - One side of filigree, multi-layered autobiographical collage-work, the other of raw and phased cello glissandi - RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh

Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contemporary music over the last few years. Paradise 94 is, remarkably, her solo debut - featuring archival, location and studio recordings which serve as a time capsule of all the myriad disciplines and influences that have brought her to this point in time. It both plays up to and shatters expectations of her music, which harnesses a duality of energies - acoustic/electronic, real/imagined, iconic/iconoclastic, pissed-off/romantic; out of place and androgynous - resulting in a visceral emotional insight and rare narrative grasp. Variegated, asymmetric, and located somewhere between her usual fields of exploration, Paradise 94 gives free reign to aspects of her creativity that have previously been subsumed into collaborative processes and interpretations of other composers' work. Here, she's free to probe, sculpt and layer her sounds through a much broader range of techniques and strategies, placing particular focus on non-linear structural arrangements and exploring the way her cello becomes perceptibly synthetic through collaging, rather than FX. At every turn Paradise 94 is bewilderingly unique. The A-side unfolds an oneiric, inception-like sequence traversing temporalities, timbres and tones from what sounds like a spectral ensemble playing on a traffic island in Pinnevik, to bursts of rabbit-in-headlights trance arps emerging from meticulously dissected musique concre`te in The Critical Rush, and a collision of masked vocals, string eruptions and a deeply moving, light-headed Bach rendition in For J.R. On the other hand, Fortified Up on side B tests out a far rawer approach, sampling herself playing the same glissandi over and again, which she layers into a sort of perpetual, sickly motion, the Shepard Tone riffing on the listener's psychoacoustic perceptions before calving off into a cathartic dissonant folk coda in its final throes. In the most classic sense, you can only properly begin to f*ck with something from the inside once you truly know it. Railton's dedicated years of service have more than equipped her with the nous and skill to do just that, gifting us with what will no doubt be looked back on as a raw, exposed and important solo debut in years to come.

Black Truffle is pleased to present Speak To Me, the sixth full-length release from 3/4HadBeenEliminated, the Italian trio of Stefano Pilia, Claudio Rocchetti and Valerio Tricoli. Based on source material recorded in Bologna and Berlin over the course of several years, the album is made up of two side-long pieces meticulously constructed in post-production by Tricoli in his singularly dense and unpredictable style. Although their live performances have always been entirely improvised, in their recorded work the group focuses on using improvised recordings as source material for compositions built up through layering, editing and analogue manipulation, extending the practices of Teo Macero, Faust and This Heat. Melancholic instrumental ruminations sit alongside cracked electronics, concrete sounds and Tricoli's whispered vocals, drawn together into dense assemblages animated by gradual transformations and sudden jump cuts.
Beginning from the abstractions of their self-titled debut release in 2004, the group embarked on a trajectory that saw them move toward near-song structures, Tricoli's voice becoming a dominant element amid an increasingly dense and layered production style. On Speak To Me, however, the listener feels confronted by the ghost of music, sonic memories echoing across a psychedelic expanse. Evacuated of any clear structure, the music becomes a reverb-saturated morass, from which crystalline details momentarily emerge: shimmering echoed guitar, bowed double bass, tactile hand percussion, skittering electronics. Suffused with a darkly pensive atmosphere, Speak To Me is an elegant summation of the distinctive blend of electroacoustic techniques, instrumental improvisation and contemporary psychedelia pioneered by 3/4HadBeenEliminated over the last decade.