Pop & Rock News

Violostries (1963/64), 16'39

Premiered and recorded in April 1965 at the Royan Festival - France, by Devy Erlih (violin) & Bernard Parmegiani (sound projection).

Violostries represents the intersection of several musical research directions, presented as two simultaneous dialogues - composer/performer and instrument/orchestra.

After a short introduction tutti very spatialized:
1. Pulsion/Miroirs: multiplied by itself, the violin is projected into the four corners of the sound space.
2. Jeu de cellules: concertante piece for violin and audio medium, the latter being made up of very tightly woven microsounds.
3. Végétal: slow and invisible development following a continuous time, resulting from an internal and permanent processing of the matter.

Capture éphémère (1967, 1988 version), 11'48

This work was composed in four tracks in 1967 for quadraphonic diffusion.
Remixed in stereo in 1988.
Premiered at the Studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris, May 1967.
Sounds - noises that circulate as time unfolds - continue to exist despite our recording them.
Breaths, fluttering wings: ephemeral microsonic sounds streaking space, sound scratches, landslides, bounces, vertigo of solid objects falling into an abyssal void, multiple snapshots forever frozen in their fall. As many symbols leave inside us the permanent trace of their ephemeral brushing against our ear.
Some day, a desert, a sound, then never again....
Somewhere, in my head and body something still resonates... resonance, what could be more ephemeral.

La Roue Ferris (1971), 10'45

Premiered at the Festival des chantiers navals, Menton, on August 26, 1971.
Sound projection: Bernard Parmegiani.
La Roue Ferris (Ferris wheel) spins, merging with its own resonance, stubbornly perpetuating its variations. It only sketches a regularly evolving movement around a constant axis. Each of its towers generates thick sonic layers that penetrate each other, producing a very fluid interweaving. The crackling of the origin eventually metamorphoses into sonic threads whose lightness recalls high-altitude clouds, cirrus clouds, haunted by the cries of swifts twirling in the warm air. The wondrous arises and dies off, leaving us with an illusion of duration.

Airwave’s latest album, Classical Reworks, ventures into the classical world, a place where Laurent finds inspiration.

As a special treat we’ve decided to have this masterpiece cut onto glorious wax for the die-hard fans and vinyl enthusiasts alike.
Organic pianos steeped in melody, soaring strings laced with rich dynamics and a pure passion are just some of the traits manifested here.

Savour the moments and feel the emotion with newly arranged compositions of 'Save Me', 'Alone In The Dark' and 'Sunspot' - on the A-Side, ... then flip over for more of the same with 'Innerspace', 'Angelica', 'When Things Go Wrong' and the brand-new 'Soleil D’Hiver' ... which you can find on the B-Side.

It's the perfect late-night soundtrack that will bring warmth to the fast approaching Winter months, not to be missed!

WRWTFWW Records is very happy to announce the official reissue of Motohiko Hamase’s astounding ambient house album Technodrome (1993). The album is sourced from original masters and available on vinyl for the first time ever as well as on CD. It comes with liner notes from the artist. This marks the fourth release from the ESPLANADE SERIES which focuses on the works of Yoshio Ojima, Motohiko Hamase and Satsuki Shibano. Inspired by John Cage, Jon Hassel, Brian Eno, and the emergence of house and techno music, Technodrome is jazz bassist turned electronic experimentalist Motohiko Hamase’s foray into what he calls ambient house or, as he explains, “using the gritty sensation inherent to the core of house music” to create an ambient record “aiming to express inverted images, optical illusions, and the sense of déjà vu that modern people can get in the city". Technodrome is constructed around innovative minimalism, a robotic funk orchestrated by bass lines and percussions, and monochrome moods. It’s the most intriguing project in Hamase’s discography, a ghostly ride set in 90s urban landscape, where repetition sets the groove and brings things to life, echoing Hamase’s deeper subtext for his compositions: “and attempt to recreate (as metaphor) the time in our mother’s womb". The album was initially released in 1993 by Newsic, the cult label started by Tokyo’s Wacoal Art Center (also known as Spiral), home, notably, of Yoshio Ojima who co-produced the album. It is now reissued in conjunction with Motohiko Hamase’s #Notes of Forestry and Anecdote albums.

Vinyl edition of Stars of the Lid 2nd album in print for the first time in over 20 years.

The release of Music for Nitrous Oxide, the 1995 debut album by Stars of the Lid, heralded a new strain of the american underground music scene, one borne of the heat and humidity, boredom, and the insular, constipated, rockist music scene of Austin, Texas, the home of the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. It was a muffled lashing out against surrounding musical conventions, a small middle finger to the local dominant americana' scene, but one that nobody could see outside the shack of a house in which they recorded or at their occasional sparsely populated live performances. It was as punk a move as anyone could make at that place and in that time. But in a surprise to the two members of SotL, people took notice, as related rumblings and grumblings were taking place simultaneously in other parts of the american landscape.
Coming quickly on the heels of that release was our current subject, Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life, released one year later. This is a transitional release that travels from the scruffiness of the debut's ambiance to more extended and subtle undulating tides of assembled sound, yet still dominated by processed guitars as the primary sound source. It also serves as an omen to the mini-orchestral works to come beginning with the Avec Laudenum album a few years later. Gravitational Pull... is a small masterpiece.

Only 21 years of age when this was recorded, Olafur hails from the suburban Icelandic town, Mosfellsb?r, just a few kilometres outside Reykjav?k. He as immersed himself completely in the world of delicate symphonic compositions in a near weightless orchestral undertaking. Mixing strings and piano with loops, ambiance, electronics and beats, his music fits into the Erased Tapes catalogue like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Debut album 'Eulogy for Evolution' took the listener on a journey, representing different periods in life, from birth to death. The first pressing of the follow-up EP 'Variations of Static' sold out on his winter tour already and will now be available in stores. While keeping the classical foundations of his debut album, here Arnalds incorporates crackling electronics and the dead voice of a machine; like vague memories of tradition lost within the digital age we all live in. It comes with a voucher for a free digital copy of the 'Erased Tapes Collection I' compilation to celebrate the label's 1st anniversary. The 10" is a super limited clear vinyl issue, we are getting 100 copies only.

One of those essential pieces of music for both classical music listeners, sound track aficionados and more spiritual techno heads! According to astrology, every planet in our solar system represents a certain mood. Inspired by this idea, Gustav Holst (1874-1934) composed his seven-part orchestral work The Planets, in which the planetary moods are convincingly turned into sound, from the aggressive Mars to the mystical Neptune and the tender Venus. The Planets has had much influence on the later genre of film music. With John Williams's Imperial March from Star Wars films as the most clear example, but also Techno producers such as Jeff Mills took inspiration from this work, and even did record his own rendition as the most recent example. The London Philharmonic Orchestra's performance recorded in 1978, led by ninety year old Sir Adrian Boult, is considered one of the very best recordings of The Planets and presented in this premium package pressed on high quality 180 grams 2lp in a limited edition run of 300 copies!

The debut album from writer and artist Holly Childs and artist Gediminas Žygus formerly known as J.G. Biberkopf.

Initiated in 2017, Hydrangea grew out of a series of performances emphasising conspiracies and the designer realities that they generate. Navigating a tangle of digitally induced subjectivities and relationships, Hydrangea sees Childs & Žygus amidst a continuously evaporating world in which narratives dissolve, leak, fold in on themselves and loop.

Childs & Žygus ask: As individuals are siloed online, can rifts in reality ever be reconciled? Is history a form of science fiction? And are narrators ever reliable? The process of creating Hydrangea was defined by the search for a form to bind fiction, poetry, and musical experience. Its narrative is influenced by technical instructions, lectures and whispered conversations, in which slippage and floating focus can create new meanings in the listener that weren’t intended by the speaker.

Aspects of physical and informational security including passwords, codes, locks and obstacles speak to the ways in which meaning or material can be locked, unlocked or instrumentalised for a range of potential outcomes. Hydrangea reflects on the Machiavellian strategies of political ideologists such as Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin and Vladislav Surkov who have made use of contemporary and postmodern artistic strategies to design narrative uncertainty—covertly braiding together questionable truths, slippery narratives and bespoke reinterpretations of history for undisclosed political ends.

"Hydrangea’s Just the Password Though, Right?"

Childs & Žygus employ a musical language that layers their cumulative practices and experiences. The compositions are cinematic and spatial, working with the illustrative qualities of Disneyesque string melodies and taking cues from Maurice Ravel’s impressionistic piano works.

The work is also influenced by both artists’ lifelong experiences of rave culture, beginning for Žygus during childhood in newly independent Lithuania, spending time juggling Disney and happy hardcore cassettes on the family stereo, and for Childs as a preteen in Australia, tagging along with her sisters to doofs and warehouse parties. Initiated while the artists were both working between Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 2017, the work also draws on Dutch gabber music.

Hydrangea’s development has been influenced by collaboration with artists and filmmakers Metahaven, who created the album art.

Holly Childs is a writer and artist. Her research involves filtering stories of computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry, and light. She is the author of two books: No Limit (Hologram) and Danklands (Arcadia Missa); and has presented her work at ICA (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Trust (Berlin), Elam School of Art (Auckland) and more.

Gediminas Žygus is an artist working within the fields of sound, documentary and performance. Their practice assembles a spectrum of influences deriving from architecture, ecology, ethnography, science studies, and media theory. As J.G. Biberkopf, their releases have found homes on Knives and Danse Noire. Žygus has performed at Barbican Centre (London), Berghain (Berlin), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), and Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others. credits

‘The Other Side’ sees musical styles woven together into a lyrical tapestry of sound, blending improvisation with co-created original compositions. A truly unique ensemble in compositional process and performance style. On 5th June, Quest Ensemble will release their sophomore album ‘The Other Side’. With nods to influences as broad as the contemporary minimalism of John Adams and Steve Reich, the experimental melancholic textures of Radiohead to the progressive jazz precision of Brad Mehldau, ‘The Other Side’ inhabits its own soundworld somewhere in the gaps between chamber, jazz, folk and contemporary classical music. From the emotive ‘Moments’, the elasticated melodies of ‘Pendulum’, to the fluid lines and compelling urgency of ‘The Boatman’ and ‘Pedal Down’, Quest Ensemble’s compositions fuse layered melodies and rhythmic patterns to create contrapuntal webs of sound. The process involves sharing improvised ideas, building up layers of music on each instrument to create a patchwork of musical themes with a rich vein of surging Reichian rhythms underpinning each. Fusing their backgrounds in western classical, Indian classical, jazz and improvisational technique, Filipe Sousa (piano), Tara Franks (cello) and Preetha Narayanan (violin) are all graduates of the Guildhall School of Music Leadership Programme. In May 2014, Quest Ensemble released their much-lauded debut album ‘Footfall’, a collection of part-composed and part-improvised original compositions, steeped in the sense of place that inspired the sound and imagination of their stories.

A monumental debut work for Shelter Press, ‘Death Star’ is something of a definitive statement or magnum opus in the explorative oeuvre of NYC artist/composer Marina Rosenfeld - a big RIYL Stephan Mathieu, The Caretaker, Félicia Atkinson Marina first grabbed our attention with the uncannily echoic industro-dub environs of ‘P.A./ Hard Love’ in 2016 (a real precursor to Jay Glass Dubs we reco), before showing a quieter, more sensitive side in her collaboration with Ben Vida ‘Feel Anything’. Now on ‘Death Star’ she places deeply uncanny proprioceptive sensibilities to stunning use across an album focussed on the microphone as listening device and instrument - a sort of mechanical ear/eye - with impressively elusive/illusive results.
The original recordings come from an installation - a plexiglas orb housing seven microphones - that picked up and fed back samples of visitors to an exhibition at Portikus gallery, Frankfurt.
Marina’s album reworks those recordings with fragments of piano played into the same system or orb of mics, generating utterly enchanted ethereal spaces that speak to the listener’s atavistic
responses to echoic space and acoustic phenomena.
In four movements Marina grows the source material from liminal, plasmic and dreamlike as she begins to feel out the work’s scope in ‘Death Star’, all quite polite but edged with a menace that gets more complex, with a chamber ensemble playing back notation of the original location recordings in more atonal and aggressive iterations re-amped thru banks of speakers to edge on KTL’s electro-acoustic doom or Iancu and Ana-Maria Avram’s spectralist music.

Furcula is a collective work by composer Asger Baden and recording artist & actor Peder. Peder and Asger Baden work as film composers on a daily basis at their townhouse studio in central Copenhagen. They have worked for 'Breaking Bad", 'Beastie Boys", 'Wolfpack' amongst others. Whenever they have some time, they work on Furcula. The music is based on the acoustic colours of two very different rooms: The Village (large orchestral studio in Copenhagen) and Vor Frue Kirke - the biggest church in Denmark which features a reverb of over 7 seconds. All sounds, instruments and samples are recorded in these two rooms and used as samples in the studio to create the music. The result is the depth and contrast between the huge reverb and very close textures that feel as though they're right next to you, scratching your skin. The result is ghostly, dark, cinematic and beautiful. Art by Rob Sato. - Debut album as a collective by filmcomposers Asger Baden & Peder who has had music featured in Breakin Bad. - Peder has 4 solo albums under the belt released by Ubiquity records, Wordandsound, Fake Diamond and allways featured in Radio Nova. Featured artists like Oh Land, Coco (Quadron) Jonas Bjerre from MEW amongst others. - Asger Baden solo debuted with a classical album 2015 recorded in Prague and The Crooked Spoke in 2008. - 2/4 of danish group Cours Lapin - As cinematic as it gets.

"...The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over. For the time being, however, the silence is with me." - Franz Kafka

In early 2019, at the Sonic Pieces 10 year anniversary in Berlin, label head Monique Recknagel hand-picked three duos from the imprint to perform live together for the first time. One of the collaborations was between Deaf Center's Erik K Skodvin and electronic composer Jasmine Guffond. The performance went so well that Monique commissioned the duo to record a full-length together.

Six months later, Guffond and Skodvin headed to Berlin's VOX-TON studio and recorded for two days, joined by Finnish musician Merja Kokkonen (Islaja), who improvised wordless vocals. With Guffond on laptop and a cymbal and Skodvin using piano, feedback, farfisa organ and percussion, the two composed an album of deep, enveloping sound that slithers through genre, absorbing Kokkonen's unique voice into five intricate and evolving pieces.

"The Burrow" takes its name from Franz Kafka's unfinished short story that was written only six months before his death. The tale, published posthumously in 1931, centres around a small creature who builds a burrow that's anxiously fortified in an attempt to protect against perceived attacks. This sense of fear of the outside world feels even more focused in 2020. Each track is named after animals that are either extinct or almost extinct, adding a sense of loss that hangs in the air, punctuated by screams and deep reverberating piano hits. As the world we thought we knew quickly retreats from view and the idea of safety shifts rapidly, Skodvin and Guffond explore the impulse to protect what we know with an emotionally charged sound that provides a foil with cautious, haunting spaces in between.

Among the musicians whose work closely reflects the reduced forms in experimental music, perhaps the most interesting is Cristián Alvear, a Chilean guitarist performing formally radical post-Cagean music, as well as Laurent Peter aka d'incise, a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, one of the key figures of the eclectic scene in Geneva. The numerous projects in which they participate prove their strictly defined artistic vision and active involvement in networking the music community, so it’s appropriate to consider them as transitory elements between several scenes on different continents. They have collaborated, among others, with Ryoko Akama, Cyril Bondi, Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hennies, Seijiro Murayama, Taku Sugimoto, Lance Austin Olsen and The Pitch.

Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings is a good example of the refinement of the style developed by Alvear and d’incise in recent years. One can observe here how their musical language and range of instrumental techniques in the use of guitar and idiophones got crystallised.

The classical form of a musical piece organized in time and characterized by a set of elements that create a coherent narrative is replaced here by the primacy of repetition, pitch, precise articulation and reverberation. Sounds seem to be clearly rooted in specific acoustic spaces, which allows the space itself to be treated as a real instrument that adds another layer of meaning. Repetitive sound sequences operate in a similar way to the metronome, determining an obsessive rhythmic pattern, a kind of matrix on which all the details are inscribed. The static structure of the pieces allows the music to function as a sound sculpture - breaking time constraints in favour of continuous duration and acting in a multi-perspective way. This material, does not promise any solution, but strictly accompanies the listener and tries to close itself in the continuous present.

At the same time Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings is a clear dialogue with the work of Henry Purcell. The title of the album is a reference to the anthems written by the British composer (Z11, Z2) and the titles of the pieces refer to his sacred songs (Z192, Z342). Apart from a skillful attempt to decontextualize the lyrics (biblical or rooted in the tradition of baroque religious poetry), we can see here not so much an attempt to give the music a metaphysical character, but certainly Alvear and d’incise tend to replicate a similar mode of listening, as in the case of Purcell's compositions - meditative and at the same time oriented to all elements of the musical situation.

Following up on their debut LP Kick Drunk Love for Marcel Vogel’s Intimate Friends imprint a few years back, we are proud to present the next installment in the sporadic KAMM legacy: Cookie Policies.

Far more sonically rich and musically adventurous than its predecessor, Cookie Policies sees the band make bold strides into new territories where classically hardwired categories such as jazz, indie rock, and electronica melt into one another with immaculate, timeless ease.

The band members’ positions are more clear cut as well this round, with Marc David Barrite (aka Dave Aju, who also did one of his coveted mix engineering jobs on the LP) on prominent lead vocals in many of the pieces, Alland Byallo on trumpet, Kenneth Scott on synth bass, and Marc Smith adding guitar sections while the others shared the arranging and programming duties. This makes for a deeper continuation of the otherworldly combination of their known individual production styles, as well as a musical whole truly greater than the sum of its parts.

The set starts off with “Bird Call”, whose opening ode to Morricone ok corral-meets-samurai showdown riffs flow into a loose and drifting psychedelic boom bap blip, building until a glorious change-up of key and energy brings the track to its peak and deconstructed back down. “Rachel, the Largest Bullfrog” then takes things in a sweeter, slightly more traditionally-structured direction where dusty indie-folk ballad vibes intersect with an array of twisted cosmic tones, bits of computer keyboard percussion, and deep rolling sub bass. “Buckle Down” then moves things back away from acoustic restraints into a beautiful synth-laden musing on potential regret, with an ultra-potent horn section from Byallo vs a nasty stacked Roland SH-101 finish.

“CCBPGC” cools things off for a few minutes with an ambient field recording slice-and-dice motif, which slowly but surely evolves into a slinking jazz noir groove from another dimension. The more traditional song structures return on the lovely “La Luna”, where Barrite’s pen and soulful voice take to nautical longing themes over apropos waves of sonic textures. The ebb and flow of the verse/chorus sections eventually rise and give way to an absolutely gorgeous denouement. “Shleem” then takes us into pure unadulterated soaring sci-fi soundtrack ambient blast-off bliss, while the epic closing track “The Soft Glow of Electric Sex” gives a hearty nod to early masters of sprawling psychedelic jam sessions, from Pink Floyd and Can to In A Silent Way-era Miles and Liquid Liquid, while bringing it clearly into futurist millennia. The gradual evolution of the piece into its grand finale is the stuff we true music-lovers live and die for. We hope you enjoy the ride as much as we do.

Frei aber froh! This was the motto of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): ''Free but happy!'' The Romantic composer formulated it in response to his friend Joseph Joachim, who after the divorce of his wife went through life under the painful motto Frei aber einsam. In his intoxicating Third Symphony, Brahms - through the three notes F(rei) A(ber) F(roh) - focused on his personal love of freedom, as well as the heroic struggle it takes to become a free, independent individual. It is known that Brahms never got married, but often fell in love with young, beautiful female musicians, and felt a lifetime attraction to Clara Schumann, the wife of the famous composer. That romantic yearning can be heard in the lyrical, melancholic Poco allegretto, one of Brahms's best-known melodies. The second movement of the symphony, Andante, has a rustic character, and Clara called it ''a pure idyll''. Here one can hear the carefree, cheerful side of freedom, that of long walks in nature and the absence of oppressing tires. Being free is also frightening and difficult, which is reflected in the majestic motifs in the first and fourth movements, which follow each other at a furious pace and only in the final measures of the composition are reconciled in the recurring Frei aber froh-motif. This performance of Brahms's Third Symphony by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the world-famous Jaap van Zweden, is of the very highest quality.

Meet the poetic sound patches of Claude Debussy (1862-1918), one of the greatest innovators of Western music. In an eventful period in his life, in which the composer left his wife and toured the coast of France with his new mistress, he wrote his impressionistic masterpiece La mer, an ode to the turbulence of the sea. Debussy was an ardent lover of William Turner and Claude Monet, whose colorful seascapes he translated into music through a rich palette of instruments. La mer, an exceptionally picturesque composition, captures the shine of the midday sun on the sea surface, the breaking of waves, the splashing of foam and the sparkling of water drops. In the first part, De l'aube a midi sur la mer, one can hear the sun rise majestically to its highest point in the sky, a process that leads to an ecstatic climax. In the second part, Jeux de vagues, the sea shows its kindest, most playful face, and in the third part, Dialogue du vent et de la mer, the wind and the waves become entangled in an intoxicating dance. La mer, a symphonic poem full of mood swings, seems to symbolize life as a whole, which is just as capricious as the sea, and subject to the same dynamics of ebb and flow. This lucid performance of La mer, by the Orchestre National De Lyon, is of the very highest quality

C.R. Gillespie is a Canadian musician and sound artist. Born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, coastal living on Vancouver Island influenced his textural overlapping of “waves”; focused layering of soothing tones that tremulate and merge in a vast and expansive synthetic ocean. This aesthetic is at the forefront of his new release, Concentration Patterns, a sprawling 75-minute ambient suite which envelops the listener in a vibrating collage of drifting texture and glacial subtlety.

Generated using analog equipment in a home studio overlooking Toronto’s rail line, the piece began as a private meditative therapy-aid on synthesizer, sampler, prepared-guitar and spatial effects. In the process of anxiety alleviation, however, he began to associate the surrounding traffic and city noise as part of the fuller piece. A glowing palette of synthesizer tones coalesce with sundry field-recordings to form a more complete and organic whole, propelled by a barely discernible accumulation of melodic information. In this way, Concentration Patterns seeks not to obscure one’s surroundings, but to assist in the unconscious creativity of the senses and to apply that synaesthesia to their current environment.

Due to the necessary breakup of the whole piece in the vinyl format, a unique opportunity to accentuate the listening experience arose in suggesting the pairing of pure sine tones (indicated in specific Hz frequencies), which allow the listener to root each side to a low-register key centre, in which the tonal information of the piece may freely float above a constant foundation.

Combining elements of binaural beats and vibroacoustic therapy , Concentration Patterns is a modern embrace of “new age” pseudo-theory in an effort to temper incessant daily fatigue.Inspired by the technological deep-listening pioneered by artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel and Steve Roach, Concentration Patterns debuted in January 2020 as a sound installation as part of the Calgary Arts Common’s +15 Soundscape project. Situated in the city’s+15 walkway system, It’s locality as part of a metropolitan commute further illustrates its purpose as an accompaniment to both the mundane and surreal. Now, released in the hopes of assuaging similarly felt anxieties in its listeners, C.R. Gillespie invites you to submerge in the ambient pathways of unconscious reflection.

Craig Tattersall made quite a name for himself by offering a series of consistent releases on his own imprints Cotton Goods and Other Ideas. After more than 5 years of silence, our favourite bee is finally back with 2 new full length albums: Daymark and Nightmark. Both albums are made around the same time and can be seen as complementary odes to these different and opposite parts of the day.

In the same vein as his previous releases, each album consists of 2 long form pieces in which melancholic piano tape loops are mixed with subtle electronic arrangements. The combination of both results in the typical lo-fi textured Humble Bee sound for which he is known and praised for. Without providing any additional information on the music, the listener is left with 80 minutes of music which gladly take you on a new and most welcome sonic adventure.

‘Evolve’ is the first full length album from composer, music producer and violinist Vito Gatto, a concept album that guides the listener on a one-way journey through the various phases of an imaginary evolutionary process. Gatto graduated in Violin from the Milan Conservatory of Music, his research starts from the unconventional application of a classical background into both making music in the studio, and live performances. For this work, Vito decided to put himself in a restricted composing and technical environment; all the arpeggiated sounds on the album are made from one single violin note that Vito sampled. He transforms the same note throughout the entire album, using the different treatment of this micro sample and the arpeggiator programming as the construction of a mutating and evolving structure. The album is Instinctively executed, almost improvised, and elements like distorted bass lines, hardcore inspired percussions, whistles and alienating string melodies represent unexpected alterations. Vito decided to keep these instinctive additions clean from excessive control as a representation of the beauty of the unpredictable. The album track list is an expression of evolutionary phases. From the minimalistic piano piece ‘Decomposition’ to ‘Quiete’ which expresses the state of calm after a shift has occurred, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Stasi’ represent a hazy trance like state. Vito challenges the listener to ask questions like ’am I in the right place? Is this who I set out to become? Do I have to keep evolving, or should I try to regress?’ ‘Evolve’ creates continuous connections between traditional and experimental music, creating dialogue between classical instruments and industrial techno, ambient, noise and de-constructed sounds. The Album will be released in both digital and vinyl formats via NeMu, a fresh new label founded by Vito Gatto himself. The label will focus on experimental projects based on the exchange between acoustic, concrete and electronic sources. The Artwork is part of ‘Jewels’, a series of ceramic sculptures by Benni Bosetto, courtesy of the artist and ADA Project, Rome

Hungarian “minimalist” instrumentalist/composer Tibor Szemző is considered a genius by many, although his accomplishments as an artist are sometimes overshadowed by the likes of superstars, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Snapshot From The Island was originally released by Leo Records in 1987 and now 33 years later the album gets the proper reissue on his own label.

Snapshot From The Island is a wonderful excursion into ambient-electronic-acoustic dreamscapes which could also be considered an offshoot of what many call the “minimalist movement” The title track, “Snapshot From The Island” is a 24-minute tone poem featuring Szemző performing on computer drums and flutes of various pitch. Here, Szemző provides a soft rhythmic undercurrent to balance the somewhat ethereal and delightfully hypnotic motif as he also electronically emulates bird and animal sounds which magnifies the mood or imagery of a far away “Island” paradise.

Szemző is a true artist, a painter with a fertile imagination, as he invites the listener into his introspective world of thoughts and dreams. Szemző’s lush, yet subtle flute work evokes a surreal landscape on ”Water-Wonder”. On this piece, Szemző pursues circular passages while also intelligently utilizing a dash of echo to enhance the aura of a magical or mystical place, which for all intents and purposes seems timeless or otherworldly. “Let’s Go Out And Dance” is a dream-laden piece, featuring Szemző’s “cosmic” flute performances atop a soft pulse and László Hortobágyi’s synthesizer backwashes which conveys a sense of fulfillment or perhaps a scenario of – peaceful celebration. Again, Szemző offers up more visions of paradisen, which could very well have been a subtitle to this beautiful recording. The overall organic nature of Tibor Szemző’s music makes it all seem so real or something that our imaginations can easily grasp. There are no hidden clues or underlying mysteries behind all of this as Szemző’s artistry speaks for itself. A museum piece for the ears.

Tibor Szemző - flutes, voice, drum computer, sound installation
László Hortobágyi - synth. on "Let's go out and dance”
Mixed by László Hortobágyi and Tibor Szemző
Remastered by István Szelényi 2020

Tape / Cassette
A peculiar recollection of a haunting hallucinatory experience, narrated through spectral harmonies. In what is best described as “horror musique concrète”, Polish multidisciplinary artist and musician Samutek (Mateusz Woś) has composed a 47-minute album that emits a distinctive, hypnotic aura — intricately developed and mastered over the years.

Ingrained with echoes of gongs, chimes, crickets, drones and a plethora of haunted sounds recorded and found, “Omamy” (Polish for “Hallucinations”) is the soundtrack of a phantasmagoric spiral, summoning an unceasing terror usually conjured in cinematic works like Ari Aster’s Midsommar and The Blair Witch Project.

A recent Masters graduate with a thesis on the paranormal, centering around 19th century spirit photography, UFO photography and thoughtography, Samutek continues this expressive exchange through sound. With a towering 31 albums under his belt, “Omamy”, his first official album release on a label, is his most distinguished and fully-formed piece of work to date. Each track serves as distinct chapters in a haunting nine-part anecdote.

The trek begins with an unnamed character engulfed in a metaphysical battle as depicted in “Samospalenie” (Polish for Spontaneous Human Combustion), paralysed with an inability to distinguish reality from an unearthly torment.
The title track and first single “Omamy” sets the pace for the rest of the album, as the character eventually reaches the gateway to a tunnel, its walls pulsating with death and desolation. “Pożeracz” (Polish for Devourer), a composition scattered with deformed growls and ceremonial bells, seals their fate. The album ends with a meditative closer, “Krąg” (Polish for Ring) as the character succumbs to this inscrutable creature, with predator and prey transmogrifying into one.

“Omamy” is an invitation to Samutek’s peculiar world of horror storytelling, a result of his personal explorations of the supernatural.
Be prepared for a strange and discomforting experience that will leave you spellbound.

Anna von Hausswolff is a Swedish singer, pianist, organist and songwriter. This album consists of ORGAN SONGS INSPIRED BY SACRO BOSCO/PARCO DEI MOSTRI

The second offering by Julie Carpenter’s textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry.
The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to “create beauty out of grief.” Utilising an amalgam of strings, synthesisers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of “baroque complexity” to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient.

Furthering the music’s mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise “the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,” lorded over by the “Queen Of Crickets,” ruler of “The Gates,” “The Fault,” and “The Fang.” Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful.

The third release of 2020 is from Oliver Leith, a London based composer making acoustic music, electronic music and video. His work focuses on text, image, video, theatre, pathos and the everyday.

Balloonwas originally commissioned by theLondon Sinfoniettaas an acoustic piece, and first performed at the Southbank centre'sSound Unboundfestival in 2019.

" This is an arrangement for synthesisers of many tunings. I called it Balloon because I had this image of thrashing a balloon with a baseball bat or something, rather than breaking or bursting it just sort of floats off - unhurt, even if you absolutely pelted it."

Slide" is old and one of my first purely electronic pieces and really was me doing a hack job with computers. On my aged software you could make parameters and automation dance around by using a mouse and track pad at the same time, that doesn't work anymore because my computer tries to be sensible so I'm back to shifting tiny notes all the time which is about as slow as pencilling in acoustic music. It felt like quite an analogue way to play with notes so that's a shame." (Oliver Leith)

Two leaders from very different musical worlds, the innovative pianist Bruce Brubaker and scientist-now-electronic-artist Max Cooper collaborate to create this latest expression of music by Philip Glass and tell a story of diversity and vulnerability.

Commissioned by and introduced at the Paris Philharmonie in 2019, Glassforms melds the acoustic concert grand piano with synths and cutting-edge electronic production techniques to create a compelling album and a dynamic live experience.

Rather than just reworking or augmenting via traditional means, Max Cooper and Bruce Brubaker fundamentally rewire Glass’ forms in a manner that’s not possible with human composition tools. Max built a new system for musical expression through coding with software developer Alexander Randon, creating a tool for taking live data from the piano and transforming it into new but intimately related forms which drive his synths on stage.

The result is that each of the pieces by Glass becomes its own electronic “instrument,” an instrument Bruce plays in addition to, and simultaneously with the original piece. As Bruce plays the piano and controls synths with his playing, Max modulates and augments, sometimes adding his own melodies to form hybrid variants.

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that digs into us. It disorients us, plays with us, but without malice. It is like a nocturnal butterfly whose wings reflect a dark light, thus projecting fleeting hallucinations, which nevertheless persist on the surface of our retina. Its trajectories, too, are unpredictable. But such disorientation is not that of a chaotic space, it is rather a mysterious reason that presents itself to us, an imperious unfolding whose logic escapes us, but which nevertheless fascinates. It is also a history of shapes and their becomings. A story, also of their own vanishing.

Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher's work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one.

These two pieces have this in common, but each with their own agenda, that they evolve with grace and inspiration in the vast domain of the sound world and it is a great pride for us to present them in this new collection.

Released in association with Editions Mego.
Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier

Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

The overlap between the organic and the synthetic is Vlad Dobrovolski’s stomping ground. Digitally organised sounds melt into squalling melodies that grow and stretch over and under each other like the fractal leaves of a fern, spiraling inwards and outwards into a tesseract of connective tissue. “The more carefully you listen, the more you hear,” explains the Russian-born sound artist. “No two moments are exactly alike in nature. The song is always changing. I find myself listening in ways I never have before. The scale of my perception has changed. Small, subtle sounds have become singular events. The space around me seems larger than I had realized.”

“Natursymphony No.1 — Spring Music” compiles fleeting waves of thought and feeling into sonic networks that embody the sinew shared by a sprawling forest, the patchwork quilt of human memory, or the post-organic logic of digital collage. Rays of rising sun and fresh air buoy this audio landscape, brimming as it is with synthetic tones and bitcrushed rhythms emerging from surrounding computer caverns. Field recordings are organized in harmony with processed acoustic instrumentation; gongs, flutes, and distorted percussive rhythms.

Probing our consciousness – or perhaps self and spatial awareness – propel forward the seven opuses of “Natursymphony No.1”, like the experience of an awakening itself. Stemming from an awakening of sorts for the artist himself, suddenly alivened in his ability to perceive his surroundings and create musical ecosystems, the nature to be found in this music is a parallel reality in miniature, with its own dusks and dawns, its own blossoming and extinctions, all delicately nurtured by an artist stumbling into a creator role.

Over two decades, Vlad has explored improvised and generative music, sonic collage, and released solo music under a variety of monikers and in various collaborative projects — such as his cassette tape soundscaping duo with Vasiliy Stepanov, S A D. The “Natursymphony” series comes following his personal landmark album, “Non-Deterministic Polynomial Poems” (Klammklang). Vlad has also participated in residencies and performances throughout both Russia and Japan.

The Bit is the second recorded collaboration between Aidan Baker (Nadja / Hypnodrone Ensemble), Simon Goff (Jóhann Johannsson / Hildur Gudnadottir) and Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater, Thor & Friends).

Following on from 2017’s Noplace album, The Bit treads a similar path in terms of the recording process as the trio spent a day improvising at Voxton Studios in Berlin whilst on a European tour. The result was then edited and moulded into six hypnotic tracks that ebb and flow with beauty and ease.

The Bit finds the trio painting with a lighter touch than on its predecessor. Thor Harris’ motorik beats still underpin the music but the atmospherics take a more prominent role and there is a pure and cohesive path to be found throughout the record. Much like on Noplace, Baker’s guitar and Goff’s violin weave together beautifully, forming a deep bed of melody, ambience and reverb.

Given the trios credentials it’s not surprising they have created another immersive and stunning record.

A sort of slowly unfurling raga that plays tricks on your sense of depth and temporal perception, this stunning new album from long-string instrument master Ellen Fullman and cellist Theresa Wong has sent us into a light hypnotic trance with its slowly shifting tonal formations. Rarely is drone music so full of quietly cosmic eruptions - everything stays the same // nothing stays the same - pure aural alchemy.For the uninitiated - Fullman’s instrument consists of 70-foot-long metallic wires, anchored by a wooden resonator, across which she moves backwards and forwards with rosin-covered fingers to create an effect that’s been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. Developed in 1981, Fullman was in search of tonalities that couldn’t be achieved with traditional instruments - and her massively cumbersome instrument has been utilised to that effect ever since.
On Harbors, Inspired by the foggy San Francisco Bay, she’s joined by Cellist Theresa Wong to create elliptical tonal changes and anxiously resonant dissonance that feel like being stranded at the end of the earth. Wong is a Mills College alumnus who has developed highly individual playing techniques that take the cello into areas more closely rooted in the sounds of the natural world, always with a kind of theatrical dexterity.
Split into three movements, the piece is anchored by Fullman’s transfixing and slowly shifting drone, cut and overplayed with an orchestration of aberrant melodies and glistening atmospheres that are shimmering with life. It’s a fascinating addition to Fullman’s catalogue - at once disciplined but also quietly delirious in a way that’s pretty much impossible to describe. Anyway, there’s a video online of the pair of them checking test pressings of this album, gently swaying to the music. You can almost sense them both getting lost in their own mythical dimensions.

Frozen in time over four decades this 1984 “cyclic incantation” combines electroacoustics, grazed euphoria, industrial aesthetics, sampled salvage and recycled mechanic folk to score a widely revered dystopian physical theatre performance from the UK’s hugely influential Impact Theatre Co-Operative. From a seminal post-punk art-action faction (formed in a Leeds warehouse space alongside Gang Of Four and The Mekons), this apocalyptic prophecy not only cracked avant-garde stage boundaries but provided a captive audience with stunning set design and an incredible broken-music soundtrack before its swan song amidst Poland’s 1986 power plant panic. From the sonic workbench of the very same bedsit-Situationists that created the haunting 1983 music to The Moomins TV animation comes the eventual isolated music release to this pioneering theatrical spectacle of truly mythical status.

The Carrier Frequency (1984) was a legendary stage work that emerged from the collaboration between the influential performance company Impact Theatre Co-operative and cult novelist Russel Hoban. The incantation of Hoban’s text voiced in the broken verbiage of a post-apocalyptic broken language and the entranced physicality of Impact’s ritualistic performance in a pool of cold dark water printed deeply on those who witnessed it. It reached an impassioned crescendo on the rising score by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill who also performed in the work. The music exploited samples from Hoban’s own recordings of the shortwave radio broadcasts which he tuned in as he wrote, helping him order the green phosphorescent letters on the screen of his Apple computer. Shill and Miller mirrored Hoban’s channelling in their approach to making the score, following the notion that this was the broadcast of some Central Eurasian radio station doomed forever to circulate fragments of static interlaced with desultory public information broadcasts and “The Record”, its only surviving fragment of a lost culture. The score was forged on an 8-track tape recorder sandwiching harmonium and accordion with the output of a digital delay machine that could trap and fragments of audio to be triggered and manually pitched. It is a knowingly crude montage where samples denote fragmentation itself and their reassembly, like Frankenstein’s monster, shows the stitches that join the stolen body parts.

Recorded live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival on October 17, 1971, Actions features a truly mind-bending confluence of musicians of the avant-garde, in the broadest sense of the term. Don Cherry - the brilliant American free jazz trumpeter - had recently expatriated to Sweden and was finding his way not only among the emerging free-jazz scene of Europe but also within his own constantly expanding musical palette that had begun to incorporate elements of African rhythms, Turkish folk idioms, and Indian classical music.

Cherry, in collaboration here with Krzysztof Penderecki - one of Poland’s greatest modern composers, who is perhaps best known to casual audiences for the use of his music in The Exorcist, The Shining, and more recently, the 3rd season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – creates a sonic landscape previously unrivaled in his work. Combining modern classical and avant-garde elements, choral arrangements, and a large free jazz ensemble - The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra, formed specifically for this performance and featuring a veritable who’s who of the European scene including Peter Brotzmann, Han Bennink, Terje Rypdal, Albert Mangelsdorff, and Gunter Hampel – Actions is one of the most expansive sets of Cherry’s storied career.

Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination.All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music. About the album Anna explains"there's a sadness and wilderness that inspired me to write this album, also a timelessness. I believe that this park has survived not only due to its beauty but also because of the iconography, it has been liberated from predictable ideas and ideals. The people who built this park truly set their minds and imagination free. All thoughts fly is a homage to this creation, and an effort to articulate the atmosphere and the feelings that this place evokes inside of me. It's a very personal interpretation of a place that I lack the words to describe. I'd like to believe Orsini built this monumental park out of grief for his dead wife, and in my Sacro Bosco I used this story as a core for my own inspiration: love as a foundation for creation."

First-ever official re-issue of the Ecuadorian composer's stunning electroacoustic composition "Oeldorf 8" on vinyl and CD. Remastered by KASSIAN TROYER at D&M, Berlin.

MESÍAS MAIGUASHCA (b. December 24th, 1938 in Quito / Ecuador) is a composer of Neue Musik, especially electroacoustic music, who studied at the Conservatorio Nacional de Quito, at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY (1958–65), with ALBERTO GINASTERA at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne and, after a short return to Ecuador, attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt and the Fourth Cologne Courses for New Music in 1966–67 where he studied with KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN. From 1968 to 1972, MAIGUASHCA worked closely with STOCKHAUSEN in the Electronic Music Studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne and joined STOCKHAUSEN's ensemble for performances at the German Pavilion at the Expo '70 in Osaka. In 1971 he became a founding member of the OELDORF GROUP of composers and performers, and began work at the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Musicale in Metz, at IRCAM in Paris, and at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. From 1990 – 2004 MAIGUASHCA was Professor of Electronic Music at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg im Breisgau where he still lives today.

The OELDORF GROUP, named after the small village 40 km away from Cologne where they lived and worked in a rented farmhouse where they set up their own studio for electronic music and studio productions, was a musicians' collective active during the 1970s. In the adjacent barn, the group held concerts for audiences up to 300 people with an emphasis on live-electronic music and other kinds of new and avant-garde music. Thanks to a long-standing contact with the Westdeutscher Rundfund, the core members of the OELDORF GROUP (PETER EÖTVÖS - electronics and keyboards, the violinist/violist and composer JOACHIM KRIST, electronics specialist and composer MESÍAS MAIGUASHCA, who also played keyboards, and his wife GABY SCHUMACHER – cello) received commissions for compositions, invitations to perform in the Musik der Zeit concert series, as well as having many of their summer concerts recorded for the late-night broadcasts of WDR3.

One of these commissioned compositions is "Oeldorf 8": a retrospective portrait of the OELDORF GROUP consisting of a series of ten short pieces for four instrumentalists (clarinet, violin, cello, electric organ/synthesizer) and tape which may be played either simultaneously or continuously without a break. It premiered in 1974 at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and was released on LP two years later and turned into a sought-after, but not very well-known rarity achieving collector's prices., and was later unofficially reissued on KEITH FULLERTON-WHITMAN's Creep Pone CDr label.

Conceived as a sonic diary with an edge to encompass radical electronic synthesis, the 48 minute composition proves " … a thing of wonder; from the outset, MAIGUASHCA's spoken introduction of the players & concept gets slowly eroded by errant, pointillist electronic sound … which then lets loose for a good 10 minutes before a swarm of slowly rising held tones c/o the players acoustic arsenal slowly comes to the fore. On the second side, the acoustic sounds - patiently, elegantly state their cases across a good half of the segment until a rising pulse-wave drone essentially annihilates the more nuanced phrasing & slowly builds to an almost ROLAND KAYN-esque climax of raw oscillator gristle" (Soundohm).

44 years after its original release, MAIGUASHCA's stunning album finally sees its deserved and overdue re-release on CD and LP, carefully remastered by KASSIAN TROYER at D&M, Berlin.


"Maiguashca … is part of the first generation of South American maverick sound explorers that in the 1960s paved the way for a tradition of innovation that persists in the present noise and psychedelic scenes of the continent. Along with Edgar Valcárcel, César Bolaños, Beatriz Ferreyra, Mauricio Kagel or José Vicente Asuar, he contributed to expand the possibilities of musical language beyond the dominant Western canon …"

David Jarrin / Kraak Festival

2020 Re-issue of Keith Kenniff's debut under his Goldmund moniker. Originally only released on CD in 2005 via John Twells' Type Recordings, this album of rare and unusual minimalist beauty is now presented as a vinyl edition for the first time.

Multi-instrumentalist Keith Kenniff is a busy man. He has appeared as Helios on a number of acclaimed releases, including Deaf Center’s ‘Neon City EP’, and released a debut album ‘Unomia’ on Merck records which has appeared on many best of 2004 lists. All this while studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, and playing drums, guitar or contributing production to a host of amazing musicians. Kenniff lives and breathes music, something that is very obvious when hearing tracks under any of his pseudonyms.

As Goldmund, Kenniff has disregarded the electronic elements of his music almost entirely in favour of just a piano, a microphone and occasionally a guitar. ‘Corduroy Road’ is thirteen tracks of pure recording, the sound of the piano being opened and the feet on the pedals, the sound of fingers pressing lovingly onto the keys. This is a record of rare and unusual beauty, so shocking and yet unpretentious in its simplicity. When the guitar does emerge from beside the delicately touched piano, it serves as a balancing point for the record. Weaving in and out of the melodies, it adds another layer to what is already incredibly moving music.

‘Corduroy Road’ is rooted in Kenniff’s love of folk music from the American Civil War. We can hear this directly from his rendition of Civil War era classic ‘Marching Through Georgia’, but the influence carries throughout the record. There is an unheard voice which propels each track through history, maybe the ghosts of dying soldiers whispering in a long forgotten bar. Every haunting note drifts deep into the psyche and is lost in the ether of nostalgia. In this way it is a concept recording of sorts, it certainly has a narrative and has to be listened to in sequence. The story has clear themes; loss, history, friendship, camaraderie, forgiveness and hope, all clearly marked out by musical segments. It is no surprise that Kenniff’s passion for cinema shines through so strongly.

It would be hard to draw comparisons to music so rooted in folk traditions, but the music evokes traces of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mark Hollis, Keith Jarret or even Eno’s more piano based compositions. Yet influence seems unimportant when listening to this deeply personal work. Just let it sink in and drift into the psyche.

One of the 20th century's most sublime pieces of music for piano, The Book of Sounds by German composer Hans Otte (1926-2007), is available again on audiophile 2xLP vinyl. Licensed from Kuckuck, this edition includes a 12-page full-color booklet with contemporary liner note contributions by Terry Riley, Dustin O'Halloran, and Otte’s biographer Ingo Ahmels, as well as a 1982 Village Voice live review and photos courtesy of his daughter Silvia. Remastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll.

"This work, a masterpiece of restraint, reflects the musical imagination of someone who has spent long periods in the quiet recesses of the mind." - Terry Riley

Maja S.K. Ratkje is at the forefront of the musical avant-garde. Her music is bold, original and it is meant for sharing. At its heart lies Ratkje’s own voice, an open door to her individual musicianship and a constant tool for realigning her work with natural expressions and human truths.

On Mara, layers of vocals overlap and layer their way through the reverberant woodwork of an early baroque parish in Austria. At times slow and beautiful, other times frantic and sinister, this live recording is full of depth, passion and life.

Live-recording at Pfarrkirche, Lockenhaus at Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus July 9, 2018. Recorded and mixed by Peter Laenger and Andreas Ruge from Tritonus Musikproduktion. Mastered by Maja S.K. Ratkje at Svartskog 2019.

All music created and performed in real-time by Maja S. K. Ratkje, except sung parts from the Norwegian traditional Hanen sten på stabburshella and the American traditional Mining for Gold.

Maja is using voice processing software created by Øyvind Brandtsegg.

Originally released in 1986 under Luis Delgado's cult imprint El Cometa de Madrid'

Produced by Luis Delgado (Finnis Africae, Mecánica Popular) and performed by Patricia Escudero, this beautiful record dives into Erik Satie's compositional work thru an experimental optic.

Entirely recorded on Synthesizers, and making heavy use of FX and timbral manipulation, this recording brings out a Satie that's never heard before.


-This record was remastered and cut from the original tapes. However, those tapes were highly affected for what is known as the Sticky Shed Syndrome, and were very deteriorated.

Even though that was professionally taken care of, it was a very long process to get a result that exceeded our standards to be pressed. That being said, there are very few parts were you might find an slight change on sound that was impossible to eliminate completely, due to the above mentioned issue

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new solo album by Eiko Ishibashi, her first for the label, following on from the duo recording Ichida alongside bassist Darin Gray. Hyakki Yagyō (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) was produced for the ‘Japan Supernatural’ exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney focusing on ghost stories and folklore from the Edo period onwards. As with The Dream My Bones Dream (Drag City, 2018), the album is a response to troubling questions about Japanese history, and the influence of the past upon the present, but finds Ishibashi shifting further away from her earlier piano-led songwriting and showing a deepening interest in electronics and audio collaging.

The two sidelong parts of Hyakki Yagyō feature layered synthesisers, acoustic instrumentation, recited verse and field recordings, at times densely mixed but always with a subtle interplay of changing elements. The influence of European and American forerunners as diverse as Alvin Curran, David Behrman and Strafe Für Rebellion can be traced, yet at the same time Ishibashi evokes the flute and string sounds associated with Japanese storytelling, and draws directly on the subversive literary tradition of Kyoka (‘mad poetry’) with a verse by the 15th-century poet Ikkyū Sōjun repeated throughout the album. Revisiting what has gone before, re-thinking what is possible musically, as a way of articulating what else might be possible in the future.

As Ishibashi’s liner notes make clear, the album reflects an attention to persistent dangers, myths and evasions in Japanese culture – as well as the lurking uncertainties that might threaten positive change. This would seem to be manifested in the emerging melodies soon met by dissonance, erratic collisions and near silence, as well as the eerie manipulation of the double-tracked vocals. Ishibashi’s underlying concerns ring true more widely of course. Hyakki Yagyō is a work of multiplicities, and mystery, a landscape where nothing is as it seems at first, and everything is vulnerable to sudden violent interruptions.

The album was produced with regular collaborators Jim O’Rourke (double bass) and Joe Talia (percussion), and features dancer and choreographer Ryuichi Fujimura performing Ikkyū’s satirical tanka. O’Rourke’s immersive mix creates a three-dimensional effect, with Ishibashi’s various sound sources enmeshing and interacting in captivating ways.

Pressed on coloured vinyl and presented in a deluxe package with an inner sleeve featuring and artist portrait and liner notes from Eiko Ishibashi. Cover and label design by Shuhei Abe.
Back cover design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke.

key selling points:

- Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new solo album by Eiko Ishibashi, her first since her acclaimed 2018 Drag City release The Dream My Bones Dream.

- This album finds Ishibashi shifting further away from her earlier piano-led songwriting and showing a deepening interest in electronics and audio collaging.

- Hyakki Yagyō (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) was produced for the ‘Japan Supernatural’ exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney focusing on ghost stories and folklore from the Edo period onwards and is a response to troubling questions about Japanese history, and the influence of the past upon the present.

- Produced with regular collaborators Jim O’Rourke (double bass) and Joe Talia (percussion), O’Rourke’s immersive mix creates a three-dimensional effect, with Ishibashi’s various sound sources enmeshing and interacting in captivating ways.

- The two sidelong parts of Hyakki Yagyō feature layered synthesisers, acoustic instrumentation, recited verse and field recordings, at times densely mixed but always with a subtle interplay of changing elements, hinting at an influence of European and American forerunners as diverse as Alvin Curran, David Behrman and Strafe Für Rebellion.

- Pressed on coloured vinyl and presented in a deluxe package with an inner sleeve featuring an artist portrait and liner notes from Eiko Ishibashi. Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke.

Laraaji erfüllt sich eine lebenslang gehegte Ambition und nimmt in einer Brooklyner Kirche unter der musikalischen Leitung von Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Mary Lattimore) ein Album mit spirituellen Piano-Improvisationen auf. "Sun Piano" markiert einen Wechsel von FX-getränkten, kosmischen Zither-Jams zu eleganten Klavierminiaturen, Laraajis erstem gelernten Instrument im New Jersey der 1950er. Gleichzeitig ist diese LP der Start einer Trilogie, die mit der komplementären "Moon Piano" LP und einer EP mit Piano/Zither-Duetten fortgesetzt wird, um schlussendlich in einer vollständigen CD-Anthologie zu münden.

Louange à l'éternité de Jésus is the fifth movement for cello and piano from Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), adapted here for cello and organ. It was composed while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz, Germany, and first performed with other detained musicians inside the Nazi camp in January 1941. Inspired by the Book of Revelation, this music invokes the composers vision of "immutable peace", in its infinitely slow, ecstatic pacing and metre, described by the pianist Steven Osborne as “seeming to touch the far edges of human experience, subverting the idea of linear time”.

Earlier this year, confronted with a multitude of shared human maladies, the idea for this record took shape as if through a fog. Performed by Lucy Railton on Cello and Andrew Marx on Organ, the recording was made a decade ago and captures an intangible human presence - a cough, a baby crying - oddly contextualising the complex existential dimensions of the music itself.

"10 years ago in spring I performed Messiaen's Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus in a concert at Buckfast Abbey in Devon. It was a normal Saturday concert, a half full audience, some friends and family were also there. It’s hard to explain why some performances stand out but for some reason I still think about that day. It’s not only that this is great music, there was something else we felt, in the heavy silence before the first note, and as the chords rose higher and higher. There was a kind of communal acknowledgement of something bigger than that moment and place, of the immense beauty of music, and of the human capacity for resilience, and transformation.” Lucy Railton, June 2020.