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Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer / theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. He will release his new album ‘Swamp/Things’ on Shelter-Press.

Rigorously experimental without sacrificing the intimacies of self, his efforts as a composer and musician extend across live contexts and numerous critically heralded solo releases, as well as collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Lucy Railton, both contributing to the record, alongside Stephen O’Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, and James Rushford, and others.

Deeply invested in the potential of sound as an elemental form - a root phenomenon with a profound capacity for meaning, as much as a multidimensional material for creative process and ideas – Jaeger’s work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve.

Sound is abstract. When the source is elusive, narrative and meaning shift between the concrete and obscure. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps/Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor - sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive - emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms.

‘Swamps/Things’ was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging 8 works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life.

Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - Swamps/Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world - memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures - captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms - moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth.

A remarkably intimate and forward-thinking aural balm, bristling with complex beauty, Shelter press is overjoyed to present Kassel Jaeger’s Swamps/Things. Two immersive, intoxicating sides overflowing with humanity and ideas.

As a child, almost every Sunday, I was wandering in the countryside, and usually, I was finding myself in my favorite spot: a swamp. Air was different. Trees were dead, but not really dead. Soil was swaying of clear water, and an everlasting mist was suspended all over the place. No one was there and nothing could happen even if some animal tracks were here to prove me I was wrong.
Much later, one of my masters made always this joke about my music. He said I was composing swamps, I guess because of the lack of demonstrative musical shapes and articulations. At the same time, he was acknowledging that I was building a “climate”.
It took me then almost 30 years to understand why I was so fond of swamps. It’s because a swamp is an intermediary space of the organic becoming and the blurry space suspending the cycle of the utilities, which is the cycle of history.

Swamps/Things has been conceived as an opera. An opera without characters, without text, but not without story. The story, here, is only an arc. Because what is an opera, if not an arc? And the arc, here, is the simplest. It’s walking through the swamp. Approaching it, leaching into it, becoming it. The Swamp is us. Our own disappearance, populated by all the beasts we have turned into, by the places we have haunted, and by the time we have consumed. We are traces in an always intermediate state. Animals tracks in the sodden earth of the Swamp. — Francois Bonnet (Kassel Jaeger).

Finders Keepers Records’ continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani’s key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world’s most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers’ decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani’s versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line.

The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne’s first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne’s proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it’s advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani’s globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer Ilhan Mimaroglu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer’s determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla’s production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. “Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano,” explains Suzanne in 2020. “It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA,” she laments. “If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola,” she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small’s aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. “I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent,” Suzanne explained. “He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself.” The basic brief around Suzanne’s musical journey was to be “The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain,” which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions (“I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn’t get street hassle on the way home”), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer.

Saturday Night is the debut LP by old friends and collaborators Alex Twomey, Matthew Sullivan, and Sean McCann. Recorded over numerous evenings at the artists’ homes, and completed just before the birth of Matthew’s daughter, Flora. The album became an excuse to spend time with one another as well as perform. As the trio ordered take-out, drank scotch, smoked on patios, laughing off the weight of reality–they stumbled into moments of musical focus.

This album has a prism of fidelities. High and low resolutions press together as the environment blows through the instruments. The woozy, side-long titular track of hesitant cello and pianos opens the record. Quiet music with blemishes and inebriated pauses, breathing an alleviated air. Phrases with failing propellers, teetering between melodic and apathetic. The true speed of their Saturday nights.

Side two opens with “London On My Mind.” Reflecting the other pole, manic cassette treatments duel over Twomey’s placid keyboard, ultimately breaking into a little joke on the piano. “Collection” features guitar by Sullivan, remembered for his thick fog of work under the alias Earn. With Sullivan’s return to the instrument, he is joined by Twomey on upright piano and McCann processing the room in real-time. The brief final work, “Bird,” recalls the style of the group's private press cassettes, The Bird and Charlotte’s Office: poorly-played pleasant-hearted music.

Each edition of the record includes a 20-page photo booklet of stills documenting the recording process.

Ambien dark industrial master Hermann Kopp shares with Fusiller this superb EP.
Pure Deep night music !

French synth-pop talent Lucien & The Kimono Orchestra unveils his new solo piano album, a journey into cinematic soundscapes

Alone at the piano, Lucien takes us on a very personal album in a deep and quiet reverie. We spend a soft winter morning in his company, reminiscing about tender childhood memories.

Between previously unreleased tracks and revisited Kimono Orchestra pieces, "Piano Matinée" concludes a trilogy of recordings which have barely been released, while paving the way for a wider future. Universal, sensitive, cinematographic, the piano language spoken here by Lucien opens us to his musical world in a light that is both more authentic and accessible.

The album also tells us a personal story. That of a grandfather - an exceptional pianist but forced to give up his career when the Second World War broke out - who passed on to him a taste for music in his early childhood, before passing away.

Many years later, Lucien came across old cassette recordings of his eldest son, soon afterwards having a disturbing dream in which he swore he had had a dialogue with him and decided to go his own way. The self-taught musician spent a whole year honing his piano skills before deciding to freeze his performance in the summer of 2019 at the legendary Steinway at the Studios Saint-Germain.

Drawing freely on all his influences - jazz, funk, classical, cinema - Lucien's "Piano Matinée" is a special object, as intimate as it is melodious.

Jean-Michel Blais is a neoclassical pianist and composer that pairs pop melodicism and classical training with lush electronics and surprising improvisational turns. Blais' compositions feel as lucid as they do dream-like, weaving together expressive piano with austere synths.


SELLING POINTS
- 5x tracks to be released in advance of the album's release.
- Videos to be produced for "Roses", "Outsiders", "Blind", and a short film for "Sourdine" & "Igloo"
- Piano-only album version and remix EP to be released in fall 2018.
- Charting/Sales: Top selling classical album in Canada of 2016. Charted #1 on Billboard's Classical chart in Canada 14x. Top 5 for 26 weeks straight since March '16. 90+ weeks on total.
- Streaming: Over 50 million streams worldwide. Peaked #14 on Spotify's Global Viral chart.
- Press: Critical praises of Pitchfork, Time Magazine, FADER, XLR8R, FACT, Noisey, MTV, CBC, BBC6 MaryAnne Hobbs, Exclaim, Globe & Mail, NOW Magazine, and more
- Syncs: National Chevrolet (1-year) campaign feat. "Hypocrite" 2m views
- Awards: Polaris Prize long-list (2016), SOCAN Hagood Hardy Award (2017), YouTube Canada's Top Ad of 2017 (Chevrolet The Canadian Dream)
- Featured performer for Red Bull Music Academy (2016). Past performances have included AGO Residency, Montreal Jazz Fest, Winnipeg Jazz Fest, Luminato, Festival de musique émergente, and more.
- Releases: Debut album of solo piano compositions 'Il', released October 2016. Collaborative EP with Grammy Award-nominated CFCF 'Cascades',, released March 2017.
- Similar to Nils Frahm, Chilly Gonzales, Johann Johannsson, Philip Glass, Erik Satie, Nicolas Jaar, Mount Kimbie, Oneohtrix Point Never
- Social: FB: 5,800 TW: 750 IG: 1,400

Stunning archival live recordings from the 90s of Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra Of Excited Strings which have remained unreleased until now

Maestro Egisto Macchi (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - The Group) recorded this mystical ethnographic trip to the South of Italy imbued with its rites, superstitions, magical symbols and popular mythologies in 1977 for the TV Documentary 'Sud e Magia'. Astoundingly evoking the intensity, magic and psychedelia of its subject with the use of inventive and unconventional techniques (aerophones, crystal glasses, prepared piano), Macchi harmonizes kindred spirits from transcendental, religious and metaphysical sound forms. Produced in the Feeling Records Studios, Turin, which had the highest level of equipment and technicians, this pinnacle of experimenal library music is released for the first time with audio restored from the original masters tapes.

Repress

Kali Malone presents a quietly subversive new album featuring almost two hours of concentrated, creeping organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code. It’s a major new work with ultimately profound emotional resonance.
‘The Sacrificial Code’ takes a more detailed approach to ideas first sketched out on last year’s ‘Organ Dirges’, which featured canon exercises spontaneously captured without much prior technical planning. By contrast, the recording of ‘The Sacrificial Code’ involved the more careful micing up of several organs in such a way as to eliminate acoustic impurities as far as possible - essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces were then performed free of gestural adornments and without expressive impulse - an approach that
flows against the grain of the prevailing musical hegemony, where sound is so often manipulated,
and composition often steeped in self indulgence. The question posed; can this strict methodology still speak to the listener in meaningful terms?
The answer is both obvious and entirely surprising; with its slow, purified and seemingly austere qualities ‘The Sacrificial Code’ guides us through an almost trance-inducing process where we
become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness.
As such, it’s a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self restraint - a stunning realisation of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigour which gradually reveals startling
personal dimensions. It has a perception-altering quality that encourages self exploration free of signposts and without a preordained endpoint - the antithesis to the language of colourless musical platitudes weíve become so accustomed to.

New York’s Fridman gallery re-activates its record imprint with this absorbing collaboration between Ben Vida (fresh from his stunning 4 hour ‘Reducing The Tempo To Zero’ opus for Shelter Press), and noted composer for dance, Marina Rosenfeld - whose collaborative album with Warrior Queen and Okkyung Lee P.A. / HARD LOVE’ is to this day one of the most brilliantly singular LP’s we’ve stocked. RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Laurie Spiegel, Terre Thaemlitz, Rashad Becker.
Working in the space between improvisation, sculpture, sound installation, and experimental composition,
both artists’ skill for creating highly descriptive yet elusive sound structures is at its illusive and ephemeral best across both pieces, from the strangely penetrative metaphysical point of view explored in ‘Any Landscape’, to the sprawling tendrils and searching electronic filament of ‘Branches’ that feel like the process of mycelium or spores finding a way into the cracks between the decayed concrete, glass and steel of crumbling urban environments.
Drawing on decades of combined experience, ‘Vertice’ unfolds along two 20 minute pieces with a natural grasp of more delicate sounds opening out in vast imaginary spaces. Their palette of field recordings, vocals, keys and electronics is placed at the service of an elusive underlying schematic, snipping away at the ligature of logic until their sounds are released into space as clusters of animated insectoid patterns. It resembles patches of gently overgrown vegetation, like rooftop gardens or thickets of mossy growth overhead.
In scale and fractured design, it comes to describe a vertiginous sense of detachment from reality, probing and challenging the listener’s proprioceptive senses with cool but heady arrangements of free-floating,
aerial, and seemingly unmetered tones and dabs of vocal that appear to describe a slow and purposeful movement above and around our architectural surroundings.

Stunning album from Ann Margaret Hogan aka Annie Hogan - prolific collaborator with the likes of everyone from Nick Cave to Simon Fisher Turner’s Deux Filles, Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flur, Lydia Lunch and countless others - here resurfacing on Karl O’Connor’s Downwards label, of all places, for a gorgeous swirl of reflective solo piano and field recordings that somehow reminds us of Virginia Astley’s life changing early 80’s masterpiece ‘From Gardens Where We Feel Secure’ - one of our favourite albums of all time - we don’t make that comparison lightly.
‘Honeysuckle Burials’ is a quintessentially native reading of the dramatic Welsh landscape described via solo piano and location recordings - a hauntological approach that marks out Hogan’s more personalised phase shift into a musical exploration and expression of self as inspired by place and memory.
Produced in Ann’s Studio Blue in 2019, the melancholy but life-affirming vibe is rooted in feelings felt during walks around the rugged North Welsh countryside. Mixing field recordings of her surroundings with her impressionistic solo piano translations of the sights and sounds of Wales’ ancient landscape, the finished article most subtly bridges the physical and imaginary with a painterly sensuality.
The results firmly fall into a long and enduring field of music from these septic isles inspired by its pastoral wilds. Like many before her, the landscape’s palimpsest of stories inspired by and accreted in its hills, rocks, water and sky urge Ann to conclusions that are at once personally poignant but resoundingly familiar, drawing on a shared Celtic heritage and, with it, a pagan appreciation of Mother Earth’s natural elements that had previously influenced countless folk, classical, and contemporary works of art. The most beautiful album ever released on Downwards?Aye, we reckon.

Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw and new talent Bas Grossfeldt present ‘Klavier’ – an album of haunted elegance, graceful poise and cerebral depth, which is centred around the Yamaha Disklavier.

Combining the prepared piano minimalism of Hauschka with Basic Channel style dub techno, the pairing is mirrored in the duo, where Shaw’s formidable dance music experience synergises with Grossfeldt’s arts-based appreciation of contemporary composition.

“Mine is the Heron” is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo’Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint.

This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters - exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolfe novel from which the album takes its title: “Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields - all are mine.”

Recorded by Tom James Scott on Walney Island, 2016 - 2019
Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering

Music of indecisive ways, silent writing, white pictures, noise and songs. Loup Uberto founds the Bégayer trio with Alexis Vinéïs and Lucas Ravinale, explores the traditional melodies of northern Italy, records intriguing sound documents - Cuban "raw" music, Eastern European travel diaries, Kurdish songs from Syria -, initiates gestures for French “chanson” with Le Saule record label, questions the gaze and its fiction, the rough edges of language, documents exile and wandering through sound testimonies, writings and photographs.

Racconto artigiano, the artisanal tale, is inspired by Walter Benjamin's Experience and Poverty, where the author comments on the drying up of popular fables; it is the compendium of numerous attempts on various materials: mobile phones, percussion, short-circuited radio transistors, computer limiters, clarinet, medieval and popular songs from northern Italy, sound collages.

Recorded in the reformed church of Mens-en-Trièves, a village at the foot of the Obiou mountain range and digging towards the eastern slope of the Vercors, this album is the outcome of some three or four years of research, the account of a series of experiments, thus itself a sort of document, a repertoire of sketches delivered as they are, completely raw and made disturbing by their dryness, just as the folk tale - which refrains from speaking - is a view offered on the horizon of silence.

Reprise is a body of piano work exploring the idea of thematic repetition and development, and the intimacy of the solo instrument that allows these ideas to be driven forward. The piano offers an environment in which the building pillars of music - melody, harmony, texture, and rhythm can be presented in a raw form, free from heavy processing, and throughout the work I was keen to explore them in a way that shows the instrument as vessel for delivering a wall of sound - Not just summed up by its elegance, but also in part defined by it's imperfections.

Nils Frahm, born in 1982, had an early introduction to music. During his childhood he was taught to play piano by Nahum Brodski a student of the last scholar of Tschaikowski. It was through this that Nils began to immerse himself in the styles of the classical pianists before him as well as contemporary composers. Today Nils Frahm works as an accomplished composer and producer in Berlin. In early 2008 he founded Durton Studio, where he has worked with Peter Broderick and Dustin O' Halloran amongst other fellow musicians.

The three instrumentals, which make up his debut release 'Wintermusik' are piano led pieces, coloured with occasional celeste and reed organ parts. The record's equal measures of sorrowful refrains and uplifting passages, combined with a real intimacy that makes for an album you'll want to return to again and again.

The songs were originally intended as a Christmas present for friends and family, hence its winter release via London-based cinematic music label Erased Tapes. As the curator of the Swedish boutique label Kning Disk's Piano Series, Peter Broderick invited Nils to record a new Nils Frahm, born in 1982, had an early introduction to music.

During his childhood he was taught to play piano by Nahum Brodski a student of the last scholar of Tschaikowski. It was through this that Nils began to immerse himself in the styles of the classical pianists before him as well as contemporary composers. Today Nils Frahm works as an accomplished composer and producer in Berlin. In early 2008 he founded Durton Studio, where he has worked with Peter Broderick and Dustin O' Halloran amongst other fellow musicians.

The three instrumentals, which make up his debut release 'Wintermusik' are piano led pieces, coloured with occasional celeste and reed organ parts. The record's equal measures of sorrowful refrains and uplifting passages, combined with a real intimacy that makes for an album you'll want to return to again and again. The songs were originally intended as a Christmas present for friends and family, hence its winter release via London-based cinematic music label Erased Tapes.

As the curator of the Swedish boutique label Kning Disk's Piano Series, Peter Broderick invited Nils to record a new album of piano improvisations the result is 'The Bells', which will now be released on Erased Tapes in the UK, Ireland and North America. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of what on the surface appears to be an entirely pre-planned and composed body of work comes with the discovery that these pieces were in fact improvised.

These two friends share a common affinity in that they both possess an absolute mastery of melody, composition and performance able to deliver with devastating effect. The modest Mr. Broderick states 'I remember thinking to myself as I lay there stunned, that I could spend ten years trying to write an amazing piece of piano music, and still it would never be half as good as these improvisations!'

Recorded in a rented, beautiful old church in the heart of Berlin over two nights, Nils 'just played' with the occasional instruction from Peter 'I spouted "Make a song using only the notes C, E, and G", or "Make a song that you could imagine me rapping over the top of" (Track 8 'My Things'). At one point I was even inside the piano, laying on the strings, asking him to make a song called 'Peter Is Dead In The Piano'. The resultant work 'The Bells' shares the same excitement and air of playfulness.

For a musician this early in his career, Frahm displays an incredibly developed sense of control and restraint in his work. As the recognition continues to grow for both, 'Wintermusik' and 'The Bells', we are pleased to announce that 2010 will also see his next album release on Erased Tapes.

Chris Korda's new album "Polymeter" is unique as entirely composed in complex polymeter sequences, a unique way to compose music with a new generation of algorithm, inside which Chris injects DNA of neo classical, ambient and jazz music.

This refreshing album will please both those who are into complex musical composition, conceptual music and who are just seeking for a beautiful, emotional and accessible, unique, musical moment.

This is a "In your hearts not the charts" album, as Irdial Discs once said.

Chris Korda is a transgender, vegan and relentless critic of consumerism, leader of The Church of Euthanasia (willing to halt the overpopulation through suicide, sodomy, abortion and cannibalism) and composer/performer of electronic dance music. She has previously released albums on Kevorkian, International Deejay Gigolo Records and Perlon.


Please read below Chris Korda's introduction to his new album "Polymeter":

Polymeter is an album of virtual solo instrumental performances. They're mostly piano pieces, along with a couple of guitar pieces. They sound uncannily similar to human performances, but they aren't. On the contrary, they are algorithmic music, pure applied mathematics.


The compositions are generated by elaborate networks of polymeter modulation. This sounds complicated and will need some explaining. But the most important point is that these are compositions I didn't write in any usual sense of the word. I created systems of rules, and the compositions emerged from those rules. The rules that generated these pieces can be conceptualized as kinetic sculptures that produce intricate non-random patterns of musical interference. The resulting patterns repeat themselves over long periods, measured in hours, days, or in some cases years.


In order to create this album, I had to write my own MIDI sequencer from scratch, because commercial MIDI sequencers lack the necessary degrees of freedom. My sequencer is also called Polymeter, and I started writing it in 1994. I used a relatively primitive version of it to create my earlier techno and electro releases, but the rapid evolution of computer technology made my original so ware hopelessly obsolete by the 21st century. Like its immediate predecessor "Akoko Ajeji" (Perlon) this album was created using a much more sophisticated version of my sequencer. It took me many years to learn the programming skills I needed to modernize my sequencer, which is one reason why such a long hiatus occurred between my older and newer releases.


Chris Korda

The release of Marc‘s album „Voyage de la planète“ in 2017 marked a new era of his career. With ten rather beatless tracks where he combined his definition of electronica with classical instruments like violine, cello, double bass and piano Marc began to walk the path of fresh sounding music for the brain.

The title track has been the most successful one so that Marc called no one else than Erased Tape‘s poster boy Ben Lukas Boysen from Berlin to contribute his very own interpretation. Ben created a typical and unique version which comes along with a, believe it or not, 4/4 kick pattetn towards the end. But listen yourself, it totally makes sense. And Bordeaux‘s best Ocoeur made a short but epic ambient version you also should not miss.

Laurel Halo presents an album’s worth of score provided for the 2018 essay film Possessed, by artist collective Metahaven and Rob Schröder, produced by Dutch Mountain Film. The film was nominated for the IFFR Tiger award and the CPH:Dox New Vision Award in 2018. Her first foray into writing music for screen, the album provides a rich variety of sounds, from aqueous, subterranean drones, to plaintive folk pieces for violin and cello, to uncanny pseudoclassical piano mutations.

It’s fitting for Laurel Halo to move into the score world. Already known for her ability to craft evocative, emotionally charged music, the pieces on offer give shade and contour to the central questions of Possessed. We arrange our lives to impress the gaze of others and have become obsessed by our own image, we are looking for a new, personal way to relate to others, but how do we find new ways of being together, outside the self-surveillance we have created? The film’s sophisticated collage of live footage combined with found footage of makeup tutorials, smart phones melted by liquefied lead, facial recognition software, selfie risktakers atop cranes, and tourists filming their every move in Rome all point to the central question of the film: who is looking out for you?

The soundtrack traverses both the synthetic and acoustic, in keeping with the film’s tension between what is natural and unnatural. Opening track Hyphae unfolds like the titular fungal network, spreading and extending indelibly; the various Rome Themes all motivic in their romantic yearning; the surreal piano of Marbles pointing towards the recurrent image of void like black marbles, all knocking against one another, but never touching. Zeljava, named after the abandoned former Yugoslavian military air base featured in the film, is a central piece for it’s resonant, wrenching quality, like a perpetually arched back. In a nod to film music tradition a simple rendition of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is also included in the collection.

Violinist Galya Bisengalieva and cellist Oliver Coates provide rich performances, and renowned engineer Paul Corley lends additional production.

‘RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer’ is a steeply adventurous, highly structured and rewarding electroacoustic collaboration between pioneering British/Russian inventor and engineer Peter Zinovieff and reeminent cellist Lucy Railton.
The collaboration is notably issued as Peter Zinovieff’s first album and also becomes the follow-up to Lucy Railton’s acclaimed solo debut ‘Paradise 94’ for Modern Love.It finds Zinovieff, co-founder of London’s influential EMS Synthesizer company and owner of the world’s first home computer, using custom computer software to create and orchestrate a “soft” version of Railton’s vast instrumental vocabulary, modelled from a large series of cello improvisations inspired by objects such as an Egyptian figure, pots, and old computer boards, as well as tales of pre-revolution Russia from his grandfather. Railton added solo cello to
the manipulated results, before these quasi-improvisations were recombined into the work’s filigree matrix during final co-production with members of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Initially conceived as a live project and performed at festivals including Norberg, Atonal, Rewire and FAQ between 2016-2017, the final 35 minute recording thrillingly sustains the duelling, visceral tension and unpredictability of their live shows in its brute scrapes across 17 variated sections.? But, with the ability to unstitch/embroider sounds outside the ? strictures? of real-time live performance, the resulting structure is confoundingly labyrinthine, assiduously swerving the prosaic and sentimental in pursuit of explorative, emotively in/human expressions of complexity and ? unpredictability in a manner that has always been key to the ideals of experimental music.
In effect, the pair speak as one through an electro acoustic prism in a symbiotic, syncretic process of transformation. Railton is here the catalyst for some of Zinovieff’s definitive work in a career spanning 60 years. Her performances provide a radical variable - a sort of spirit in the machine - which is diffused, inverted and scattered by Zinovieff using various software applications, so that Railton plays around herself like a fractal mise en abyme, cutting her warped image to ribbons in a double refraction of the “real”, the instrumental, and its virtual allegory. In this (un)common, metaphoric language and poly-temporal syntax, they incisively speak to ideas of an uncanny valley of perception between the haptic and the intangible, conducting an absorbing dialogue that transcends and bends the story of avant-garde and electronic music
in beguiling, free fashion.

French-Canadian newcomer Racine transmutes the worries of the world into sorely bittersweetelectronic compositions for Aïsha Devi’s excellent Danse Noire label.
Seemingly coming out of nowhere with a fully realised sound that makes a virtue of biting point dissonance, Racine is placed in good company among Danse Noire’s roster of fleshy conduits for what Aïsha Devi terms her Spirit Liberation Front. Fluidly adept at speaking the language of hypercontemporary electronica, in ‘Quelque Chose Tombe’ Racine spells out a labyrinthine album intended to reflect a modern life of “grinning through worry, living in insecurity”, where “to be vulnerable is the new normal; afraid, a bare minimum”.
Much like Arca, Emptyset or even Aïsha Devi before them, Racine wrings as much emotion as possible from each curdled chord and warbling note in fractal patterns that connote the elusive nature of the future and the intense flux of emotions that never seem to go anywhere, but only compound into feedback loops of anxiety and impotent anguish as the bridges burn in front of us.

The Flying Luttenbachers’ “Shattered Dimension” is the first offering by the seminal cult band since 2007. It is released on CD and download on March 1st, 2019 via ugEXPLODE Records and on gatefold double LP in April 2019 via the Austrian God Records label. The current New York City based version of the group on this recording features stalwart leader and primary composer Weasel Walter on drums, saxophonist Matt Nelson (GRID, Elder Ones), bass guitarist Tim Dahl (Child Abuse, Lydia Lunch) and guitarist Brandon Seabrook.

A Sunken Mall is a new label from Vaagner for limited vinyl editions in special packaging.

The story of the Southerner who leaves the South will forever carry with it a certain poetic solemnity, as though the mystic doom of Faulkner, and his Yoknapatawpha County, follows them elsewhere, follows them everywhere. The cruelty of the Country’s history is embedded in their every move, their every utterance, their voice itself. One need only to sit with Rejoice!, the new album from Brooklyn-by-way-of-Nashville artist Jeremiah Carter, once, to comprehend the significance of such antiquities and their reflections both on self and world alike. The cinematic samples of stringed instruments on the opening Title Track, along with a great deal of the A-Side, paints a thousand overlapping landscapes, of plains, of prairies, of mountains. They clash at times, in prickling discord, like dragonflies disturbed in their hovering atop endless fields of cattails. But, at others, they mingle with Carter’s gorgeous, lush synthesizers, graciously oozing a fullness both enriching and wholly melancholy. These tracks are simultaneously irksome and soothing, the A-Side echoing holograms of a similarly sad theme throughout—taking its time with us, for the benefit of our own self-reflection. The incorporation of the spoken word of Roberto Bolaño’s “43. Like A Waltz,” on the track of the same name, humbly nods to timeless and scenic summers, or not summers—a beautiful forgetmenot.

Static and droning highs overtake the air on Side B, like a rainforest mist, the synths returning as sunbeams through the treetops. It becomes all the more warming and loving than its preamble. The glowing tones of “Perfectly Red Ochre,” and “Abandonment Veil,” beckon us away form the previous perils of dissonance. They hover like the haze after a much needed rainfall, as if to say, “See? this land is not doomed.” Organic instrumentation interrupts the drones on this Side—solitary acoustic guitar on “Over Your Cities,” and piano on closing track, “Silence Belongs To Us.” It’s Carter’s reminder that a human voice lay behind all this, that someone is playing these instruments, composing these epics. By its end, Rejoice! has done what historians will forever aim, yet consistently fail, to do—it captures the soul of a land. It channels Carter’s voyage from Southern States to Northern, with the conflicts of his past, and the land’s, trailing behind him like a cape. He wears these sounds, and he wears them beautifully.

Invisible Island is a fitting title for an album that seems to exist in a place quietly removed from the problems of the world. It's playful and imaginative, living in a soundscape filled with exotic fruits that fall from invisible trees. The record feels like a continuance from her album Minor Planet (2016) that shines through as an ethereal fog.

Although the pieces on the album mostly centre around the piano - played in a soft, minimal way - it's the way they are presented that creates the personality that defines Invisible Island. The keys are coated in sound experimentations, perfectly accompanied by layers of synthesizers. It's a dreamy album that seems to emanate from a fantasy full of warmth, channeling both classic Japanese ambient music and a more modern electro-acoustic sound. Midori has a special sense of creating touching, melancholic pieces that float on the borders. As someone who grew up in the outskirts of Kyoto for then to later move to Berlin, one can sense the influences of both places - without ever settling down on either.

Midori's Invisible Island is a safe place. Though it's one full of life and colours : birds, animals, wind and waves, fond memories of lost or unknown places and people that exist only in the hidden edges of this album. This especially comes to light for the albums centrepiece, the beautiful Belong, featuring Christoph Berg on violin. It's as if the protagonist - after roaming around the island for a long period, lost in its intrigue - finally finds what he/she has been searching for. A few tracks later the album ends on the title track, an uplifting ending that seems somehow unreal once the album stops and we ́re back to reality. Though the piano seems to keep performing in ones head with its repeating chorus and slowly drowning theme. An album of true visible beauty.

Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition — staged by Anne Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live event.

Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of power and paradise.

The music for Faust was written in a band-like process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to it's premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice. From the chaos of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque intricacy,
each track a testament to the energy that brought it into being.

Faust is anchored around three pieces — Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen Song — written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner, whosesonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new
arrangements that couple the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the studio.

Throughout the album and culminating in its closing act — the brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last Song, a pulsing canon of looped and layered voice pierced by black metal screams.Faust is the record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice. Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began in 2013, and this generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently her performance trilogy Sex (2019).

Arandel's new opus, 'InBach', released 24th January 2020 by French label InFiné, pays a poetic, infinitely respectful and innovative homage to Bach's sacred workings.

Arandel was granted limitless access to the galerie of (sometime rare and ancient) instruments, as a well as a countless recordings of the prestigious Musée de la Musique in Paris with a view to sounddesign his brand new creation. He performed a few months after at Philharmonie Paris a hybrid live performance/DJ set 'Switched on Bach', named in acknowledgement to the legendary 1968 by American composer Wendy Carlos (Tron, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining).

From candles to LEDs, from DJ sets to museums, from historical instruments to machines, from Bach's themes that have entered the collective unconscious and inspired contemporary flesh and blood musicians… 'InBach' was a foregone conclusion.

In the immensity of Bach's oeuvre, in the company of his fellow wanderers, within the constraints of his-torical instruments, emboldened by the delightful, sometimes technically dangerous friction between acoustics and electronics: Without a net, Arandel walks a tightrope without a faux pas.

Vital Sales Points:

- Strong French environment including institutional support from Philharmonie / Musée de la Musique in Paris with a big shows' scheduled.
- A hybrid album with a mix of rare instrument sounds, synthesizers and innovative creative bias.

25 years ago, David Shea released a crafty piece of complex philosophical and narrative audiocolage: The Tower of Mirrors. Composed and produced in New York City, during September-October 1995, it includes 24 tracks, and features guests such as David Morley on analog synthesizer programming, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Zeena Parkins on piano & prepared piano, Jim Pugliese on percussions.

"In 1994, i wrote a work based on the Hsi-Yu Chi novel for a large ensemble and sampler which used the 100 chapters as a map for creating an independent musical work. The Tower of Mirrors is a work that began as a collection of pieces for sampler solo and for sampler and solo instrumentalist. A series of 'mirrors' for solos and duos based on parts of the novel. also a collection of tributes to composers in ambient dance music, exotica, easy listening film music and experimental music formed separate points of entry. in particular many of the great arrangers and composers of the period from 1955-64 who were the pioneers of stereo recording such as: Esquivel, Marty Gold, The Three Suns, André Popp... historical teachings (often completely out of order), religious lessons, and a host of allegorical, historical figures encountered much in the same way as in Dante's La Divina Comedia."
- David Shea, 1995

"I'm reflecting today on the period of my life where I was immersed in the Chinese mythological Taoist/Buddhist stories of the Monkey King - Sun Wu Kung - titled, in English, The Journey to the West. I was also lost in sea of Hong Kong films and living in New York working in many of John Zorn's projects (Elegy being one of many high points) and just beginning my own tours in Europe and with Sub Rosa. Tower of Mirrors became a defining cross into to the last 20 years of my life. I felt thrown into the ethersphere during the years of 94 95 myself and I could not be more grateful to have created during and survived that time. I collaborated with so many during my travels and the credits are full of the people I was so lucky to have crossed paths with. I began a different path soon after this, with my interest in exploring Italian and Irish roots and reflecting on my teenage years of studying Taoism, Chan Buddhism, meditation and martial arts and what followed was a long period of influence from Giacinto Scelsci and Luc Ferrari to traditional Chinese and Buddhist musics. Enjoy and explore the references and connections I wanted to share then and now."
- David Shea, 2019

Johann Sebastian Bach: Violin Concertos BWV 1041 and 1042, Double Concerto BWV 1043 - Yehudi Menuhin, Christian Ferras (v) | Festival Chamber Orchestra/Robert Masters Chamber Orchestra | Yehudi Menuhin (cond).

When sound recordings of important works from the early years of stereophony still remain significant to this day, then one really ought to investigate the audible reasons for their durability. Hereby, it is unnecessary to comment on the importance of Bach’s masterworks for violin and orchestra.

Rather more, the music lover is invited to listen to the passionately fervent performer Yehudi Menuhin. Just how the soloist and Festival Chamber Orchestra succeed in transforming the score into unreservedly impressive music is absolutely unique.

Menuhin’s violin sings out bright and clear, without seeming cool, and remains powerful even in the piano passages. In the A minor Concerto the soloist and lively, circling continuo are well balanced and attuned to one another, and carry the musical proceedings along together.

Christian Ferras proves himself to be on a par with Menuhin in the Double Concerto, in which the violins play along in a lively chiaroscuro. Instinctively the protagonists discover an ideal rapprochement between romantic emotion and baroque directness, which makes this recording so valuable and timeless.

Two top EMI employees – producer Peter Andry and sound engineer Robert Gooch – must be expressly named here for setting down so authentically this event in London’s Kingsway Hall for posterity.

This Speakers Corner LP was remastered using pure analogue components only, from the master tapes through to the cutting head.

The 3rd vinyl on Galya Bisengalleva’s Nomad Music Productions is an intimate duet for violin and viola, written by Edmund Finnis and performed by the LCO’s Bisengalieva and Robert Ames Proceeding the dreamlike and experimental nature of Galya’s first two label entries alongside Claire M. Singer, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Shiva Feshareki, and Chaines, the Kazakh violinist’s collaborative recording of ‘Brother’ is a relatively more straight-forward, but no less gripping, example of contemporary classical composition that naturally experiments with ideas about consonance/dissonance in a way that relates to folk music.
The composition was conceived first with the final moment in 2012, which was written in a single day during a residency in Massachusetts, 2012. Its other three movements were subsequently commissioned by LCO, recorded at St. Michael’s Highgate, London, and premiered by Galya Bisengalieva and Robert Ames at London’s Roundhouse in 2015. They have since gone on to perform the work numerous times, leading them to truly get under the skin of its music with an intensity of tone balanced by their lightness of touch.
In four sections, ‘Brother’ calls for the performers’ instruments to be closely intertwined to the extent their colours become fused and coalesced, essentially speaking as one in a dense weave of patterns, tracing lines that arc, overlap, dovetail and mirror one another. The composition’s elegant pacing and spacious dimensions have already lent themselves to film, used by Icelandic filmmaker
Hlynur Palmas’s feature ‘A White, White Day’ which premiered at the London Film Festival 2019 at the BFI, and is set for general release in March 2020.

First time release of these live-recordings by Phill Niblock from 2007 and 2019.

A SIDE

UNMOUNTED / MUTED NOUN, 2019: for organ AND 4 pre-recorded tracks. Commissioned by Musica Festival Strasbourg for Hampus Lindwall

B SIDE

NAGRO (AKA - ORGAN), 2007: for organ and tape. Tape material was recorded May 1, 2007 at the Joseph Gatto Organ (1787) in Sankt Kirchberg am Wagram, Austria by Emanuel Schmelzer-Ziringer

Black Truffle announce the release of Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke, offering up two side-long realisations of Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko parlour. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves, creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles; snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko parlour. Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises d’Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari’s piece layers Luc Ferrari’s sounds into a dense new work that emphasises the insistently pulsing rhythms of the source material. In this realisation with O’Rourke, the piece becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape calls up Luc Ferrari’s classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the swarming electronics bring to mind O’Rourke's Steamroom work or even the vast expanses of Roland Kayn.

Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with liner notes from Brunhild Ferrari.

Edition Telemark proudly presents the first vinyl LP since 1989 by Munich's long-running ensemble for experimental music, PHREN, formed in 1968 by Michael Kopfermann.

Informed by the musical avant-garde at the time and especially the problems discussed by other improvisational groups, Kopfermann developed his own approach to improvisation and tone production and sought to find instruments and playing techniques that allowed him to realize what he had in mind. His thinking centered around the treatment of noise and the eschewal of a separation between noise and tone, as well as methods for overcoming the limitations of the pre-conceived tones of the tempered system. This ruled out quite a few instruments, and also electronic techniques available at the time were deemed to primitive for the tones he sought to produce. After initially experimenting with Turkish cymbals stimulated by cello bows, Kopfermann settled on a range of instruments that included traditional string instruments, e.g. viola and violoncello, and certain wind instruments like the flugelhorn and the helicon. All instruments were prepared, the string instruments with thicker gut strings and unusual tunings, the wind instruments with longer elbow pieces. The preparations, along with the development of new and uncommon playing techniques, allowed the players to create and improvise on previously unheard noisy tones that are not static and pre-conceived but substantially individual.

Over time, the number of musicians in the ensemble expanded up to six and the activities under the PHREN moniker became morefold, most notably with the formation of the PHREN theatre group led by Carmen Nagel-Berninger. Still, even during the sextet years, trios and duos of varying instruments were played, often called "analytical" because they were meant to focus individual voices against the background of the larger ensemble. From early on, PHREN published about their actitives in written form and on LPs and later CDs, mostly in their own PHREN-Verlag. This new LP thus compiles recent recordings from 2010 and 2018 of the duo of Carmen Nagel-Berninger (prepared viola) and Inge Salcher (prepared flugelhorn). The duos heard here are not so much meant as analytical studies, but rather as fully valid, improvisationally generated pieces, applying the musicians' long-term experience with their music in a way that doesn't sound reduced despite the small line-up.

Edition of 300 with printed inner sleeve and extensive liner notes on the history of the PHREN ensemble and its duo line-ups in German and English by Reinhard Kapp, Carmen Nagel-Berninger and Inge Salcher, as well as a detailed discography.

WRWTFWW Records is insanely happy to announce the first ever vinyl reissue for both volumes of Yoshio Ojima's superb environmental music project Une Collection des Chaînons I and II: Music For Spiral, originally released in 1988 on CD only. Each volume is sourced from original masters and comes as a double vinyl LP with liner notes in English and Japanese . This marks the inaugural release from the ESPLANADE SERIES by WRWTFWW Records which focuses on the works of Yoshio Ojima and friends.

Une Collection des Chaînons II (along with its complementary predecessor Une Collection des Chaînons I) gathers selected music pieces conceptualized and produced for sound-designing the Wacoal Art Center in Aoyama (Tokyo) also known as Spiral, a hub for a wide range of sophisticated cultural proposals spanning visual arts, theatre, music, design, fashion, and lifestyle.

Named after its superb curled-shaped structures laid in a vast atrium, Spiral is a monumental work of architecture by Fumihiko Maki, designed according to the principles of Metabolism, a movement advocating the fusion of the notions of megastructures and organic biological growth - in essence, evolving designs and constructions, adapting to human needs naturally.

Evolving, organic, adapting, these are notions that perfectly describe Yoshio Ojima's divinely designed brand of environmental music. Continuing, embellishing and bringing the Collection des Chaînons (which translates as collection of links) full circle, this second volume approaches sound design in relation to various contexts, sizes, and shapes. The nanoscopic neoclassical lullaby "Les Trois Grâces" brings attention to the importance of small details, "Pulse at Soothe" starts with the minimalism of a Satoshi Ashikawa piece and slowly drifts into mystical landscapes and cavernous echoes, "Entomology" and its melancholic artificial forest feels like a Twin Peaks mirage, and "Atrium" literally feels like a floating visit of a gigantic open space structure. With each timbre selected with extreme precision, each element placed in space with the utmost care, and textures worked to allow a wide canvas of emotion for the listeners, Yoshio Ojima's music is the constantly transforming connecting point between humanity and architecture.

Sitting alongside Midori Takada's Through The Looking Glass, Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way, Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green, or Yutaka Hirose's NOVA, Une Collection des Chaînons is a pivotal work of Japanese environnmental/ambient/minimalist music.

A note from Yoshio Ojima: "Please listen to this album at around the same volume as daily life sounds such as air conditioners and refrigerators."

Hiking in the Mist is new album of Taiwanese chamber ensemble Cicada who played with Olafur Arnalds, Rachel Grimes, Balmorhea. Cicada was formed in 2009 consists of violin, cello, acoustic guitar, and piano. It's named after Cicada because people are aware of cicada's existence by their sound instead of forms.
Cicada later collaborated with the Japanese label FLAU to release Ocean based on these two albums for worldwide.
In 2016, Cicada selected 14 songs from Over the Sea/Under the Water, Pieces and Let's Go! with the new recording and production to make the album Farewell.
The most recent release in 2017 White Forest was dedicated to animals including coral reefs, sea turtles, humpback whales, dolphins, as well as cats in the city and birds in the mountains.
Cicada walked into the mountain from the ocean on the 10th year and released Hiking in the Mist. It's their hiking journal with intention to depict their homeland with expansive views.

 Let’s go on a journey… Seven Albums. Released over Seven Months. Each album represents one unique day. One variation on a theme. One take on the same view. Imagine looking out of your window each morning, the same window with each day giving you a unique emotion setting your mood for the day. Seven Days Walking is inspired by Ludovico’s own personal walks in his nearby nature. Meditative and calming, this music gives the listener space to reflect with the culmination of the project allowing for hours of peaceful listening.
Musically, Ludovico Einaudi plays piano alongside cello and violin returning more closely to the immediately identifiable sound of his solo piano recordings with this beautiful blend of soft strings complimenting his simplistic and mesmerising melodies. Recordings of the highest quality made at home and Air Studios (London), Seven Days Walking maintains Ludovico’s known values of quality, simplicity and design whilst remaining accessible to all. “Imagine looking out of your window each morning, the same window with each day giving you a unique emotion setting your mood for the day.” - Ludovico Einaudi Let’s go on a journey… Seven Albums. Released over Seven Months. Each album represents one unique day. One variation on a theme. One take on the same view. Imagine looking out of your window each morning, the same window with each day giving you a unique emotion setting your mood for the day. Seven Days Walking is inspired by Ludovico’s own personal walks in his nearby nature. Meditative and calming, this music gives the listener space to reflect with the culmination of the project allowing for hours of peaceful listening.
Musically, Ludovico Einaudi plays piano alongside cello and violin returning more closely to the immediately identifiable sound of his solo piano recordings with this beautiful blend of soft strings complimenting his simplistic and mesmerising melodies. Recordings of the highest quality made at home and Air Studios (London), Seven Days Walking maintains Ludovico’s known values of quality, simplicity and design whilst remaining accessible to all. “Imagine looking out of your window each morning, the same window with each day giving you a unique emotion setting your mood for the day.” - Ludovico Einaudi

Terry Fox was a first generation Bay Area conceptual artist. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked extensively with sound, especially the use of piano wires detached from their native instrument and anchored between opposing walls of the performance space.

Linkage, Fox's first album, was originally released in 1982 to accompany an installation at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. The record would mark Fox's first attempt to realize his groundbreaking and visceral piece "Berlin Wall Scored for Sound."

Side one links five ways of playing the piano wires: drumming, pulling, bowing, beating and scraping. The room itself acts as a type of natural resonator as Fox moves the wires with padded mallet, his bare fingers, violin bow, wooden shish kebab stick and rusted metal rod. The effect of such plain arrangements can be utterly hypnotizing.

The second half of Linkage was recorded in the attic of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, West Berlin, in May 1981. A thirty-three meter long wire was held in contact with a sardine tin. Over the course of 20 minutes, pulsating drones dissolve into rhythmic patterns that sound almost synthetic in origin. As noted in the original LP pamphlet, all these sounds were strictly acoustic; the only electronics involved was the recording equipment.

In an introduction for this edition, Marita Loosen-Fox and Ron Meyers write, "The desire to eliminate any barriers between the art and the viewer/audience connects all of Fox's situations/actions/performances. The ultimate goal is to communicate as directly as possible, which finds its most concentrated expression in the artist's works with sound."

This first-time reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with booklet.

"I Drew A Fish Hook, And It Turned Into A Flower" is the result of a dialog between the musicians Stephen Vitiello & Molly Berg and the photographer Jake Michaels, initiated by IIKKI, between May 2019 and September 2019.

Stephen Vitiello and Molly Berg met in Richmond, VA in 2007 and have stayed committed to an ongoing (if on-again, off-again) collaborative relationship ever since. Their first CD, The Gorilla Variations was released on 12k in 2008. The initial sessions for that CD began as a soundtrack for Brazilian video maker, Eder Santos. The two went on to create 2 more releases for 12k: MOSS (also with Steve Roden and Olivia Block) and Between You and The Shapes You Take. Together they make use of instruments that they do and don’t know how to play and seem to have the most productive recording sessions in offices and empty rooms rather than proper studios.

The title "I Drew A Fish Hook, And It Turned Into A Flower" comes from the book Mental Radio by Upton Sinclair (published in 1930). Sinclair and his partner did studies on telepathy, creating drawings based on aspects of mind reading. Like the previous sessions, Molly and Stephen didn't speak about what they were going to do and just relied on an unspoken interaction in ways that Stephen saw mirrored in the book. The title proposed comes from one of the drawings where one drew a fish hook and from the idea of one person starting with an image and the other twisting it into their own variation.

Jake Michaels (b.1984) is a Los Angeles based photographer. He graduated from Art Center College of Design with a degree in fine arts. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times. He is part of the on-going series called " The Look" which features a unique blend of fashion and street photography. His work is always in flux. On some days it’s an exploration of aesthetics, hard lines and California color. On others it’s an investigative journey though different subcultures around the world. Lately its been a blend of the two ideas. He currently divides time between commercial and personal photography.

David Norland is an Emmy-nominated English composer living and working in Los Angeles. Most recently he composed the score to the current HBO film “My Dinner With Herve” (HBO 2018) starring Peter Dinklage and Jamie Dornan.

His work with Emmy-winning director Sacha Gervasi includes the award-winning documentary "Anvil! The Story Of Anvil", (which won the IDA Best Feature award, an Emmy award, the Indie Spirit Best Doc award, and numerous other best doc awards around the world) as well as the score for “November Criminals” (Sony 2017) starring Chloe Moretz and Ansel Elgort. David Norland was also the music supervisor for the movie "Hitchcock" featuring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren & Scarlett Johansson.

Since 2010 he has composed much of the music for US broadcasting giant ABC’s primetime news documentaries. His work for ABC is broadcast in the US and around the world on a daily basis.

Having been a chorister from an early age, singing daily in Westminster Abbey, and a boy treble in The Elizabethan Consort of Voices, a touring choral group of the time, he also composes choral music. His electronic band Solar Twins was signed by Madonna to Maverick Records, and rode high on the US dance charts, and his record writing, production and mixing work with Jamaican legends Sly and Robbie has been nominated for a Grammy.

"Glam Tear Stain" is the first real solo full length of David Norland. It combines electronic influences, elements of his film scoring work and more intimate, minimalistic piano and string arrangements.

"The music I want to make has changed over time - from imitation baroque pieces as an 11 year old chorister, through guitar pop with my first teenage bands, experimental sonic works with my first rudimentary recording equipment in my early 20s, through electronics, drum and bass, and reggae, leading finally to piano, choral, and string music informed by my film scoring work.”

"Glam Tear Stain" is simple melodic and tonal music for for piano and strings, filtered through the electronic, spatial, and experimental lens of Norland's earlier musical endeavors - and on a personal level was made over a time of profound sadness, change, and acceptance. It’s more unapologetically emotional than other music in the broad neoclassical field, and often stranger, too, drawing from influences as diverse as Future Sound Of London and 16th century English choral music.

Recital publish the newest record by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Currently working on her PhD in Musicology at UCLA, her trajectory has been unorthodox. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, which, if you've never been there, doesn't really scream "Avant-Garde" (Calgary is the rodeo capital of the world). From a young age, Sarah was a driven pianist (and figure-skater, although that's a story for a different time). It is important and interesting that she chose to study esoteric music; as Sarah could have easily been a cowgirl or a concert pianist had her ingrained love of synthesis and sonic phenomenology not taken the wheel.

Sarah is a considered person. I find few people that have the diligence and resolve to take their time with music... especially in a live context. I respect that about her. The first time I saw Sarah perform, I presumptuously told her that her music reminded me of my favorite Mirror albums (the exceptional project of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann). Sarah was not familiar with Mirror, so the compliment was initially lost on her. Years back I was in the same situation when a review compared my music to Andrew Chalk, who was unknown to me at the time. So I felt a kinship in our magnetic drift towards unspoken and clustered beauty.

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day follows the release of her "sound-wheel" LP All My Circles Run, which examines the isolation of different instruments. Let Night Come On..., recorded mainly with a Mellotron and electronic organ, feels like a return to the nest. Burrowed in the studio, Davachi was the only performer on this album. She both splays her compositional architecture and re-contextualizes the essence of her early output. She chiseled careful and shadowed hymns; anchors of emotion.

Two pillars of this album are "Mordents", which to my ears drops hints of her love for Progressive rock music - and "Buhrstone," comparable to a sombre funeral march of piano and flutes. These two examine punctuations of early music, gently plucking melodies and movements. The three other compositions are tonal works, blowing slow jets of lapping harmonics.

Writing this description now, I find it hard to separate "At Hand" from filmmaker Paul Clipson, who made a melancholic film for this piece of Sarah's. A fitting title for Sarah and Paul's relationship - frequently working in orbit of each other, meticulous and tactile. I cherish this track as a memory of Paul.

This is a lovely album to fill an evening living room with. A blanket, a cup of wine, a dim bulb, a wide window.

Three beautiful photo-prints by Davachi are included with Let Night Come On Bells End The Day. Frames are not included.

- Sean McCann