In stock
CD
Kali MALONE & Leila BORDREUIL
“Music For Intersecting Planes”
Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space. Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone join in a work of austere, ritualistic presence, where the granularity of air, the vibration of strings, feedback, and subdued sine waves intersect in sculptural form.
Minimal in means yet expansive in effect, the music slowly unfolds like beads on a thread, punctuated by silence and deep breaths. Bellows whistle within feathered string harmonics, interference patterns pulsate throughout the chapel, and the environment itself becomes part of the composition, with ringing church bells and motorcycles passing in the distance.
Performed live in single takes, the music balances patience and intensity, composure and chance. The collaboration reveals new terrain: more tonal and composed than Bordreuil’s work, more textural and raw than Malone’s.
Music for Intersecting Planes is both severe and tender, an elemental convergence of cello and organ that resonates with the timeless intrigue of acoustic phenomena.
17,00€
In stock
LP
Kali MALONE & Leila BORDREUIL
“Music For Intersecting Planes”
Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space. Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone join in a work of austere, ritualistic presence, where the granularity of air, the vibration of strings, feedback, and subdued sine waves intersect in sculptural form.
Minimal in means yet expansive in effect, the music slowly unfolds like beads on a thread, punctuated by silence and deep breaths. Bellows whistle within feathered string harmonics, interference patterns pulsate throughout the chapel, and the environment itself becomes part of the composition, with ringing church bells and motorcycles passing in the distance.
Performed live in single takes, the music balances patience and intensity, composure and chance. The collaboration reveals new terrain: more tonal and composed than Bordreuil’s work, more textural and raw than Malone’s.
Music for Intersecting Planes is both severe and tender, an elemental convergence of cello and organ that resonates with the timeless intrigue of acoustic phenomena.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Kali MALONE + Drew McDOWALL
“Magnetism”
Kali Malone and Drew McDowall present Magnetism, their first collaborative album born from a decade-long friendship and ignited by a single day of creative synergy. When Malone stepped into McDowall’s Brooklyn home studio, a shared vision immediately took root and set the course for a remarkable collaboration between these two singular artists.
On Magnetism, Malone’s poignant and evocative melodies manifest through McDowall’s signature timbral synthesis, creating a unified voice that soars freely and radiates with vitality. Technically, the duo employs an exquisite blend of Karplus-Strong synthesis, distortion and just intonation. Kali and Drew embrace these tools with refined grace while moving fluidly within their musical framework. Charged by the magnetic pull of repetition, saturation, and resonance, Magnetism pulses as a living music that captivates the senses and lingers long in the mind after the final notes fade.
27,50€
In stock
CD
Kali MALONE + Drew McDOWALL
“Magnetism”
Kali Malone and Drew McDowall present Magnetism, their first collaborative album born from a decade-long friendship and ignited by a single day of creative synergy. When Malone stepped into McDowall’s Brooklyn home studio, a shared vision immediately took root and set the course for a remarkable collaboration between these two singular artists.
On Magnetism, Malone’s poignant and evocative melodies manifest through McDowall’s signature timbral synthesis, creating a unified voice that soars freely and radiates with vitality. Technically, the duo employs an exquisite blend of Karplus-Strong synthesis, distortion and just intonation. Kali and Drew embrace these tools with refined grace while moving fluidly within their musical framework. Charged by the magnetic pull of repetition, saturation, and resonance, Magnetism pulses as a living music that captivates the senses and lingers long in the mind after the final notes fade.
17,00€
Out of stock
LP
SLOMO
“The Creep (20th anniversary edition)”
The 20th Anniversary Edition of "The Creep" by Slomo, this ambient doom masterwork, is now available on vinyl for the first time via Ideologic Organ. This is a storied album of verbal history, and emerged from a figurative long barrow deep within a virtual space of great depth and contemplation, an inverted framing of acoustic space with heavy floors ranging from the wake of COIL to the heaviest Japanese fire of psychedelia to the monuments of drone coagulating in the early 'aughts. A first tiny CDR edition (100 copies) of "The Creep" in 2005 garnered the focus of heavyweights like SUNN O))), Julian Cope, GNOD, the esoteric legendary record store Aquarius, and the Wire. Ideologic Organ is honoured to have been tasked with bringing this to a limited LP for the very first time, and has collaborated with mastering genius Rashad Becker to create a 61-minute single LP in perfect cut. The album will also be distributed widely on all digital channels.
–Stephen O'Malley, Stockholm May 2025
28,00€
Out of stock
CD
BJ NILSEN
“True than Nature”
True than Nature encourages active listening. There is sound that exists seemingly for its own sake – a continuing drone that slowly evolves, sound of nature – and there are sounds that refer to a momentary action, and sudden intrusions of sound. BJ Nilsen triggers shifts in the perception for the listener that alter how you perceive and experience the world through sound, and how you think about sound.
Listening to True than Nature is full of moments of instability. The shifts between sound spaces refocus your listening, or throw you out of a world you were imagining. You recognize sounds, wind, rain, metal bending, a hammer on stone, the background noise of a city, but often there is an unfamiliarity about these sounds. You think you recognize them, but often you are not sure, because you are not there, and different worlds clash or coexist at the same time.
BJ Nilsen (SE/NL) is a Swedish sound artist and composer based in Amsterdam. His work explores the intersection of field recording, sound, space, and perception. Through subtle electronic manipulations and detailed editing, Nilsen transforms environmental recordings into layered, immersive soundscapes that inhabit the space between reality and imagination.
His upcoming release, True than Nature (2025) on Ideologic Organ, continues a 30-year career spanning original scores and sound design for music, film, visual arts, and performance. His most recent album, Irreal (2021), was released on Editions Mego.
16,50€
Out of stock
CD
Hampus LINDWALL
“Brace for Impact”
An album of contemporary composition for the organ, drawing influence from everything from Xenakis to metal to rave.
For Hampus Lindwall, the pipe organ is a playground. The organist and composer makes music that explores its textures and resonances, using it as both a vehicle for powerful chords and delicate rhythmic lattices. On Brace for Impact, he presents five pieces that highlight his experimental approach to the instrument, foregrounding off-kilter rhythms and tumultuous melodies. His music is eerie and light, ancient and futuristic, in equal measure. By experimenting primarily with the textural aspects of the organ, he showcases the instrument’s remarkable flexibility.
"Though the organ’s origins trace back centuries, it’s a main player in the current contemporary classical and experimental music scene. Many leading composers work with organ drones: take the limitless harmonies of Ellen Arkbro, or the haunted whispers of Sarah Davachi’s endless hums, for example. Lindwall carves his own path on the instrument, asking how he can use it to play dance music rooted in the sound and texture of the organ. ‘90s raves, after all, were how he got started in music. With Brace for Impact, he seeks to show how the organ, too, can embrace the freedom and vibration of the dance floor.
Syncopation is the most distinctive aspect of the five pieces on Brace for Impact, often driving its unconventional structures. No two rhythms feel the same, nor do they loop in step; instead, they’re a little off center, and always running at full speed. They buzz beneath his organ’s longer tones, always ready to pounce, or veer, or transform. This is most evident on tracks like ‘AFK’, a chaotic repeating pulse fit for a late-night rave, and ‘Swerve’, which builds from an uncanny beat that feels like electrified water droplets falling just out of pace.
What makes these patterns stand out is Lindwall’s embrace of dissonance. His ever-evolving vibrations often clash; his melodies and harmonies often foreground dissonant intervals. On ‘À Bruit Secret’, for example, Lindwall alternates between bubbling riffs and imposing chords. These collisions drive the music’s feeling of being just a little bit real and unreal at the same time. And then there’s the title track, which is an anomaly from the rest of the record. Here, Stephen O’Malley’s guitar crashes like lightning into Lindwall’s panting runs. They’re two forces, from outside, or above, or below, in a race to the finish line. It’s like a reminder that the present is past and the future is coming whether you want it or not. Why not let the organ, who has seen it all, be the spaceship that takes you there?"
The Quietus
17,00€
In stock
LP
Hampus LINDWALL
“Brace for Impact”
An album of contemporary composition for the organ, drawing influence from everything from Xenakis to metal to rave.
For Hampus Lindwall, the pipe organ is a playground. The organist and composer makes music that explores its textures and resonances, using it as both a vehicle for powerful chords and delicate rhythmic lattices. On Brace for Impact, he presents five pieces that highlight his experimental approach to the instrument, foregrounding off-kilter rhythms and tumultuous melodies. His music is eerie and light, ancient and futuristic, in equal measure. By experimenting primarily with the textural aspects of the organ, he showcases the instrument’s remarkable flexibility.
"Though the organ’s origins trace back centuries, it’s a main player in the current contemporary classical and experimental music scene. Many leading composers work with organ drones: take the limitless harmonies of Ellen Arkbro, or the haunted whispers of Sarah Davachi’s endless hums, for example. Lindwall carves his own path on the instrument, asking how he can use it to play dance music rooted in the sound and texture of the organ. ‘90s raves, after all, were how he got started in music. With Brace for Impact, he seeks to show how the organ, too, can embrace the freedom and vibration of the dance floor.
Syncopation is the most distinctive aspect of the five pieces on Brace for Impact, often driving its unconventional structures. No two rhythms feel the same, nor do they loop in step; instead, they’re a little off center, and always running at full speed. They buzz beneath his organ’s longer tones, always ready to pounce, or veer, or transform. This is most evident on tracks like ‘AFK’, a chaotic repeating pulse fit for a late-night rave, and ‘Swerve’, which builds from an uncanny beat that feels like electrified water droplets falling just out of pace.
What makes these patterns stand out is Lindwall’s embrace of dissonance. His ever-evolving vibrations often clash; his melodies and harmonies often foreground dissonant intervals. On ‘À Bruit Secret’, for example, Lindwall alternates between bubbling riffs and imposing chords. These collisions drive the music’s feeling of being just a little bit real and unreal at the same time. And then there’s the title track, which is an anomaly from the rest of the record. Here, Stephen O’Malley’s guitar crashes like lightning into Lindwall’s panting runs. They’re two forces, from outside, or above, or below, in a race to the finish line. It’s like a reminder that the present is past and the future is coming whether you want it or not. Why not let the organ, who has seen it all, be the spaceship that takes you there?"
The Quietus
28,00€
In stock
LP
Chris ABRAHAMS – Oren AMBARCHI – Robbie AVENAIM
“Placelessness”
Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music.
Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit.
In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form.
Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP.
Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve.
While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm.
What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms.
29,50€
In stock
2 LP
Kali MALONE
“The Sacrificial Code (2025 edition)”
Kali Malone’s landmark album The Sacrificial Code emerged from a momentous confluence of dedication and inspiration. In 2019, Malone was finishing a master's thesis in electroacoustic composition at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, having spent several years studying how sound and space interact, both academically and as a part of Sweden’s underground music community. An apprenticeship with the organ tuner Jan Börjeson opened up the instrument’s history as a laboratory for the development of various tuning systems, resonating with her interest in the sublime, uncanny soundworlds that exist beyond equal temperament. Countless hours were spent imagining new ways to conceptualize archaic compositional forms like canons, embracing their limitations as a way to peel away dramatic flourishes so only a stark core remains. A vision of music began to crystalize that was instilled with koan-like dualities of restraint and spectacle, stasis and variation, intimacy and grandeur.
Six years after its initial release, Ideologic Organ has reissued The Sacrificial Code, adorned with striking archival organ photography by Malone and including a new arrangement of the titular composition recorded in 2023 on the 16th-century meantone organ at Malmö Konstmuseum. The album remains one of the defining works of 21st-century minimalism, singular in its approach and impact. Its legacy has been defined by the revelatory experiences of those who encountered it, passed from listener to listener by word of mouth. The intensely personal experience of taking in these sounds, sitting with them for over an hour, absorbing each chordal shift in countless repetitions and finding oneself within them, became the driver of its slow cultural saturation. As she began regularly performing these pieces in churches and concert halls around the world, their impact deepened.
To produce the reissue, Malone went so far as to return to the copy machine at the legendary EMS studios in Stockholm to lay out the typography, revisiting the physical spaces in which it was created and remaining faithful to its DIY roots. The album’s first three pieces - “Spectacle of Ritual,” “Sacrificial Code,” and “Rose Wreath Crown (for CW)” - were captured voice by voice, each in single takes, on the Mats Arvidsson organ in Kirnberger III temperament as a part of her thesis. They were realized in isolation, and were originally presented as electroacoustic works on multi-channel speaker arrays in acousmoniums, speaker domes, and an abandoned iron mine. “Sacer Profanare,” “Litanic Cloth Wrung,” and “Fifth Worship II” were all recorded within two-hours of borrowed studio time on the Woehl organ at Studio Acusticum in Piteå; their patient and deliberate nature cutting through the hasty timeline of their capture. With each, Malone was developing and deploying self-taught close micing techniques to reproduce the most granular, air-filled sound of the instrument, bringing the listener into its stoically heaving guts.
The effect of all this careful work is a sense of time dilation, the physicality of the sound itself - the thunderous rolls of bass, the pitched hiss of the flue, the quivering dance of air molecules animated by dissonance - drawing attention away from the clock. Each piece cycles through purposefully constructed chord progressions, the repetition creating moments that can feel anthemic or mournful depending on the harmonic resonance and duration of the piece. These reiterations become so steady and expected that at the end of “Fifth Worship II,” when Malone switches off the organ mid-stream and the harmonics wither and fall, it feels like the ground slips away from under us. Repetition becomes the magnetic force shaping and stabilizing space and time.
Recurrence has also been a hallmark of Malone’s work on a larger scale, as evidenced by the third, new iteration of “Sacrificial Code” included on this reissue. She frequently returns to compositions, including multiple versions across various releases (“Fifth Worship” was originally heard on Organ Dirges 2016-2017, an experimental precursor to The Sacrificial Code), and they often change as they are performed over successive years and on different organs. Recorded five years after the two versions originally included on the album, “Sacrificial Code III” is absent the sense of sorrowful gravity heard in the previous versions, replaced by a sense of relative tranquility and performed in a higher register - an expressive shift that naturally occurred through years of repeated live performances. As The Sacrificial Code resurfaces, it retains its power but feels rejuvenated in this new context, inevitably changed by the years between then and now. Like any highly personal work, how those changes manifest depend on the listener, how they meet the sounds, and how those years have changed them in return.
–Jonathan Williger, February 2025
37,00€
In stock
CD
Kali MALONE
“The Sacrificial Code (2025 edition)”
Kali Malone’s landmark album The Sacrificial Code emerged from a momentous confluence of dedication and inspiration. In 2019, Malone was finishing a master's thesis in electroacoustic composition at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, having spent several years studying how sound and space interact, both academically and as a part of Sweden’s underground music community. An apprenticeship with the organ tuner Jan Börjeson opened up the instrument’s history as a laboratory for the development of various tuning systems, resonating with her interest in the sublime, uncanny soundworlds that exist beyond equal temperament. Countless hours were spent imagining new ways to conceptualize archaic compositional forms like canons, embracing their limitations as a way to peel away dramatic flourishes so only a stark core remains. A vision of music began to crystalize that was instilled with koan-like dualities of restraint and spectacle, stasis and variation, intimacy and grandeur.
Six years after its initial release, Ideologic Organ has reissued The Sacrificial Code, adorned with striking archival organ photography by Malone and including a new arrangement of the titular composition recorded in 2023 on the 16th-century meantone organ at Malmö Konstmuseum. The album remains one of the defining works of 21st-century minimalism, singular in its approach and impact. Its legacy has been defined by the revelatory experiences of those who encountered it, passed from listener to listener by word of mouth. The intensely personal experience of taking in these sounds, sitting with them for over an hour, absorbing each chordal shift in countless repetitions and finding oneself within them, became the driver of its slow cultural saturation. As she began regularly performing these pieces in churches and concert halls around the world, their impact deepened.
To produce the reissue, Malone went so far as to return to the copy machine at the legendary EMS studios in Stockholm to lay out the typography, revisiting the physical spaces in which it was created and remaining faithful to its DIY roots. The album’s first three pieces - “Spectacle of Ritual,” “Sacrificial Code,” and “Rose Wreath Crown (for CW)” - were captured voice by voice, each in single takes, on the Mats Arvidsson organ in Kirnberger III temperament as a part of her thesis. They were realized in isolation, and were originally presented as electroacoustic works on multi-channel speaker arrays in acousmoniums, speaker domes, and an abandoned iron mine. “Sacer Profanare,” “Litanic Cloth Wrung,” and “Fifth Worship II” were all recorded within two-hours of borrowed studio time on the Woehl organ at Studio Acusticum in Piteå; their patient and deliberate nature cutting through the hasty timeline of their capture. With each, Malone was developing and deploying self-taught close micing techniques to reproduce the most granular, air-filled sound of the instrument, bringing the listener into its stoically heaving guts.
The effect of all this careful work is a sense of time dilation, the physicality of the sound itself - the thunderous rolls of bass, the pitched hiss of the flue, the quivering dance of air molecules animated by dissonance - drawing attention away from the clock. Each piece cycles through purposefully constructed chord progressions, the repetition creating moments that can feel anthemic or mournful depending on the harmonic resonance and duration of the piece. These reiterations become so steady and expected that at the end of “Fifth Worship II,” when Malone switches off the organ mid-stream and the harmonics wither and fall, it feels like the ground slips away from under us. Repetition becomes the magnetic force shaping and stabilizing space and time.
Recurrence has also been a hallmark of Malone’s work on a larger scale, as evidenced by the third, new iteration of “Sacrificial Code” included on this reissue. She frequently returns to compositions, including multiple versions across various releases (“Fifth Worship” was originally heard on Organ Dirges 2016-2017, an experimental precursor to The Sacrificial Code), and they often change as they are performed over successive years and on different organs. Recorded five years after the two versions originally included on the album, “Sacrificial Code III” is absent the sense of sorrowful gravity heard in the previous versions, replaced by a sense of relative tranquility and performed in a higher register - an expressive shift that naturally occurred through years of repeated live performances. As The Sacrificial Code resurfaces, it retains its power but feels rejuvenated in this new context, inevitably changed by the years between then and now. Like any highly personal work, how those changes manifest depend on the listener, how they meet the sounds, and how those years have changed them in return.
–Jonathan Williger, February 2025
17,50€
In stock
LP
Lucy RAILTON
“Blue Veil”
The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination.
Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton’s momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello, a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound.
Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.
Railton’s creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound's inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, allows listening to reflexively participate in the music’s movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precision-tuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening’s structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener.
Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton’s realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others.
29,50€
In stock
CD
Lucy RAILTON
“Blue Veil”
The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination.
Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton’s momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello, a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound.
Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.
Railton’s creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound's inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, allows listening to reflexively participate in the music’s movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precision-tuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening’s structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener.
Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton’s realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others.
17,50€
In stock
LP
GOLEM MÉCANIQUE
“Siamo tutti in pericolo”
"Siamo tutti in pericolo" is the third album by Golem Mecanique, the nom de plume of French multi-instrumentalist composer Karen Jebane, to be released on Ideologic Organ. Jebane works within the fringes of contemporary folk (aka La Novea community), microtonal and early modern spheres, as well as touching upon the ashes and fibres of back metal and the DNA of gothic music, literature, sorcery and most of all - poetry. Jebane's work with the "drone box" (a mechanised hurdy-gurdy) and zither as a smooth and rippling surface for her singing is immediately evident in a nearly ceremonial way, inviting into a space of clear-dark creativity-beauty. On "Siamo tutti in pericolo", Jebane works with her forms of composition in new ways, poetic and spare execution of her techniques, through her homage/hymns/meditations on the highly irregular circumstances and questions/mysteries of the passing of the soul of master artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. A perfect pairing with collage artist Julien Langendorff's cover art, "Siamo tutti in pericolo", presents a pure presentation of Jebane's "Golem Mecanique". –Stephen O'Malley, Brion, France, 1 Sept 2024
Voice, electric/processed hurdy-gurdy and zither by Golem Mecanique
Composed, performed and mixed by Golem Mecanique between November 2023 and May 2024
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung, July 2024
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, September 2024
27,50€
Out of stock
LP
Nina GARCIA
“Bye Bye Bird”
Nina Garcia has been actively moving the art of noise guitar into surprising and intriguing new spaces. She has been at it for some time now, a bit of a secret weapon all the while hiding in plain sight. As I listen to her music and ruminate upon seeing her perform it brings me to a realization which I have with very few musicians: the ego inherent in making art can be transcended through a purity of direct action. At least that’s the feeling I have when experiencing Nina’s music which comes across as serious and radical and wholly engaged in the moment of its creative impulse. With Bye Bye Bird she delivers her most exalted and sublime collection of recordings for all adventurous hearts to hear. A fantastic album.
Thurston Moore, London 2024
:::::
After a decade of performing concerts under the Mariachi guise, Nina Garcia has finally unveiled her unique approach in Bye Bye Bird, her first album under her name. Bye Bye Bird is her second solo album, to be released by Ideologic Organ in February 2025.
With no pretence or demonstration, the album is a captivating blend of chiaroscuro, melodies, and raw emotion.
Nina Garcia's album takes on an almost documentary-like quality by adopting a simple approach to gesture and sound recording. It offers a candid portrayal of a moment, a lack, a state, and a breathtaking energy. With ostinato as her only credo, Nina Garcia's music is an experiment in freedom, where the peaks answer the abysses, and the power of movement and the emotion of sound serves as her compass.
From very short (01:28) to never very long (07:34), the eight tracks that make up this set explore a moment, a space, a mechanism, an intention or a way of doing things. As a common feature of almost all these pieces (all but one, the last), Nina Garcia explores a new technique. She adds to her instrumentation, reduced to the essentials (a guitar, a pedal and an amp), an electromagnetic microphone which, when held in hand, makes it possible to listen in on the exact zones where the vibration of the string creates a sound amid vast spaces of silence. The guitar is unplugged, and the body/instrument relationship changes in dimension.
In this series of variations, you can get caught up in masses of noise seen from very, very close up, evocations of melodies in the making, feedback on ridgelines, pulsations that hold their own, modulations weakened by exhaustion and harmonic bursts that hint at better days to come.
Neither hopelessly chthonic nor beatifically ethereal, Bye Bye Bird is a sum of musical pieces that make a whole and give voice to echoes of what has been, the presence of what is and the hope of what will be, a record movement in the form of flight and salvation.
Since 2015, Nina Garcia has been researching and creating around the electric guitar, halfway between improvised music and noise.
On numerous stages in Europe and North America, she has played occasionally with Stephen O'Malley, Sophie Agnel, Fred Frith, Antoine Chessex, Louis Schild or with Luke Stewart and Leila Bordreuil's Feedback Ensemble, in addition to more regular formations in which she participates, such as the ensemble Le Un, mamiedaragon, Autoreverse (with Arnaud Rivière), duets with trombonist Maria Bertel and percussionist Camille Émaille, and the installation piece De Haut En Bas, De Bas En Haut Et Latéralement (with Christophe Cardoen, Jennifer Caubet, Etienne Foyer, Anna Gaïotti and Romain Simon).
–Arnaud Riviere, Paris November 2024
27,50€
In stock
LP
Carlos GIFFONI
“Dream Walker”
About 20 years ago, Carlos Giffoni quickly made a name for himself both as a noise guitarist and a laptop noisician upon arriving in New York (via Florida and Venezuela). His expertly curated annual No Fun Festival, as well as his No Fun label, further solidified him as a key figure in the international noise scene. The festival’s success proved the formula for experimental and improvised music fests could work with the noise underground as well, but it also capitalized on the faster rate of connections being made between geographically disparate artists as a result of the (still relatively nascent) internet. Back then Carlos would play his laptop like a pinball machine, in contrast to the static stage presence of most laptop performers, and his solo music, like many others’ at that time, expressed a less dark and dour vision of the implications of harsh noise. By the close of the 2000s, he had stopped doing the festival, switched gears musically to playing the lighter No Fun Acid sets, and moved to LA.
Now he has re-emerged in a big way with Dream Walker, his first full-length since 2018’s Vain (and only his second since 2010). Inspired by the masterful performances and diffusions he heard at the February 2023 GRM electronic music festival in Paris, particularly sets by old friends Lasse Marhaug, Jim O’Rourke, and Eiko Ishibashi, he began conceptualizing new music of his own in response, turning to synthesizers and other hardware to produce a work more firmly in the tradition of European electronic music than anything else he’s done. Intended as a late night listen that evokes the edge of consciousness, with Carlos getting as close as possible to a trance state during the actual recording and mixing, each of the eleven tracks transition into one another rather than being standalone discrete pieces, forming two side-long suites that proceed like stages of a dream.
Unabashedly tonal and repetitive, the glistening opener “Now Dream,” the droning “Sleep Walker,” and the closing triptych of “Lost in Descanso,” “Sunrise,” and “The Hidden Path” occupy a power electronics-ambient nexus that feels spiritually close to the Mego label. Elsewhere, “Ticking Clock” is reminiscent of Stereolab’s non-easy listening vintage electronic side, while the two-part arpeggiated “Euphoria” recalls early Oneohtrix Point Never (which Carlos released on No Fun). The contrast between “One Breath”’s crackling opening and its remarkably fluid and soaring sustained synthesized chords is a distillation of the album’s lingering tension between electronics’ ability to project mechanical rupture as well as the organic and the infinite —or “walking between dreams,” as Carlos himself puts it.
Produced by Lasse Marhaug (who also mastered Carlos’ first solo album, Welcome Home, back in 2005), released by Stephen O’Malley (who I remember DJing at the No Fun fest), with cover art and photos by personal friends, Carlos considers the album a family affair. But Dream Walker most of all heralds a maturation of the artist, and stands as a record that exists out of pure desire, rather than obligation or force of habit; a statement of reconnecting with music not by merely revisiting it, but by building on what’s come before, both in his own work and in the music he loves.
–Alan Licht, New York, December 2023
26,00€
In stock
LP
Lukas De CLERCK
“The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas”
Lukas de Clerck brings the telescopic aulos, which his new interpretation of long-form expression coaxed forth on this tremendous recording.
Lukas de Clerck explores a niche of archaeological research in music; the aulos is a historical Greek instrument that Lukas analyzed and reinterpreted by a luthier in modern times—navigating this impression as an artwork or living sculptural object, as there is an absence of historical partitions or written information about how to recreate technique on the instrument. Lukas de Clerck has interpreted information from the rare archaeological resources and visual art of the classical period to recreate both playing technique and possible sound timbres with the instrument. With his contemporary approach to drone, post-minimalist music, and contemporary folk, we find a deeply satisfying and compelling, even playful set of songs, timbral exercises and compositions.
"The morphology of the aulos is defined by its reeds. The tubular memory inside the plant's fibre will ensure it closes and opens naturally, like the mouth that blows breath inside. The reeds are the core, the sound source—the naked instrument. They behave like two oscillators, bending high-pitched notes into beatings. The pipes are a context, a channel for the sound. They create a narrative."
An essential document of new music meets contemporary archaemusicological research via Stephen O'Malley of SUNN O)))'s label Ideologic Organ.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Timothy ARCHAMBAULT
“Onimikìg”
Onimikìg [Algonquin]:
(n. an.)- thunder
Timothy Archambault’s unaccompanied flute pieces for this album have been inspired by Indigenous brontomancy (divination by thunder).
Each piece highlights a different extended flute technique metaphorically related to types of thunder sounds: claps, peals, rolls, rumbles, inversions, and CG (cloud-to-ground).
The Indigenous flute used in this recording is made of cedar respective to the traditional woods used by the Kichesipirini and other tribes who live along the Ottawa & Saint Lawrence Rivers. To the Algonquin the flute (Pibigwan) is the wind maker or essence of the wind. Unlike other tribal nations whom the majority used the flute as a courting instrument, the Algonquin generally utilized the flute for more contemplative singular usage to mimic the sounds of nature or as a signaling device during times of conflict. When love songs were required, they were usually more plaintive in character expressing sadness, loneliness, or concerning the departure of a lover.
The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear claw, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in all the pieces traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note, sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats from. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with similar traditional ceremonial practices.
An important document of new music meets contemporary musicological research via Stephen O’Malley of SUNN O)))’s Ideologic Organ.
Timothy Archambault is an Indigenous flute player, composer, and architect. His repertoire includes traditional Canadian Algonquin flute songs (recorded for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Archives in 2007), early 20th-century Indigenous flute music, and contemporary music by Indigenous composers. He has recorded extensively and received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, National Gallery of Art East Building, and the Winterville Mounds Association. He is a Hereditary Senator of the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation, a member of the Métis Nation of Quebec, First Nations Composer Initiative, and co-founder of thecreativedestruction
26,00€
In stock
LP
GAMMELSÆTER & MARHAUG
“Higgs Boson”
Runhild Gammelsæter and Lasse Marhaug are two Norwegian musicians/sound artists. Both started in the early 1990s music underground and have worked in many constellations with a wide range of collaborators.
Despite knowing each other for a long time, Gammelsæter and Marhaug’s first collaborative work was the “Quantum Entanglement” LP in 2014. The album ignited a collective spark that both wanted to pursue further. Still, other commitments got in the way, and the project lay dormant until Stephen O’Malley, and Greg Anderson invited them to open for Sunn O))) for a special gig in the St. James Church of Culture in Oslo in the autumn of 2019. The two gathered for a long series of rehearsals, and after the successful performance, it was clear that it was time to start working on new compositions and recordings. That process initiated in late 2019 and continued to early 2021, encompassing before and after the world went through the lockdown. The result of this long development to be heard accumulated upon their new album “Higgs Boson” on Ideologic Organ Music.
Throughout the profound process of creating “Higgs Boson”, Gammelsæter and Marhaug drew inspiration from various subjects and artists. For Marhaug, it was concepts informed by the structuralist experimental cinema of Japanese directors Takashi Ito and Toshio Matsumoto, futurist worlds of French comic book artists Philippe Druillet and Jean Moebius Giraud, landscape photography of Fay Godwin, Kåre Kivijärvi, and Tamiko Nishimura, amongst others.
It became a metaphysical juxtaposition involving Gammelsaeter’s research and lyrical ideas based on several seemingly unrelated principles. A process of association inspired by “the Glass Bead Game” by Herman Hesse. The discovery of the Higgs Boson as a confirmation of the physical universe. The work of Ernst Schrödinger on the uncertainty principle. The four forces of physics. The Force. Helplessness under armed forces - as the war sailors in World War II. The influence of magic as expressed in tarot.
Gammelsæter experiments with a boundary involving the thresholds amongst various states of focus and legibility by forensic experimentation with techniques such as exclusive expression of consonants, syllabic repetition, retrograde text vocalisations and multi-lingual layering. Her vocal inspirational sources include Sidsel Endresen, Diamanda Galas, Natacha Atlas, the choral works of Rachmaninov, and the bands Carcass and Grave.
Two worlds coming together, making the music special. Mixing hard facts with science fiction helps create a kaleidoscopic cross point between the complex realities of the past and a possible future.
“Quantum Entanglement” featured two long-form pieces centred around a prepared piano and layered voice, while “Higgs Boson” developed a much more elaborate and ambitious compositional work. Across eight parts, the two artists brought a broad palette of instrumentation and sound. Electronic and acoustic, objects and field recordings, and pipe organ define the structures of which the centre is Gammelsæter’s magnificent voice. She has become known for her legendary voice, with her vast and unique range of inflective techniques and affective colour through her 30 years creating music. In the mix, Lasse approached the instrumental elements like landscapes, then Runhild’s vocals as characters that inhabit those worlds. Often, Gammelsæter multiple characters fused with the landscape. Make them occupy space, sometimes blend into it, sometimes dominate it. Constructing and setting visual guidelines helps set focus and open possibilities.
As an album, “Higgs Boson” is direct and focused, drawing on song structures. Within these tracks are vast strata of sound, an immersive multi-dimensional depth of music. Creating a feeling of depth while working with a flat two-channel stereo format - and how dimensions of texture and distortion can help develop the illusion of a space. The album structure is a story-like arc, a malleable subjective path, set as the album traverses oblique and suggestive areas, opening the concepts for the listener to unpack as they like.
– exclusive consultation with Gammelsæter & Marhaug, edited by Stephen O’Malley, June 2022
Runhild Gammelsæter – vocals, guitar, bells, digital piano/organ and processing
Lasse Marhaug – electronics, synth, objects and mixing
21,00€
Out of stock
LP
Timothy ARCHAMBAULT
“Chìsake”
Chìsake [Algonquin]: to chant; to conjure; to cast a spell; this generally involves a shake-house, or shaking tent, in which the conjurer goes into a trance; the conjurer then has an out-of-body experience, going into the future to predict coming events, or into the past; as well as going into any locality in the universe to seek out someone or something generally practiced for ancestral divination.
The unaccompanied flute pieces within this album are adaptations of Anishinaabeg shaking tent chants. The Anishinaabeg also known as Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples that reside in areas now called Canada and the United States. They include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree and Algonquin peoples. The word Anishinaabeg translates to “people from whence lowered”. The Anishinaabeg origin myths describe their people originating by divine breath.
The shaking tent or conjuring lodge was the setting for a divinatory rite performed by specially trained shamans otherwise known as Chìsakewininì. During the shaking tent ceremony the Chìsakewininì would construct a special cylindrical framework typically of birch or spruce uprights planted in the ground with respective wood hoops to bind it together. This created a tensile structure of which birch bark, deer skin, or cloth was used as a covering. Rattles of caribou and deer hooves, or cups of lead shot, were tied to the frame. The floor was usually softened with freshly cut spruce boughs. The vertical axis of the shaking tent represents the realm of mediating beings, while the horizontal axis the earth or world of humans. The Chìsakewininì would enter the shaking tent at night and once inside would not be visible from onlookers. The singing of chants and drumming would summon the Chìsakewininì’s spirit helpers, whose arrival was signified by animal cries and erratic tent shaking. During this transcendent state, the Chìsakewininì could dispatch these spirit helpers or Manidò to distant regions to answer questions from the onlookers about the most auspicious places to hunt, the well-being of a distant relative, and what would happen in the future.
The chants were usually sung using vocables before, during, and after the Chìsakewininì entered the shaking tent. Like many other similar divination ceremonies, singular or collective, the opening chants begin lyrically. They gradually turn to more reductive abstract structures midway and then end in lyrical chants. This symbolizes the performer and listener leaving the external literal world, entering a more abstract state of mind, and then returning. Traditionally all songs were carved on birch bark for record-keeping with mnemonic pictographs or other marks for future use. Tally mark clustering, sometimes used for song-keeping throughout the Anishinaabeg, is used for this album’s track titles and numerical sequence.
The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear teeth, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in the middle tracks traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note or sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats off of. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with the Chìsakewininì ceremonial actions. All songs are repeated seven times to signify the seven sacred directions: east, south, west, north, above/sky, below/earth, and center.
-Timothy Archambault
*
Timothy Archambault is a Miami based Indigenous flute player, composer and architect. His repertoire includes traditional Canadian Algonquin flute songs (recorded for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Archives in 2007), early 20th-century Indigenous music and contemporary music by Indigenous composers. He has recorded extensively and received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, National Gallery of Art East Building, and the Winterville Mounds Association. He is a Hereditary Senator of the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation, a member of the Métis Nation of Quebec, First Nations Composer Initiative, and co-founder of The Creative Destruction.
21,00€
In stock
7 CD box
Akos ROZMANN
“Mass / Mässa”
Ákos Rózmann’s Mass consists of twelve electroacoustic compositions created between 1989 and 2004 in the composer’s studio and at EMS in Stockholm. Like most of Rózmann’s compositions, Mass is a long-form work with a duration of around seven hours.
We can describe Rózmann’s Mass as an enormous fresco of personal observations on the two first parts of the Catholic Mass, Kyrie and Gloria. The intensely subjective perspective on the texts of the Mass is underlined by Rózmann’s freezing images – in his own words – “tropes”, i.e. meditations in Swedish, Hungarian and Latin over particular words in the mass text or connection to it. A few passages have nothing to do with the mass text: Organ piece VI in Gloria I (also performed with the subtitle Nocturne in silver and dance) is a sort of lament based on the phrase “Natten gråter” (the night is crying). We find the composer’s peculiar sense of humour in the intermezzo following Gloria I – a composed version of the intermission common in Swedish concert houses, complete with clashing coffee cups and empty chatter from the bureaucratic music establishment.
The overarching formal structure of Mass is an intricate one, with the various parts functioning simultaneously as independent pieces and as parts of sub-groups within the whole structure of the piece. As independent pieces, some of them go under the name Organ piece. For example, the three pieces included in the first Gloria part of mass form another independent composition named Triptykon, first performed as a separate work in 1996.
In the earlier parts of Mass, a battle fought between Positive forces is represented by the words in the Mass text and Negative forces represented by various challenging sounds, such as scornful laughter, grunts, burps, nauseous choking and vomiting sounds. First, the Negative powers drag down the Positive forces into a “black hole” or in pockets. Then the Positive forces return to dominate the remaining parts of Gloria. This formal narrative is nuanced by the composer, who, in interviews, offer a less dualistic, more complex viewpoint on the conflict central to the Mass:
“It’s presumable that everything in the general sense is about the notion of positive or negative because everything in the world is structured like that. But it’s not that simple in the Triptych [the first three pieces of the Gloria-cycle]. Different forces stand against each other, but their interrelation is more complex than that of good and evil.”
The most prominent sound sources in the work are the organ, a Hungarian zither and human voices. Throughout the whole piece, there is a vocal group from a village church in Corsica, singing the Latin mass texts solo and chorally. Other participants are Schola Gregoriana Holmiae under the direction of Viveca Servatius, a group of German Benedictine monks and – in the role of a sort of master of ceremonies, Thomas Hammar.
Ákos Rózmann was born in 1939 in Budapest, Hungary, where he studied composition at the Bartók Conservatory and the Liszt Academy. In 1971 he received a scholarship to come to Stockholm and completed his compositional studies with Ingvar Lidholm at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and then settled down in Sweden. He was the organist at the Catholic Cathedral in Stockholm for a long time. His early encounter with electroacoustic music gave a new direction to his composing. Except for a few early pieces, Rózmann composed solely electroacoustic music – often preferring a monumental form, usually with the organ and the human voice as the most crucial sound sources in a complex, penetrating musical language loaded with symbols. As a composer, he worked involuntary seclusion, uncompromisingly and with great originality. Rózmann’s music is about the fundamental questions of existence, often on an ethical or religious (Catholic or Buddhist) basis, for example, in the enormous suites Images of the Dream and Death and Twelve Stations, both previously released on Ideologic Organ.
60,00€
In stock
7 CD box
Akos ROZMANN
“12 Stations / Tolv Stationer, For Voices And Piano (1978 – 2001)”
Final pressing of 300 copies.
***
Ákos Rózmann (1939-2005) was born in Budapest where he studied organ and composition at the Liszt Academy. From 1971 to 1974 he studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and from 1978 he was an organist at the catholic cathedral in Stockholm. Throughout his life Rózmann dedicated himself to musique concrète developing one of the largest and most rewarding bodies of work in this, the most alchemical of all musical genres. In the early eighties, Rózmann started to build a private electroacoustic studio which he installed in the basement of the Catholic Cathedral whilst continuing to work in tandem at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS Sweden) where he produced his earlier masterpieces.
With an unwavering commitment to the creation of music Rózmann would often lock himself up in his windowless studio working into the night in order to achieve the results he desired. He did not seek the approval of his peers nor the satisfaction of his audience with the only concern being the perfect articulation of his vision. This combination of vision, passion and stubbornness resulted in one of the most singular catalogues within the field of musique concrete. Commissioned by the Hungarian composer Miklós Maros who requested a five-minute work for piano and voice. Rózmann accepted the offer with the intention of writing a tape piece made from recordings of Miklós’ wife, the soprano singer Ilona Maros’ and his own experiments with prepared piano. The elements recorded here became the source material for Twelve Stations, a work which flew far from the initial five minute brief to land 20 years later as a spirit stretching journey of more than 6 1/2 hours. The compositional process is unique in Rózmann’s output due to the 18 year gap between the initial phase and completion of the final work. The first phase made between 1978-1980 consists of an exploration of traditional musique concrète techniques such as speeding up, slowing down, cutting and splicing tape. The last four stations made between 1998-2001 embrace digital technology where small sections of the original recordings from 1978 were fed through an effects processor and improvised on a sampler keyboard. Despite this gap and the different techniques deployed at each period of creation the monumental result sits as a complete and staggering whole.
Within the set limitations of the source material Rózmann’s skill unfolds in an uncanny ability to coax a vast world of flexible sound from the original piano and voice recordings. The result is a maelstrom of dynamic audio and one of the most daring, challenging and rewarding works of musique concrète from the 20th Century. ‘Property – Room’ parts I and II initiate proceedings with a vast landscape of Sturm und Drang. The original material of piano and voice are dissected and reconstructed as a means of evoking an aggressive otherworldly atmosphere. ‘The Contents and Life of the Black Pit’ shifts further outside with an expansive palate of heavily corrupted voice and frenzied electronics dancing in a most unsettling fashion. ‘The Abandonment of Hell’ leads the listener into a sophisticated and shocking melange of audio disorientation, one with a distinct ‘musical’ quality. One senses a master craftsman quietly whittling away at the individual elements in order to harness the previously unobtainable world within. Part V ‘The Awakening’ implants female forms in the mix as the growling, belching, disturbing voices of the early sequences are replaced with more heavenly voices ascending the malformed matter below. Rózmann was typically ambiguous about the meaning behind his work despite suggesting earlier that the first part of ‘Twelve Stations’ was an interpretation of the ‘Tibetan Wheel of Life’. Alongside his interest in Tibetan Buddhism he maintained his following of the catholic church and as a consequence one may also read this sequence, with its uplifting motifs as an ascent from hell into heaven. Rózmann concludes proceedings with ‘The Celebrators’, which presents itself not as an ending but rather a continuation of sorts. A short musical refrain conjures a prism where refractions of voice and sound appear like a hall of mirrors, spiralling onwards and outwards, without end.
Epic in scale, timbre, technique, mood and movement, Twelve Stations is a unique masterpiece of 20th Century musique concrète and presents itself as an intensely personal and bold realm of sound, an offering as such, a radical mass open to all.
Man meets different difficulties and sufferings through his wandering. These are forces between which a continuous struggle is going on. He cannot control and preside over these forces. He is being tossed up and down, powerless, like snowflakes in the storm: chaotic thoughts and feelings, gladness and suffering, which flow without intermission like a river that has no beginning nor end. All these are the fruits of our own deeds. However, in this life you have the chance to make easier those life wanderings that are to come. - Rózmann (from the programme notes for the 1984 premiere of the first seven stations).
– Mark Harwood
50,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Eyvind KANG
“Ajaeng Ajaeng”
To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls “the third ear”.
The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.
The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights, but in Tanpura Study they are embedded in a series of gestures, what I call signatures, on the melodic level.
In Tanpura and Harpsichord, there is an encounter of overtones with chords braided into pun-notes, what Gerard Grisey calls “degrees of transposition”. Taken together, this amounts to a non-spectralism in which, contrary to first impressions, there are no fundamental frequencies, even in the bass.
Ajaeng Ajaeng: with respect to European string instruments, the technique col legno affords the direct encounter of wood and string, opening the way to a more tactile conception of the sustained sound, while bringing the materiality of the bow and its practices into question. In violin, viola, cello bows, Pernambuco wood offers an ideal example of extraction, colonialism, deforestation.
With the Ajaeng, a Korean musical instrument, the situation is more complex. The dialectic of court to folk music, always political, always incendiary, may be heard here in the encounter of forsythia and silk, of Dae Ajaeng to So Ajaeng, and on a broader level of Dang Ak (Tang Dynasty music) to Hyang Ak (native Korean music) and their representations.
Alternating music and sound, overtone arrays mingled with noise, marked by the bow change, in flamelike patterns which flicker, emerge, and fade again. A slow down structure, also formalized in Time Medicine, seems to produce a long decrescendo, with the technique of the players drawing out the flicker patterns in a kind of game.
The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a “social hieroglyphic”, which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student.
The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target.
This music is made for meditation. On retreat in 2019 I had a revelation: there is no difference between the prayer, the hearing, and the void. There is nothing original in this idea; Wonhyo and many sages have thought it before.
—Eyvind Kang, April 2020
25,00€
Out of stock
LP
Ai ASO
“The Faintest Hint”
Ai Aso’s immaculately crafted form of minimalist pop music skirts the edges of tensity with the manner and with the skill of a tight rope walker, calmly balancing repeatedly at every step, with a combination of surety and the risk of a slip, a fall, and an unknown uncoiling of events. Aso's capacity to capture, or inspire, the tension and attention from within the listener and observer are quite pronounced. At Aso's concert the performance constantly teeters near the brink, a sharpened awareness in the hall emerges from all observing, with the will of that most delicate balance. On “The Faintest Hint” she brings a meta level to the proceedings, the dream of a singer in a bright sunlit room in the centre of the density of the society, simply and precisely searching for single ideas, single tones, a sense of sensuality and even a dream of a grandeur (rock dream) emerge. A stillness prevails, even a sharp set of instances of dreaming, melancholia, nostalgia… or even saudade. The album was recorded, mixed & mastered by Soichiro Nakamura at Peace Music between 2018-2020. Atsuo and I joined these sessions as producers, and moreso as catalysts, yet also became the skeleton of a band on the album (with the tender touch). The legendary Japanese rock band Boris accompany Aso on two pieces. A faintest hint of sharpness and la tendresse féroce quickly erodes into a fine brief cloud of the purest crystalline dust.
Stephen O'Malley, Stockholm June 2020
Ai Aso : Vocals & Guitar & Synth
Stephen O’Malley : Guitar, Bass & Synth
Atsuo : Percussion
also Boris Play on "Scene" & "Sight"
All songs & words written by Ai Aso
Produced by Stephen O’Malley and Atsuo
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Soichiro Nakamura at Peace Music 2018-2020
18,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
THE NECKS
“Unfold”
2018 repress. Warehouse find.
Ideologic Organ present Unfold, brand-new recordings from The Necks, the legendary Australian trio who excel in bypassing musical cliche whilst exploring and extending the practices embedded within improvisation, jazz, post rock, ambient, minimal, and textural, "sound based" music. The latest document from this long-running ensemble presents itself as a double LP, with four side-length tracks. A deliberate absence of numbered sides hands a substantial swatch of participation over to the listener, allowing her to navigate his own path through the soundscape at hand. The shorter length of the vinyl format, far from being a constraint upon the members of the ensemble, instead offers them a more compact horizon to contemplate, wherein the distance travelled is recalibrated to more immediate and dynamic textural concerns. The immediacy of "Rise" confirms this new path, as the mournful tones of Lloyd Swanton's bass swirl around Chris Abrahams's crystalline piano motif, with Tony Buck's percussion steering proceedings into enlightening free-jazz territories. "Blue Mountain" cuts a swathe through the sonic undergrowth, with soul organ, rattling percussion, whistles, and loping sound-waves all vying for the foreground. "Overhear" retains a sublime melancholic aura as the percussion and keyboards simultaneously embrace and fall apart, whilst "Timepiece" skips along as a gentle gesture of further possibilities. Exactly how The Necks conjure their particular magic - as deceptively simple as it seems - whilst always moving forward, is anyone's guess, but Unfold proves yet again that rules and schools are to be broken and re-formed into patterns and frameworks unlike those already known. Mastered & cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
GOLEM MÉCANIQUE
“Nona, Decima et Morta”
Stephen O'Malley on the release (Paris, January 2020):"My first encounter with Karen Jebane (aka Golem Mecanique) was in the context of Echoés above the village of Le Saix in Haut-Ales, in 2016. This tremendous location runs along a deep river canyon with a long cliff on one side and a small mountainside slope on the other. Importantly, and uniquely, some mad acoustician geniuses have built massive concrete amplified horns into the hillside to project sound against the cliff, activating the landscape's natural resonance and delay patterns. The Echoés organizers exploit this system once per year, in a type of private weekend. People arrive for a few evenings of music and enjoy the summer and loosen their minds a bit. I was to be performing later in the night (under the stars, one of my most memorable and moving experiences with music ever), but Karen began her performance directly at sunset, the color saturating the sky and shadows growing deep purple and reds. Instantly and for the next hour I felt like I had descending into the Neolithic/Mythological age. And into the pre-renaissance mindset of time where linearity was absent, cyclic experience unnecessary... just when it was/is. Karen's deep and evocative chanting voice reflected and called forth in multitude amongst the landscape. Bone-chilling, or, perhaps, penetrating down through the bone. A thick and immaterial drone wove itself into the air. Voices began emerging from the cliff's face, the stones itself were singing, seemingly liberated from their geological time space. I understood more about why archetypal memory forms of seers, divinatory, witches and sorceresses exist in our cultural long storylines, our shared sociopsychological neurological rationalization constructs. Those necessary systems of attempting to interpret and communicate the world. It was an incredible moment within the blur between the night and the day. Although Karen's main instrument are her voice, and her mind, she also performs on organ, and also together with the Mediterranean folk music impressionada Marion Cousin on this deeply moving album. Karen also utilizes a very special French instrument known as the BAB, a kind of mechanized vielle (hurdy-gurdy)... one of the more incredible inventions of the La Nòvia group's legendary instrument builder Léo Maurel. Basically, the instrument sounds like an arcane goth/spirit interpreting Phill Niblock's string pieces, in monochrome on the very edge of the invention of color grain. Marvelous." Recorded and mixed by Borja Flames on 2019 New Year's Eve. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin July 2019.
17,00€
Out of stock
LP
KUKANGENDAI
“Palm”
Kukangendai is a kick ass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrythmic and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a forest than it is a geode. They started in 2006. They left Tokyo to Kyoto and started the cult venue Soto (“Outside”) “to listen to music they hadn’t heard yet” a few years later. They collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto last year. They reminded me of James Brown on a heavy binge of Bastro, there’s a deep current of both archaic musical tastes and the human desire for articulating that archaism in there, but you shake your ass and get the shouting in… in a punk basement … 13th century version of Breadwinner, the bare soul version. I’m honoured and proud to work with this tribe, and to count them amongst friends.
-Stephen O’Malley, February 2019, Paris
16,00€
In stock
LP
Daniel HIGGS
“The Fools Sermon, part 1”
Recorded by Eli Winograd at Lone Pine Road, Kingston NY, Spring 2015
Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin 1115.
“Daniel Higgs once told me that the Earth is actually in its 34th life cycle. That everything has been conceived, created, grown, withered and ultimately been destroyed a grand total of thirty three times to date.
As for quite how long this Ourobouros-esque pattern will continue, he never enunciated. For enunciation is at the very heart of The Fools Sermon. Or I should say “Ee-nun-see-a-she-on”, as language in the hands of Higgs becomes a plaything; syllables coil and retreat as if in eternal competition over the course of this 35 minute address.
Anyone versed in Higgs’ vocabulary over his 30 year-plus career as musician, poet and orator, The Fools Sermon will feel like a worthy distillation of his other-world view: a raw vision of the sacred and the profane, the physical and the metaphysical, The Proterozoic and the Present.
At points, the results conjure a Flannery O’Connor penned pulpit-bound preacher elucidating as a huddle of Tribe Records personnel channel Black Dada Nihilismus; at others the narcoleptic exotica of Eden Ahbez shakes hands with Blind Joe Death. One imagines Gene Roddenberry’s Captain turning his attention to the Philosopher’s Stone, to boldly go where no man and everyman has been before and forever will go again.” Anthony Sylvester, London, June 2016.
Ideologic Organ curation and art direction by Stephen O’Malley, manufactured and distributed by Editions Mego.
Original price was: 15,00€.8,00€Current price is: 8,00€.
Out of stock
2 LP
Ustad Zia Mohiuddin DAGAR
“Raga Yaman (Rudra Veena // Seattle // 15 March 1986)”
Zia Mohiuddin Dagar : rudra veena. Manik Munde : pakhawaj. Gayathri Rajapur & Annie Penta : tanpuras. Recorded by unknown at the University of Washington, HUB Auditorium, Seattle, Washington 15 March 1986 ; concert co-sponsored by the UW Ethnomusicology Division and Ragamala.Original digitally processed audio recording made with Panasonic PV-9000 VCR, Sony PCM-F1, PZM mics. Mastered & Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering 1117 & 0318.Liner notes by Renaud Brizard, edited by Ian Christe.“Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar.Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to "show the raga in its clearest and purest form". It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance ... in short I was hooked on this new (to me) and ancient form of music from the first listen, and feel that a more or less continual listening & reviewing of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's recordings in the years that followed have influenced my own approach to music quite heavily (if, albeit, indirectly).In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label. It's been a long path to arrive at actually releasing them but also probably in many ways one of the most significant releases I've worked on. And I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time.Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad (Bahauddin Dagar continues the lineage as a master rudra veena dhrupad player of note today). Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release.Raga Yaman was recorded at a public concert in Seattle at the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington in March 1986 (the week after the accompanying release SOMA028 Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani was recorded) at the end of his last tour of the United States. Yaman was a special raga for Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, one of his signature raags. For centuries, Yaman has been considered as one of the most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music and is one of the first ragas which is taught to students. A deep knowledge of Yaman gives a key for understanding many other ragas. It's filled with tranquility, contemplation, pathos and spiritual yearning.”-Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France
23,00€
Out of stock
CD
Ustad Zia Mohiuddin DAGAR
“Raga Yaman (Rudra Veena // Seattle // 15 March 1986)”
Zia Mohiuddin Dagar : rudra veena. Manik Munde : pakhawaj. Gayathri Rajapur & Annie Penta : tanpuras. Recorded by unknown at the University of Washington, HUB Auditorium, Seattle, Washington 15 March 1986 ; concert co-sponsored by the UW Ethnomusicology Division and Ragamala.Liner notes by Renaud Brizard, edited by Ian Christe.“Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar.Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to "show the raga in its clearest and purest form". It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance ... in short I was hooked on this new (to me) and ancient form of music from the first listen, and feel that a more or less continual listening & reviewing of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's recordings in the years that followed have influenced my own approach to music quite heavily (if, albeit, indirectly).In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label. It's been a long path to arrive at actually releasing them but also probably in many ways one of the most significant releases I've worked on. And I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time.Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad (Bahauddin Dagar continues the lineage as a master rudra veena dhrupad player of note today). Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release.Raga Yaman was recorded at a public concert in Seattle at the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington in March 1986 (the week after the accompanying release SOMA028 Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani was recorded) at the end of his last tour of the United States. Yaman was a special raga for Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, one of his signature raags. For centuries, Yaman has been considered as one of the most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music and is one of the first ragas which is taught to students. A deep knowledge of Yaman gives a key for understanding many other ragas. It's filled with tranquility, contemplation, pathos and spiritual yearning.”-Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France
15,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Ustad Zia Mohiuddin DAGAR
“Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani”
Zia Mohiuddin Dagar : rudra veena. Annie Penta : tanpura.Concert recorded at the home of Shantha and Niranjan B. Benegal, Seattle, Washington 9 March 1986. Recorded by Niranjan Benegal. Files obtained from Jeff Lewis. Mastered & Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Liner notes by Renaud Brizard, edited by Ian Christe.“Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O’Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar.Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to "show the raga in its clearest and purest form". It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance ... in short I was hooked on this new (to me) and ancient form of music from the first listen, and feel that a more or less continual listening & reviewing of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's recordings in the years that followed have influenced my own approach to music quite heavily (if, albeit, indirectly).In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar’s son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label. It’s been a long path to arrive at actually releasing them but also probably in many ways one of the most significant releases I’ve worked on. And I’m proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time.Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad (Bahauddin Dagar continues the lineage as a master rudra veena dhrupad player of note today). Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release.Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani were recorded in a private house concert in Seattle at the home of the Benegals in March 1986 (the week before the accompanying release SOMA029 Raga Yaman was recorded). The Benegals were friends (& Shantha Benegal was also a student) of Dagarsahib who sometimes hosted Hindustani music concerts in their home. It's a rare glimpse of a more intimate, personal and perhaps different kind of performance considering the form of dhrupad.”-Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France.
23,00€
Out of stock
CD
Ustad Zia Mohiuddin DAGAR
“Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani”
Zia Mohiuddin Dagar : rudra veena. Annie Penta : tanpura.Concert recorded at the home of Shantha and Niranjan B. Benegal, Seattle, Washington 9 March 1986. Recorded by Niranjan Benegal. Files obtained from Jeff Lewis. Mastered & Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Liner notes by Renaud Brizard, edited by Ian Christe.“Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O’Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar.Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to "show the raga in its clearest and purest form". It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance ... in short I was hooked on this new (to me) and ancient form of music from the first listen, and feel that a more or less continual listening & reviewing of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's recordings in the years that followed have influenced my own approach to music quite heavily (if, albeit, indirectly).In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar’s son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label. It’s been a long path to arrive at actually releasing them but also probably in many ways one of the most significant releases I’ve worked on. And I’m proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time.Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad (Bahauddin Dagar continues the lineage as a master rudra veena dhrupad player of note today). Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar’s life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release.Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani were recorded in a private house concert in Seattle at the home of the Benegals in March 1986 (the week before the accompanying release SOMA029 Raga Yaman was recorded). The Benegals were friends (& Shantha Benegal was also a student) of Dagarsahib who sometimes hosted Hindustani music concerts in their home. It's a rare glimpse of a more intimate, personal and perhaps different kind of performance considering the form of dhrupad.”-Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France.
15,00€