Out of stock
LP
Frantz LORIOT
“While Whirling”
On While Whirling, French-Japanese violist Frantz Loriot unleashes the essence of the viola as an explosive expressive force. Pushing the instrument to extremes, he ceaselessly explores its most subtle and unexpected sonorities. From a single acoustic string instrument, he miraculously teases and evokes hallucinatory impressions of harpsichords pounded, bells struck, electronics cracked, dirt shoveled; Loriot has created a unique, personal music filled with moments of textured transcendence and tension-filled tenderness. While Whirling is Loriot's second solo album and a masterclass on how to develop a radically personal musical language. As a third-generation classically-trained musician, Loriot's rupture with that tradition is striking as he continues to challenge every pre-conceived relationship between instrument and instrumentalist. Having first been inspired to rethink the physicality of musicianship by hearing Tom Cora's playing on his collaboration with the Dutch punk-rock band The Ex, Loriot sought out a series of teachers that could further expanded his sense of the musically possible/possibly musical. From Joëlle Léandre, he was opened up to the combination of aesthetics and politics; from Barre Phillips and his "large calm energy," Loriot learned about the necessity to get uncomfortable in his music-making. And from David S. Ware, he took an understanding of music as a matter of life and death. To his biological and pedagogical foundations in classical music, Loriot supplemented his understanding of music's force with realizations of vitality, awareness, and danger. While Whirling was recorded in the acoustically balanced space of Das Institut in Zürich, a small, intradisciplinary art space with angled walls on the top floor of a residential building on a quiet street. Because Loriot knew that he wanted to focus on both capturing and unspooling specific acoustic phenomena that he sought to manifest, he had to choose a place that would be ultra-conducive to intense focus, yet still casual enough to make room for life to burst in. As a sequence of solo excursions, each track on While Whirling rewrites the balance between improvisation and composition. The drama of Loriot struggling to complete a sequence after arriving at a texture he so clearly strove for puts the listener in an extremely privileged position; you have the pleasure of hanging on to each desperate subtlety of his decision-making process as he pushes himself and his music further and further across the vanishing edges of ever-expanding horizons. Deluxe LP with download; Heavy tip-on jacket with embossing and spot finishes; Full color inner sleeve and insert.
23,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Jean-Luc GUIONNET
“L’épaisseur de l’air”
Thin Wrist Recordings release L'épaisseur de l'air (the thickness of air) by Jean-Luc Guionnet. After more than three decades playing the alto saxophone, this is the French artist's first solo saxophone album. Since the 1990s, Guionnet has built a renowned and thrilling oeuvre of works with pipe organs, electronics, and field recordings as both an improvisor and composer; L'épaisseur de l'air finally documents his dedication to exposing sides of the alto saxophone that quite simply never existed until he developed them. His tone is as clear as direct sunlight, so when he boils it in mud or scratches at it as if for air, his emotion is palpable. A double-LP masterpiece and a definitive statement about the profound physical relationship between an improvisor and their instrument. A student of Xenakis at the Sorbonne, Guionnet has constantly explored the philosophical side of music; his work interrogates fundamental questions about skill, intuition, experience, and performance that arise through improvisation. He has instigated and featured in unexpected collaborations such as performances with noted British philosopher Ray Brassier and artists Seijiro Murayama Mattin as well as his long running artistic partnerships with dancer and choreographer Lotus Edde Khouri. For this album, Guionnet retreated to a barn in Brittany, where he recorded by himself at night over the course of a few weeks. Each of the nine improvisations -- spanned across two LPs -- uncovers such particular sonic territory that it's a miracle the whole adds up to such a complete statement. But by pushing space and silence so startlingly and oblongly into the pieces, the gnarled, gritty textures of his tone begins to make sense as a response to time that is forever shifting in such unpredictable ways that you better get into it while it's still coming out. Direct metal mastering at Calyx Mastering Berlin. Pressed at Record Technology, Inc. (RTI). Deluxe gatefold double LP with download; Heavy tip-on jacket including debossed and embossed inserts.
34,00€
In stock
2 LP
A HANDFUL OF DUST
“Dragging her wings of rusty knives: selected recordings 1994-2016”
A Handful of Dust was founded over three decades ago by two giants of the New Zealand underground, Bruce Russell (The Dead C, Xpressway, Corpus Hermeticum) and Alastair Galbraith (Plagal Grind, The Rip).
Declaring their raison d’être in the now infamous Free Noise Manifesto the group has advanced a radical aesthetic; Rejecting any notion of structure or comfort they’ve ground music to it’s sub-elemental parts. A scraping and howling electricity, spontaneous, unrestrained, physical.
i) Being beyond “music,” it is noise.
ii) Being beyond “rules,” it is free.
Dragging Her Wings of Rusty Knives contains expanded and unreleased works spanning the group’s history including their first studio recordings since 1995 and new writings, a late coda to The Journal of Vain Erudition, Logopandocy.
Alastair Galbraith: Violin, Guitar, Clavioline, Glass Harmonica, Keyboard
Bruce Russell: Guitar, Farfisa, Clavioline
Peter Stapelton: Percussion (1i, 2iii)
Mastered by Lasse Marhaug.
34,00€
In stock
LP
Jacob WICK
“Feel”
A trumpeter and improviser living in Mexico City, over the last ten years Jacob Wick has become known for deconstructing the instrument itself and any expectations of how it "should" be played. The explorations on Feel focus on sound as it relates to specific spaces and in turn the subtle but profound connections they have to emotions and the body. The result is a highly personal music that is both unique and immediate, abstract yet undeniably visceral. On Feel, Wick creates two intense side-long improvisations. On the surface they appear to be works of rigorous minimalism; on closer listen they reveal sounds that slowly but constantly shift and evolve. Texture and plosives replace melody and rhythm. Body and breath become indistinguishable from the instrument, the moment is stretched and expanded. Each sound is so closely linked that the player and listener are drawn completely into the present. Feel is an uncompromising and entirely original album -- an intimate sound experience that rewards anyone that chooses to enter.
Original price was: 24,00€.12,00€Current price is: 12,00€.
In stock
CD
OPEN CITY
“The birth of cruel”
Peter Kolovos : guitar. Andrew Maxwell: drumkit. Doug Russell: guitar.
Released November 2003.
"A gorgeous record of free sound: Through three unsettled pieces, Open City breaks down the formalism of the avant garde, noise and free improvisation to reveal one of today’s most distinctive and intense group dynamics. The group use a constant flow of deep drone, pointilistic cut ups, rich texture and silence to create Alpha music. Unrepeatable and unpredictable, aggressively abstract, time-stamped, adaptive, actionist, attentionist, fun. An organic assembly language in an open field, avoiding the trance and repetition of idiomatic pop for sound statement and direct coinage.
Open City aims for a moment before music, the unsettled pause before a devastating blow. The Birth of Cruel is a generational X-flare, a sound proposition, a coronal mass ejection of propulsive and audible means. Enjoy!
Released November 2003.
"A gorgeous record of free sound: Through three unsettled pieces, Open City breaks down the formalism of the avant garde, noise and free improvisation to reveal one of today’s most distinctive and intense group dynamics. The group use a constant flow of deep drone, pointilistic cut ups, rich texture and silence to create Alpha music. Unrepeatable and unpredictable, aggressively abstract, time-stamped, adaptive, actionist, attentionist, fun. An organic assembly language in an open field, avoiding the trance and repetition of idiomatic pop for sound statement and direct coinage.
Open City aims for a moment before music, the unsettled pause before a devastating blow. The Birth of Cruel is a generational X-flare, a sound proposition, a coronal mass ejection of propulsive and audible means. Enjoy!
5,00€
Out of stock
3 LP
Peter KOLOVOS
“Black colors”
Over more than a decade Peter Kolovos has created an incredibly physical and dynamic musical language using the electric guitar. He plays music that unpredictably flows from electrified fragments of sound which fold and expand in dense layers and massive tones that surge and collapse in rapid succession. His approach has been called “massively a-formal” and his control of timing and texture “masterful.” Rather than set harmonic or rhythmic structures, he draws form from open sequences of sound events merged and propelled by a distinct internal logic. In his music Kolovos attempts to erase the line between intent and impulse and to create sounds that are immediate and unrepeatable. Black Colors is the fullest realization of Kolovos’s music to date. Over six sides of vinyl the album presents a vast world of intricate sound-at times dense and teeming with saturated bursts and drones and at others sparse with minute ticks and quiet tones that reverberate in open space. Without a preset listening sequence, the album is intended to be a shifting, prismatic work-with sides that can be arranged in hundreds of different sequences, each yielding a distinct sound experience. The music on Black Colors is coupled with Zoe Crosher’s artwork. Eight photographs from her "L.A. Black Like" series present views from the black spaces and shadows of Los Angeles where light and color only pierce the darkness in filtered and obscured glimpses of the outside world. Beyond being created in the same time and place, Crosher’s images and Kolovos’s music share a deeper consonance. Deluxe Packaging: 3 x 180 gram high-quality vinyl pressed at Pallas Germany. Mastered at 45 RPM for volume, dynamics, and clarity by Rashad Becker at D&M Berlin. Full-color, heavy tip-on slipcase with three full-color sleeves. Digital download included.
20,00€