A first box set containing 16 CDs, presenting more than 40 works and 18 hours of listening, including never released before music by Denis Dufour and texts in a detailed booklet (Fr/Eng/Ger).
With his morphological and expressive approach to sound, Denis Dufour works on pieces in a constant state of renewal and on ideas that are specific to each piece. This results to a work looking like a large fresco in which no theme sounds alike, containing varied and breathtaking soundscapes and a patchwork of sounds, thoughts and colors that enable us to appreciate the sheer imagination as well as the consistence of his style. By deliberately but effortlessly opening his music to all sounds, Denis Dufour works with liberty, independence, rigor, and craftsmanship so refined that makes one forget oneself. Every second of sound is wrapped by a conscious ear so that so that his work contains no trace of automatic tools. Composer, teacher, researcher, director of label and festival, Denis Dufour, has greatly contributed to the development of acousmatic art in the world during forty years. First volume of the integral of his acousmatic work, this boxset regroups 44 works of Denis Dufour, composed between 1977 and 2020. Each one of the 16 discs is conceived as a listening program, which provides to listeners an immense landscape. The second volume is expected in 2022, and his instrumental work is under publication as well.
CD 1 – 3 Melodramas 1, 2 & 3
CD 4 – 5 Radio Art 1
CD 6 – 9 Suites 1, 2 & 3
CD 10 – 11 Tombeaux 1 & 2
CD 12 Acousmalides Cycle 1
CD 13 – 14 Sacred Music 1 & 2
CD 15 Electronica
CD 16 Moments musicaux 1
Several years of mutual appreciation and encounters on- and off-stage have been the root of this chance meeting, resulting in an unplanned mysterious collaboration album where the aura of each individual is augmented by the magic osmosis of united forces. The 12-tracks display a collage of dreamy musique concrète with desolate instrumental and vocal interventions, masterfully balanced out by Vincent Epplay.
Anne Gillis: words, voice, noises
Jac Berrocal: words, voice, trumpet
Vincent Epplay: field recording, percussion, Synthi AKS
Timo van Luijk: sounds, strings
Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue's first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This double-CD album brings together two complete performances by Curtis, recorded nearly 15 years apart (Paris in 2006 and Los Angeles in 2020), drawing attention to the evolution of the piece and to its inherent mutability. The sound and spirit of Naldjorlak are centered around the re-tuning of the entire cello to the wolf tone, a uniquely unstable frequency, creating a haunting, almost feedback-like resonance within the instrument itself. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with custom packaging and screen printing by Alan Sherry. Includes extensive liner notes by Gascia Ouzounian, Radigue, and Curtis, and a reproduction of Radigue's never-before published original drawing of Naldjorlak.
From Gascia Ouzounian's liner notes: "Even as it expands conceptions of what sound is, and thus what music can be, to understand Naldjorlak only as music would be to limit its scope. It is music, but it is also physics and philosophy. Naldjorlak is a detailed investigation of the physical properties of resonating bodies and dynamic systems; it is a meditation on the condition of instability; it is a metaphysics of chaos and uncertainty."
*2023 repress*
This double CD edition collects, for the first time, all the original music composed by Michele Bokanowski for the short films of her husband, Patrick Bokanowski.
Covering a time spectrum of almost 50 years, from "La Femme Qui Se Poudre" dated 1972 to "Vers Syracuse" of 2019.
Michele Bokanowski's sounds are visionary, sometimes disturbing and grotesque, sometimes ecstatic.
Some compositions are suites of grim musique concrete, an obscure ambient perhaps like never heard before, others are liquid abstractions of "expanded" music where it is easy to lose the ordinary awareness of one's senses, and find oneself experimenting with new ways of approaching listening as in the best tradition of experimental music .
The work of Michele Bokanowski and Patrick Bokanowski is essential for all avant-garde and visionary art lovers.
La Femme Qui Se Poudre (1972) 15:28
Déjeuner Du Matin (1974) 12:03
La Plage (1991) 12:12
Au Bord Du Lac (1993) 05:11
Flammes (1998) 03:35
Le Canard à L’orange (2002) 07:37
Battements Solaires (2008) 17:43
L’envol (2016) 07:26
L’indomptable (2017) 03:48
Vers Syracuse (2019) 05:40
Angus MacLise, the first drummer for the Velvet Underground, was a poet, composer, and a member of The Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young.
The "Tapes" 3CD Box is the first-ever reissue of a 3-cassette compilation that Pleasure Editions originally released in 2015, limited to only 100 copies. The 3CD box set comes with a miniature poster and track lists, and each CD has a paper sleeve that reproduces the original cassette card artwork. This comprehensive 3CD box set is over three hours in length and includes session recordings with Tony Conrad and William Breeze (of Coil, Current 93, and Psychic TV), mystical recordings from the filming of Ira Cohen's "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" (1968), shortwave experiments, and sounds of Tibetan Buddhist monks recorded by MacLise.
The "Tapes" compilation features excerpts from the archives of the Angus MacLise Papers, which are held at Columbia University Library. The archives contain over 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings of live improvised music, theatrical performances, and sound experiments created by MacLise and his associates during the 1960s and 1970s. MacLise produced the original recordings in his own unique style, characterized by rough and peculiar editing.
The release is curated and sequenced by Will Cameron and Mark Iosifescu.
Jim O'Rourke completed a new sound restoration and mastering of the recordings in 2023.
The 3CD box comes with a miniature poster, a sheet of track list, and each CD comes with a paper sleeve which reproduces the original cassette sleeve artwork.
About Terry Fox: Labyrinth of the inner ear
For the exhibition “Sonambiente", I will produce a new audio work for compact disc. The title of this work will be “Labyrinth of the inner ear" and it will be recorded in Berlin on the 14th and 15th of April, 2006. The compact disc will be produced directly after the recording process and presented, during Sonambiente, in a room of the former Polish Embassy.
This will be a kind of “drone" work consisting of the repetitive tapping of a sightless person (the artist, Siegfried Saerberg) navigating his way through an urban environment and finally returning to the place where the walk began. The sound of the cane, either tapping or sweeping back and forth, would be a constant in this composition. It would cease only when Siegfried stops walking for some reason, for
example: an interesting acoustical space, a ride in a public transport, etc.
Location interpretations could be ascertained by the sounds surrounding the steady central position of the cane; an alley, a busy shopping district, the relative quietness of a back street a park, and so forth. This walk would, itself, finally return to its place of origin.
Terry Fox, Köln 2006
About Terry Fox
Terry Fox (b. 1943 Seattle – d. 2008 Cologne) was one of the leading pioneers of American Body Art and Conceptual art. He became famous in the Seventies with performances in which he used his own body as a medium for exploring often extreme physical and psychological experiences. In numerous installations, actions and street events he directed a heightened attention to everyday phenomena and aspects of social interactions. Fox researched both unknown and little regarded aspects of energy in substances, and the transformative qualities of materials. And from the 1980s on, language, as both substance and meaning, would play an increasingly important role in his space related works and objects.
With his lifelong, innovative exploration of sound and space, Terry Fox is also one of the seminal figures in contemporary Sound Art. He became known worldwide in the 1970s for performances with meters-long piano wires stretched in rooms, often fastened from one wall to an opposite wall. With his understanding of sound as a sculptural material, he has created an impressive body of work located between Visual art and Acoustic Sound art. In his later years quiet sounds at the limit of audibility and silence became more and more prominent.
The ephemeral, the invisible, time, space, the body, words, letters, sound -throughout his entire work Terry Fox used the elemental forms of human existence to explore the possibilities of sculpture and extend its limits..
Fold out embossed DVD sleeve with liner notes and photographs documenting the piece
Recent years have seen the release and reissue of dozens of hours of Roland Kayn's music, on several labels and in both physical and digital formats. Our interconnected yet chaotically imbued age seems to be the setting in which Kayn has truly found his audience. The scene is now set for one of the most momentous works in his oeuvre to return to the shelves. 'Infra'.
One of the titanic cybernetic works Kayn originally released on the Colosseum label in the late 70s and early 80s, 'Infra' (1978-79) has come to occupy a very special place in the hearts of fans lucky enough to have copies of the original vinyl box sets. Now lovingly remastered from the original archive masters by Kayn devotee Jim O'Rourke, 'Infra' has finally found its way to CD for a new generation of admirers to discover.
For the newcomer, it should be mentioned that Kayn's electronic music exists in a category all its own, bearing precious little resemblance to that of any of his composer peers. His work perhaps sits more naturally in today's non-idiomatic landscape of drones, field recordings, and modular synthesis, yet arrives accompanied by a poise and near-epic suggestion of natural phenomena simply found nowhere else. Stretching forwards across four decades to suggest new possibilities even now, 'Infra' represents a musical world ripe for rediscovery.
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.
4th volume of Organum Electronics project
An abandoned silence
Dreams of drifting, living a fateful solitude
Wrapped around a grey and foaming voice
Reaping impulse and mass like a forgotten beast
Lost to countless days and nights
Rocks and soil, sand and stars
In the sadness of being
Standing apart
Remember the rising flame from time long ago
A sound that shook deeply from the bottom of a boiling ocean
One voice of Mother Magma
Formless lava fashioned a primeval landscape
Ash, smoke and seething seas
A red-hot avalanche cascades endlessly
The Awakened Voice
Predestined from beyond the FEARCENESS
Do you remember the last time you were breathing consciously? Either way, you are likely doing it now. On his new album "Observation of Breath" for the Swiss-based Hallow Ground label, Lawrence English worked exclusively with an organ for four compositions that are exercises in "maximal minimalism," as their creator himself notes in a nod to Charlemagne Palestine, who coined this term. While it seems somewhat fitting that those four pieces based on a steady flow of air were conceived and recorded in a situation of accelerated standstill caused by a respiratory disease, the Room40 founder is not so much concerned with capturing the zeitgeist than rather incorporating the spirit of time itself.
"It is a record about presence and patience," he explains. Exploring the unique sonic affordances of a singular instrument, "Observation of Breath" is not only devoted to the durability of sound but also to its density. That it marks his debut on Hallow Ground after having shaped its sound by mastering most of the label's releases in recent years is just as fitting then as its release following albums by Kali Malone and FUJI|||||||||||TA, whose innovative work with organ instruments have facilitated a rediscovery of their possibilities.
English's compositions however are neither directly indebted nor responding to these musicians. His exploration of the organ's many facets started a decade ago when the composer was given access to an instrument built in 1889 that is presently housed at The Old Museum in Brisbane. After it had already played a crucial role on his seminal albums "Wilderness Of Mirrors" and "Cruel Optimism," last year's self-released "Lassitude" was the first record that English entirely composed and recorded with that instrument. "During the soft lockdowns, I spent many days playing to an empty concert hall, recording the pieces that became >Lassitude< and then, this album," says English in regards to an unfortunate situation that fortunately provided him with time and space-two major themes but also key qualities of the four new compositions. In this sense, he goes on, "Observation of Breath" resolves a number of the questions originally raised by "Lassitude."
Field Recording and Fox Spirits is a collection of personal recordings -- from the field, from performance, from interviews -- that sketch out the breadth of David Toop's work over the past five decades. The recordings exist both as individual memories and as a hazy auditory daydream-like collage woven together by Lawrence English. Additionally, the edition includes a 40-page book, consisting of an extended in conversation with David Toop, which features extensive visual works and photographs from his archive.
From David Toop: "What are field recordings? 'My memory is not what it used to be, David,' my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria's funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat. Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious. During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted..."
Sub Rosa presents in their Early Electronic series, the final chapter of music by Beglian key composer of early electronic experiments, André Stordeur (1941-2020). Side A features a previously unreleased, stark and poignant composition from 1979; while the B side is vibrant and almost playful of pieces from the 2000s.
André Stordeur His musical career started in 1973 with a tape composition for the soundtrack to a film on Gordon Matta-Clark titled Office Baroque. Later in the 1970s, he participated to avantgarde music ensemble Studio voor Experimentele Muziek, founded in Antwerp, Flanders, by Joris De Laet. Since 1980, Stordeur composes exclusively on Serge synthesizer, either a Serge series 79 and a Serge prototype 1980, which was especially built for him by Serge Tcherepnin himself. In 1981, Stordeur composed the music of Belgian film director Christian Mesnil's documentary Du Zaïre au Congo. He studied at IRCAM in 1981 with David Wessel and then flew to the US to study with Morton Subotnick. Stordeur became an influential sound synthesis teacher and, in 1997, completed his Art of Analog Modular Synthesis by Voltage Control,[4] a guide to everything modular.
Oberheim While 'Oberheim' is the centerpiece of this LP, we pressed for the first time on vinyl three pieces from the session André called 'Synthesis Studies,' previously featuring on Complete Analog and Digital Electronic Music, 1978-2000. 'I was helped in my studies by a must-have book: The Techniques of Electronic Music, by Thomas Wells and Eric Vogel (University Stores, 1974). That book aside, I learned synthesis on my own. After a trip to India in 1968, I discovered Indian music and took tabla and sitar classes in New Delhi; my teachers were students of Chatur Lal and Ravi Shankar. Later, in the 2000s, while living in the US, I tried to recreate through synthesis all the Indian musical instruments I loved so much.' 'Drone' is one of his most spectacular works.
D.v. Euler-Donnersperg - side: 8 unreleased tracks from his wild beehive.
Felix Kubin - side: Felix Kubin accompanies René Clair‘s silent film »Entr’acte« from 1924 live with a new electro-acoustic soundtrack, which refers to the surreal choreography, the contrasts in content and the fast editing sequences of the film in rhythmic cut-ups.
Rene Clair‘s film „Entr‘acte“ from 1924 is a real jewel of surrealism and is largely unknown to this day. The director radically experiments with cinematographic effects, provokes absurd exaggerations, which sometimes take on blasphemous proportions, and is not afraid to commit violence. The staff of actors is made up of famous artists such as Erik Satie, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who, quite self-ironically, bounce through the image rather than stride. Men and women roles are reversed, a death procession turns into a roller coaster ride. The bizarre humor of the film also testifies, among other things, to the artistic daring of its time.
Gatefold sleeve, 300 copies
Music: Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg & Felix Kubin
Mastering: Rashad Becker, production & design: Robert Schalinski, artwork: Frank Diersch
David Toop illustrates the sound from the back of his eyelids in ‘Apparition Paintings’, accompanied by notables such as Áine O’Dwyer and Rie Nakajima to rustle int he undergrowth of Fourth World ambient, atomised jazz-fusion, and country-folk with curiously plasmic results subtly contrasting his recent ace, also for Lawrence English’s Room 40.
"Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it’s about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense of fading, like a mist that thins out to leave not a clear bright day but almost nothing of substance as all that beauty is crushed, burned, dug up, wiped out, to be replaced by banality, so it’s about a language of love and desire in which we speak openly to all the unknowns, the speculative, the ancestral, the forgotten, the different, the extinct, the unimaginably distant and vast, the incomprehensibly small and intimately close, the fast or the slow, as if as we spoke we were becalmed in a wooden galleon off the coast of Java, sleeping microscopically in soil of a thousand years hence, hearing the voice of a dead person from the rim of a vibrating cup, gliding backwards and weightless through the alleyways of a city unrecognisable yet heartbreaking in its poverty, speaking in conference with winged and amphibious beings, crouching in a cavern whose opening only reveals the spectre of many wonders now apprehended as memories of the skin, heard through cheekbones, nostrils, the crepitation as a neck turns, pains of the knee and thumb and some not yet fully understood sensation within the throat which suggests a way of comprehending that which is being lost of this magical place. All I desire is what already exists or once existed, now falling asleep outside the world.
Don’t ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares? Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box. “’Things’ in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous,” wrote Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. Maybe sounds are melting ‘things’, tired of the monotonous real.
Apparition painting is the term used to describe a certain type of ancient Chinese painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In these works, often associated with Chan (Zen) teachings, the ink used to depict the subject was exceptionally pale, the background lacking in any detail. As Yukio Lippit has written: “This combination results in remarkably self-dissembling images that somehow compromise their own visibility. Apparition painting appears to capture its subjects in mid-fade, as if managing to preserve only a dimly translucent afterimage of a bygone entity.” - David Toop
Liner Notes From Bill Meyer
In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, "You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough."
In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual 6 hour-long solstice concert at the Experimental lntermedia loft; not only did the neighbors complain, the landlord sued. But the validity of his prescription is undiminished, for it takes sonic volume and spatial confinement to unlock his music's true nature. Give the sound waves a boost and something hard to smack against, and they begin to shiver and multiply so that tones transform tones and every turn of the head (or every new room) yields a new listening experience. But Guitar too, for four is notable in Niblock's oeuvre for its independence from loudness. While it sounds great turned up, the additive process that yielded the CD's two versions has resulted in music that changes most rewardingly, even when heard at modest volume.
Victor Frankl opined that in the hierarchy of essential human motivations, meaning eclipses pleasure. In some ways, this music hews closer to the pleasure principle. Once you let go of the yearning for tunes and grooves, it's a sensuous delight to dunk yourself in the warm sound-bath of his music. And Niblock would be the first person to scotch any efforts to assign the sort of cosmic significance fhaf certain other drone-oriented minimalists did to their art. But consider this notion; Niblock's music is fundamentally social. It only truly happens in spaces where people gather.
While he does much of the composing and assembling of this music alone, Niblock didn't treat Guitar too, for four as finished until he got some more people in on the act. He asked Rafael ToraI and Jim O'Rourke to contribute to a CD edition. And when O'Rourke declined to play on his own production, but instead invited Kevin Drumm, Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, and Lee Renaldo to do the honors, Niblock's reaction was the more, the merrier.
To the extent that connecting people is an essentially meaningful activity, this music is the connective tissue of meaning.
Matte laminate embossed sleeve, insert card, 24 page book with linear notes from Bill Meyer, interview and photos.
Asmus Tietchens is a sound artist and composer from Hamburg, Germany. He got interested in Musique Concrete by listening to a German radio programme when he was 10 years old. In 1965, at the age of 18, Asmus started experimenting with tape loops and turned them into musical collages. Soon, the use of synthesizers was added. In 1980 his debut album Nachtstücke was released, produced by Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream. This was soon followed by a series of albums of electronic pop music for the Sky label, home of many Krautrock bands. Tietchens often uses special source materials for his compositions such as water (Seuchengebiete), human voices (Von Mund zu Mund), paper (Papier ist geduldig). He is associated with the Industrial music scene through his collaborations and releases on labels such as United Dairies, Esplendor Geometrico or Dom Records. Tietchens never studied composition, he has no academic background, everything he does is self taught or learnign by doing. Nevertheless, he was professor for sound design in Hamburg in recent years. Linea was originally released on cassette on Dutch Korm Plastics label, later re-issued as a CDR in 1999. It is one of Tietchens's most minimal compositions, and has a special place in our music hearts here at Klanggalerie. For our new edition, Asmus Tietchens has dug deep into his archive and unearthed two further Linea pieces that have so far never seen the light of day.
Bent Lorentzen is widely considered one of the key figures and pioneers of early Danish electronic music and he was one of a few classically trained composers seeking out the possibilities of the new technology in the 1960's. Lorentzen composed a fairly large number of electronic works, – mainly in the 60's and 70'es. Furthermore, he developed a significant educational practice in and around electronic music, conducted workshops, taught at courses, and published articles in both national and international journals, while also producing several educational records on electronic music.
'Electronic Music' was originally released in 1987 as a retrospective album, collecting three of Bent Lorentzen's electronic works from the 70'es. The thee works clearly demonstrate Lorentzen's close familiarity with his equipment and his great technical proficiency regarding the creation and manipulation of all sorts of electronic and recorded acoustic sounds – typically in the form of speed changes, reversed sounds, and reverb and filter effects. The music is often quite dramatic with distinct narratives and multiple dynamic layers of sound, but still with a clear sense of disposition and restraint, possibly stemming from Lorentzen's experience with classical instrumentation, and orchestration.
'The Bottomless Pit' (originally Afgrundens brønd) on side A was composed as the musical score for a ballet by the Norwegian dance company Høvik Ballett, commissioned by NOMUS (Nordic Music Commitee) and staged at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo during the Nordic Music Days festival in 1972. The piece was originally composed for four channels, but mixed down to stereo for the 1987 release.
Side B's 'Visions' (originally Visione) and 'Cloud-Drift '(originally NUBES) were also both composed as 4-channel works. The back of the original LP-sleeve contains small prints of graphic notations accompanying the two compositions, here reproduced in enlarged versions for better readability.
The music on the record has been carefully remastered for this reissue. The Bottomless Pit and Visions are new stereo mixes made from 4-channel versions obtained from Gunner Møller Pedersen's private archive. These versions had much more clarity, detail, and depth than other masters we were able to find. The mix from four channels to stereo has been done with careful regard to how the stereo versions appear on the original record. Cloud-Drift was not to be found in its 4-channel version, but comes from the master tape for the 1987 release from OH Musik / Point Records. This piece appears a bit rougher and with less detail in the higher frequencies, but it is the exact same version, as the one on the original release from 1987.
Music for Organ is comprised of two, sidelong works - Unmounted / Muted Noun, composed in 2019 for organ and four pre-recorded tracks, and Nagro (aka - Organ), for organ and tape, from 2007. In the case of later, the tape material was recorded in 2007 by Emanuel Schmelzer-Ziringer, on an 18th century organ in Austria. The remaining recordings were made by Hampus Lindwall, in presence of the Niblock, in Belgium earlier this year.
Unmounted/ Muted Noun, 2019, for organ AND 4 pre-recorded tracks. Hampus Lindwall, organ.Nagro (aka - Organ), 2007, for organ and tape Tape material was recorded May 1, 2007 at the Joseph Gatto Organ (1787) in Sankt Kirchberg am Wagram, Austria by Emanuel Schmelzer-Ziringer.
New edition + new mastering of 1968 album in deluxe A5 Digipak (DVD Format).
Formed in 1967 as an electronic rock duo featuring Dan Taylor on drums and Simeon on a homemade synthesizer consisting of 12 oscillators and an assortment of sound filters, telegraph keys, radio parts, lab gear and a variety of second hand electronic junk, the band quickly gained a reputation as New York’s leading underground musical expression.
First full-length album was released in 1968 on KAPP Records. The self titled album rode the Billboard Magazine Top 100 list for 10 weeks.
The second full length album was released in 1969, titled “Contact”. A national tour was launched by the band’s recording popularity. A third album was recorded in 1970, but not released when KAPP folded.
Without a record label the band disbanded, and, except for an occasional bootleg release, was not heard from again until 1994, when a German label named TRC, without license, re-released the first two albums in a 2 CD version, complete with poster. Since then numerous artists around the world have released covers, tributes and samplings of Silver Apples material.
New edition + new mastering of 1968 album in deluxe A5 Digipak (DVD Format).
Formed in 1967 as an electronic rock duo featuring Dan Taylor on drums and Simeon on a homemade synthesizer consisting of 12 oscillators and an assortment of sound filters, telegraph keys, radio parts, lab gear and a variety of second hand electronic junk, the band quickly gained a reputation as New York’s leading underground musical expression.
First full-length album was released in 1968 on KAPP Records. The self titled album rode the Billboard Magazine Top 100 list for 10 weeks.
The second full length album was released in 1969, titled “Contact”. A national tour was launched by the band’s recording popularity. A third album was recorded in 1970, but not released when KAPP folded.
Without a record label the band disbanded, and, except for an occasional bootleg release, was not heard from again until 1994, when a German label named TRC, without license, re-released the first two albums in a 2 CD version, complete with poster. Since then numerous artists around the world have released covers, tributes and samplings of Silver Apples material.
Penultimate Press present A Sunset for Walter, the first duo release from long-time collaborators Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras. "Having worked together in a number of different collaborative contexts over the years, the pair used Pateras' 2018 residency at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart as an opportunity to develop a major durational work for Steinway piano and multiple Revox tape machines. Presenting four excerpts from a three-hour concert, the LP's opening moments immediately establish its distinctive sound-world: an austere sequence of octaves slowly sounded by the piano gradually develops into passages of fragmentary lyricism as Noetinger's tape manipulations dilate the sonic space with rumbling sub-bass, distant echoes, and hints of uncanny backmasking. A Sunset for Walter was conceived as a loose tribute to the piano works of Walter Marchetti, particularly the slowed-down subaquatic expanse of Nel Mari Del Sud. As Marchetti described his own work, A Sunset for Walter is 'music without beginning, or end, or development', where the lack of obvious structural divisions creates something like an endless present. But where the monochrome surface of Marchetti's work — in its willingness to descend, in his own words to the 'pits of aesthetic poverty' — often approaches total stasis, A Sunset for Walter is calmly immovable in its overall texture but perpetually changing in detail, as the performers respond intuitively to each other, their instruments, and the environment. Noetinger's tape manipulations range from nearly imperceptible shadowing of the live piano to anarchic bursts of rewinding tape, floating wisps of feedback, and dreamlike concrète interjections of children's voices and splashing water. Pateras' piano performance moves from single pitches left hanging over a backdrop of silence to almost Messiaen-esque sequences of complex chords and arpeggios, all sounded within a temporal framework that seems to follow internal rhythms of breath and bodily movements. Caught in this hall of mirrors, the listener is often unable to distinguish the live piano from its tape-manipulated reflection. Like the sunset of the title, here outlines blur into a crepuscular haze, as fleeting effects of light and shade catch our attention just as they disappear." – Francis Plagne
16 track composition for pre recorded sounds and live percussion performed by Michael Ranta (entirely different work from the Yuen Shan CD released in 2005).
All material previously unreleased.
Yuen Shan (Round Mountain in Chinese) was conceived in 1972 and finalized in 2014. It’s a musical cosmogony in four cycles based on different levels of ancient Asian spiritual principles and mechanisms. A major work in Ranta’s oeuvre (his first solo release in almost 25 years), highly personal and spiritual.
"1970 was an important year in Eliane Radigue's musical life since it was the year just before she acquired her ARP 2500 synthesizer. Since 1967, she had been using the feedback as a material; feedback from two tape recorders reworked through intensive studio techniques: slowing down, alteration, superimposition, montage.
"In 1970, the last year she dedicated to feedback, several milestone pieces saw the light of day: Omnht, a wonderful sound installation for three out-of-phase tape loops and wall-mounted loudspeakers; the theoretical setting of Labyrinthe Sonore (eventually premiered at Mills College in 1998 in collaboration with Pauline Oliveros, Maggie Payne and William Winant, among others); Opus 17, one of her first compositions in fixed duration (according to Rhys Chatham, a decisive piece that would change his own compositional career); and Vice-Versa, etc…, which appears to be her very last feedback loop composition.
"Vice-Versa, etc… was conceived as a sound installation setting similar to S=a=b=a+b. A single magnetic tape can be played at any speed, a stereo tape of which allows three playings: left channel alone, right channel alone, left and right channels together. These different channels can be overlapped/crossed over as much as possible, at any speed. Thus the piece reveals itself in its whole dimension, its infinite grace. (...)" Manu Holterbach
“Includes liner notes & archival photographs. On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Eliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall-Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978. Recorded in the composer’s studio in Paris. After the premiere of Adnos I in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Eliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned to Paris, she began to explore this spirituality in depth, which slowed her musical production up until 1978. Triptych marks her return to composition, and draws its inspiration from the spirit of the fundamental elements", water, air, fire, earth... Eliane Radigue likes to add that this has often been useful to her in her moments of research and transitions. This three-part composition, with its great humility and contemplative simplicity, heralded a new period of work and was the first in a series of masterpieces inspired by Tibetan Buddhism: Adnos II (1980), Adnos III (1981), Songs of Milarepa (1983) - with the voices of Lama Kunga Rinpoche and Robert Ashley -, “Jetsun Mila” (1986), as well as the Trilogy of Death: Kyema (1988), Kailasha (1991) and Koume (1993). Archival images included in the accompanying booklet.”
Homotopy To Marie is the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, released in 1982, created by Steven Stapleton, music and sleeve.
The album is “a step on from the Dadaist rock of Merzbild Schwet, with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques”. The album which combined tape edits with resonating gong tones and disembodied children's voices to create a sonic collage far removed from the harsh improvisations of the group's early albums.
The title of the brief closing track derives from a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, a surreal poetic novel written by Le Comte de Lautréamont. This appropriation of a phrase from Maldoror is shared in common with the title of Nurse With Wound’s debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella; both phrases appear in Lautréamont’s work.
The album was first issued on Stapleton's own United Dairies label on vinyl, cassette and later in remastered compact disc including an extra track “Astral Dustbin Dirge”.
This masterpiece reissue, is the official full double album from the original recording sessions. The 4 tracks from the original LP plus additional recordings from the same period.
This second, double album masterpiece in the Silver Collection of Nurse With Wound albums, is a technically better, crystal clear performance, in comparison to the original 1982 cut.
Black vinyl, 800 copies.
Vinyl silver & black + deluxe metallic gatefold limited to 700 copies.
Homotopy To Marie is the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, released in 1982, created by Steven Stapleton, music and sleeve.
The album is “a step on from the Dadaist rock of Merzbild Schwet, with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques”. The album which combined tape edits with resonating gong tones and disembodied children's voices to create a sonic collage far removed from the harsh improvisations of the group’s early albums.
The title of the brief closing track derives from a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, a surreal poetic novel written by Le Comte de Lautréamont. This appropriation of a phrase from Maldoror is shared in common with the title of Nurse With Wound’s debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella; both phrases appear in Lautréamont’s work.
The album was first issued on Stapleton’s own United Dairies label on vinyl, cassette and later in remastered compact disc including an extra track “Astral Dustbin Dirge”.
This masterpiece reissue, is the official full double album from the original recording sessions. The 4 tracks from the original LP plus additional recordings from the same period.
This second, double album masterpiece in the Silver Collection of Nurse With Wound albums, is a technically better, crystal clear performance, in comparison to the original 1982 cut.
2013. Chromanatron is the new album from Nurse with wound, collages of no less than 5 albums by the mythical German band from the late 60s SAND. These five psyche-experimental-krautrock albums include their first oddity Golem, that NWW discovered a long time ago and represented straight away a great source of inspiration for him.
A great dedication to Sand, and hat-in-hand, chapeau bas ! to Nurse with wound for this once again unique masterpiece.
Chromanatron is part of the series Inxodem released by Rotorelief. It is a series of new albums from Sand as well as a reissue of their obscure and rare album Golem. This series of albums is called Inxodem, the series title having one letter for each album. Current 93 is also part of the project with When the may rain comes, cover versions of the original track from Sand.
All paintings and collages of the Inxodem series are created by Babs Santini aka Steven Stapleton.
Limited and numbered edition of 500 copies on picture disc.
2013.
Chromanatron is the new album from Nurse with wound, collages of no less than 5 albums by the mythical German band from the late 60s SAND. These five psyche-experimental-krautrock albums include their first oddity Golem, that NWW discovered a long time ago and represented straight away a great source of inspiration for him.
A great dedication to Sand, and hat-in-hand, chapeau bas ! to Nurse with wound for this once again unique masterpiece.
Chromanatron is part of the series Inxodem released by Rotorelief. It is a series of new albums from Sand as well as a reissue of their obscure and rare album Golem. This series of albums is called Inxodem, the series title having one letter for each album. Current 93 is also part of the project with When the may rain comes, cover versions of the original track from Sand.
All paintings and collages of the Inxodem series are created by Babs Santini aka Steven Stapleton.
CD 3 flaps 6 panels Digipak
“Elemental II is the first ever piece Eliane Radigue wrote for an instrument, without any pre-recorded sounds, without the use of her ARP synthesiser. I took a very long time to convince her to do so, the piece was some two years or more in the making - discussing about the sound a mountain makes after the rain. The first recording was released just after the premiere of the piece, in 2004. In 2011, seven years later, after having played the piece more 30 times in concert, after having spend a long time with it, after having “domesticated” it, it seemed interesting to rerecord it - something very common in classical music, but almost inexistant in those “other”, electronic, musics. However those musics also live, change, evolve ; the same score another point of wiev”.
Documentary recordings of Hartmut Geerken and Michael Ranta’s November and December 1976 tour of the Middle East and East Asia. Geerken is known for his long relationship with Sun Ra including compiling a discography), but he wears many other hats too: musician, film-maker, archivist. Ranta is a percussionist best known for his famous “Improvisation Sep.1975” collaborative
record with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi. This is a CD reissue of an LP boxset, originally released in 2010 as the last release on the now dormant Italian label Qbico. The tour started in Iran before moving east to India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Korea, and ending in Japan. At their show in Osaka, they played together with Toshi Ichiyanagi. This edition includes the concert with Ichiyanagi, solo performances by Ichiyanagi and Shoko Shida, as well as a rare Delhi performance that was originally only included in the highly limited 6LP edition of the Qbico set. All the tracks overflow with rich multi-dimensionality, providing a glimpse of Ranta and Geerken’s depth as performers.
Boxset. Includes a 12-page booklet with flyers from the period.
Limited edition of 500.
Disc 1. rec. November 25; Baghe Ferdows-Zafaranieh, Teheran, Iran. rec. December 1; Max Mueller Bhavan, Delhi, India. rec. December 3/4; Max Mueller Bhavan, Calcutta, India.
Disc 2. rec. December 8, German Cultural Institute in co-op with the Academy of the Arts, Dacca, Bangladesh.
Disc 3. rec. December 13; Abelardo Inner Green (open air) in co-op with the U.P. College of Music, Manila, Philippines.
Disc 4. rec. December 15; Korea Drama Center, Seoul, Korea.
Disc 5. rec. December 18, Goethe-Institute, Osaka, Japan.