Out of stock
CD
Hanne LIPPARD – Ellen ARKBRO – Hampus LINDWALL
“How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?”
Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall’s How do I know if my cat likes me? is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday—corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition. By untethering sound from meaning through a pleasurably numbing cycle of repetition, the album satirizes the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life—from hold music to online banking—with a prim, deadpan delivery.
Conceived when Lippard and Arkbro were both in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (and recorded in part on the organs of that same town’s Temple Saint-Théodule), How do I know if my cat likes me? is a long-awaited collaboration from the trio they formed with Lindwall. Throughout, Arkbro and Lindwall’s ascetic organ accompaniment provides a tonal landscape that is both intuitive and enigmatic, while Lippard’s recitation ensnares the listener in a tautological customer-service loop where language shifts from pure function to pure aesthetic. How do I know if my cat likes me? opens with an interpretation of Phil Harmonic’s classic 1978 composition “Timing,” originally written for and performed by “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Harmonic, a Cagian who resisted the authoritarian strictures of notation, wrote a piece that invites the performer to make “subtle and thoughtful changes” based on pre-recorded audio cues—“Change now”—designed to capture his idiosyncratic sense of timing. “The Long Goodbye” imagines an unending dialogue between automated acquaintances who try to politely disengage with the same few parting words, perpetually on the verge of separation. Meanwhile, “Modern Spanking” paronomastically free-associates from sterile conveniences to illicit erotics. Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking,” it sketches a world of perfunctory pleasures whose sadism is more indebted to Jamie Dimon than Marquis de Sade. The album wraps up with a rendition of “At Last I Am Free,” Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco breakup anthem, notably reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt as a world-weary yet triumphant protest song. Amid the monotonous absurdities of How do I know if my cat likes me?, “At Last I Am Free” takes on a haunting irony. With its eternally ambiguous refrain—“I can hardly see in front of me”—the song calls into question the very fact of freedom (perhaps as an antidote to Harmonic’s Cagianism). Existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment.
How do I know if my cat likes me? recalls David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s Daytime Viewing (1979–80) (Unseen Worlds, 2013), a highly stylized, puckish stream of soap-operatic scenes and sales channel segments, punctuated by Humbert’s listless narration and Rosenboom and Willie Winant’s drum machines, claves, and maracas. The album also nods to Paul DeMarinis’s Songs Without Throats (Black Truffle, 2019), a compilation of tracks from the 1970s in which all the lyrics are recited by Speak & Spell machines. Constantly poking at the porous membrane between sound and meaning, poetry and song, or playful irreverence and existentialism, How do I know if my cat likes me? is a portal into a fantastical, unforgettable, organic-synthetic world.
Hanne Lippard is an artist who has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture.
Ellen Arkbro is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. She focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Hampus Lindwall is an artist, organist, and composer. Since 2005, he has been the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris.
18,00€
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
CD
Rafael TORAL
“Sound Mind Sound Body”
Sound Mind Sound Body was inspired in part by the working principles of Fripp & Eno, extrapolated by Rafael via a unique signal path leading out of his guitar. He paid notice to the massive impact of discreet gestures, creating slow-moving tones and spacious orchestral resonances, drifting and droning with glacial majesty, hardly recognizable as guitar much of the time. The first pieces were recorded in 1987; in 1994, a collection was released on Portugal's AnAnAnA, producing an hour’s worth of remarkable sonic equilibrium in this mode. With each subsequent reissue, however, aspects of this sound have been subtly revisited. For the 1998 Moikai CD, "AE 1", one of the earliest pieces conceived, was newly recorded; for the 2018 Drag City LP master, “Textura e Linhas Curvas” was included, "AER 7 E" was re-recorded and the material for "AE 2" was recorded for the first time ever. These performances were executed using the same processes as the original ones. For the current CD, “Loopability II” has been recalled from the AnAnAnA master, “Textura e Linhas Curvas” omitted and yet another brand new version of “AER 7E” inserted in place of the 2018 version. Incredibly, all of these changes augment Sound Mind Sound Body’s expansive intent without altering its essential otherworldly atmosphere.
16,00€
In stock
CD
Rafael TORAL
“Wave Field”
Wave Field, released in 1995, was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O'Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter's cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements — a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Eno blend together. Here, the clangorous potential of the guitar was emphasized, giving a metallic edge to the two extended pieces and "radio edit" coda. The jacket paid subtle tribute to My Bloody Valentine, which, along with the radio edit, suggested a harmony between musical directions as wildly disparate as minimalist experimental and rock. Today, such a paradoxical intent is more widely considered as a part of the artist's purview.
16,00€
In stock
CD
Stephen O’MALLEY
“But remember what you have had”
With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.
Composed by Stephen O’Malley / Mixed & arranged at GRM studios, Paris, 2022-2024 / Commissioned by INA grm
Electric guitars performed by Stephen O’Malley / Recorded at Applehead Studio, Woodstock by Randall Dunn, September 2022
Winds performed by Hans Teuber (bfl, fl, bcl, cl, tpt) & Stephen Moore (tbn) / Recorded at Studio Litho, Seattle by Floyd Reitsma, September 2022 / Arrangement assistance & conduction by Kali Malone
Premix at La Fugitive, Paris with François-Xavier Gilles & Tristan Mazire, February 2023 / Final stereo mix at GRM studios, Paris with Emmanuel Richier, May & October 2024
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, October 2024 / Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, October 2024
17,00€
In stock
CD
Jim O’ROURKE
“Shutting Down Here”
Shutting Down Here
2019 / 35’13
Recorded at INA GRM and Steamroom
Piano: Eiko Ishibashi // Violin, viola: Atsuko Hatano // Trumpet: Eivind Lonning
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020
Photo by Eiko Ishibashi // Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley
Special thanks to Francois Bonnet and Jean Schwarz for bookending 30 years
Due to the wide dynamic levels, please adjust your volume accordingly
Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like an universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans . This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition.
Released in association with Editions Mego.
Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg
17,00€
Out of stock
CD
ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH
“Spilla”
Black Truffle presents Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah, the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (BT 086CD). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie's long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell's "Uncle," performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell's dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal. Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois' drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.
14,50€
Out of stock
10 CD box
Kevin DRUMM
“If Tomorrow Gets Here”
Kevin Drumm (b. 1970) is a Chicago-based composer of electronic music, and his works have been published by labels like iDEAL, Editions Mego, Erstwhile and lately he has been self publishing many of his recent works. This box set is compiling some of that, paired with some exclusive things aswell as new versions. It is moving from his harsher stuff to more ambient recordings. iDEAL is proud to release this massive 10xCD box set mastered by Lasse Marhaug.
100,00€
Out of stock
CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“Tainted Creampuffs – The Hostess Twinkie Mixes”
This was originally release on Betalactum in 2004 as a limited edition CDR Of 25 copies & as such, was one of the rarerest items in the Nurse discography.
It has been put back together from its original fragmented form & mastered at IC Studio by Colin Potter, who did the mutating of the voice recordings recorded & cut up by Mr. Stapleton a long, long time ago .
Reissued due to popular demand, this is an edition of 300 copies in a digipack with new Santini artwork.
Possibly one of the strangest Nurse releases of all time. And that's saying something.....
15,00€
In stock
CD
Colin POTTER & Jonathan COLECLOUGH
“Carboniferous”
After running IC Studio for over 40 years I’ve accumulated a large store of recordings by both myself and the many people I’ve worked with. I was recently looking for some masters of another band on a hard drive, where I stored tracks that had been transferred from old digital tapes. I noticed the folder ‘Period Remixes’ which I decided to open, as I hadn’t listened to the material for many years. The tracks were remixes of Jonathan Coleclough's 'Period' album, on which I had worked with him when it was released over 20 years ago. These pieces were made before the use of computers became commonplace in studios. They were all mixed live, without editing, using a physical mixing desk and external analogue and digital effects units.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard.
And I hope you will be too.
Colin Potter, IC Studio. London 2025
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
Arvo PÄRT
“Silentium”
Four pieces by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, a pioneer of “holy minimalism.” The album centers around a never-before-released rendition of “Silentium,” the second movement of Pärt’s most famous concerto, Tabula Rasa, performed by Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry. The group plays “Silentium” at nearly half the speed of the best-known version, released on ECM in 1984. The piece, known for its healing properties for the dying and often used in palliative care facilities (one patient famously called it “angel music”), is breathtaking at half speed, seemingly stilling time itself.
The album compiles some of the most stunning renditions of Pärt’s music ever recorded. “Vater Unser (Arr. for trombone & string ensemble)” is somehow warm and austere at once. A miniature epic. Pianist Marcel Worm’s solo version of “Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka” is as beautiful as anything we’ve ever heard. “Fratres for Strings and Percussion” is one of Arvo Pärt’s most celebrated works. The Hungarian State Opera Orchestra’s version is iconic, filled with emotional playing right on the verge of overly romantic, but never tipping over.
Pärt’s approach to both music and life is as sparse as the compositions he creates. He once said, “I have nothing to say… Music says what I need to say. And it is dangerous to say anything, because if I’ve said it already in words there might be nothing left for my music.” Silentium continues Mississippi Records’ fascination with this great contemporary composer
14,50€
In stock
CD
ILINX
“Flipperen”
'Flipperen' takes the randomness of pinball and turns it into music. Using recordings from old pinball machines, the music mixes chaos and structure, reflecting the Fluxus spirit of play and chance. It's a wild ride through sound, where things don't always make sense--but that's the fun of it.
During the quiet and strange Covid days, Suzana Lașcu, Robert Kroos, and Reinier van Houdt began a recording project based on the soundbites of pinball machines. They visited the empty Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam and captured field recordings of machines from the 1960s to the 1990s. From these, they selected 28 samples to serve as thematic starting points for what they called 'game pieces,' recorded in two sessions at Sonology Studios in The Hague. The recordings were then shaped into sound collages using cut-up techniques and probabilistic processes.
The project is titled 'Flipperen,' released under the name 'Ilinx.' 'Ilinx' refers to a form of play described by Roger Caillois, which creates a temporary disruption of perception, similar to vertigo or trance. The trio’s improvisational approach intentionally follows this principle.
The samples were chosen to highlight how the ball moves through the pinball machines. The sound design reacts to its journey, capturing how it interacts with the machines and the elements inside.
Pinball is a game that combines control and randomness—each action leads to an unpredictable result, and the outcome is always uncertain. The ball bounces around, following its own path, guided by chance and momentum. This sense of unpredictability is reflected in the music, where the sounds are both structured and random. By combining recorded samples with processes that incorporate chance, the music mirrors the chaotic movement of the pinball, showing how disorder can form patterns and meaning.
The unpredictable nature of pinball connects to the work of avant-garde artists like the Fluxus movement, who embraced randomness and unconventional methods. This project delves into the tension between control and chaos, where play and randomness become tools for reimagining sound itself. It flows unpredictably, like the disorienting dance of a pinball bouncing between unseen paths.
The album cover features 'Pinball Wizard II' (1973) by Dutch Situationist Jaqueline de Jong, who once described the "flipside of existence" where time is bent and forms are constantly in play, much like the pinball itself. Jaqueline bought a pinball machine she named 'Gaucho' in 1972, and playing it gave her "wonderful and idiotic sensations," reflecting the same chaos and playfulness that runs through this album. She generously allowed the use of her artwork before her passing in June 2024.
13,00€
In stock
2 CD
Christof MIGONE
“Wet Water (Let’s Dance)”
Christof Migone's 'Wet Water (Let’s Dance)' immerses you in a mysterious soundscape, characterised by electronic noise and watery flows. Each piece explores inarticulation and the struggle to communicate, challenging traditional notions of sound and language. In the work captured in this collection, the relation between elements is abstract, entangled, puzzle-like in its weirdness, and all the more rewarding for that.
The four pieces constituting The Release (Into Motion), which take up the entirety of disc two, are different, more conventionally ‘musical’ in structure and style, but still sharing, as with all of Migone’s work, a conceptual sensibility and feeling of underlying logics at work. In each piece, layers of roughly pitched electronics tones flow into and around each other, as if mirroring the dynamic surfaces, continuous motion, interference patterns, and interacting currents of ocean waves. These sounds derive from a performance work in which Migone held a tomato frozen in a block of ice in his mouth while it slowly melted over more than thirty minutes—a painful looking exercise, based on the documentation images. How such an endurance ritual produced these sounds is mysterious and oblique, but at the same time highly suggestive. Like so much of the work captured and documented in this collection, the relation between elements is abstract, entangled, puzzle-like in its weirdness, and all the more rewarding for that.
— Joel Stern
16,00€
In stock
2 CD
GOODIEPAL – BANANSKOLEN
“The Pruttipal Index”
What is - or rather: what could be - a "Pruttipal Index"? In books, libraries and databases, an index is usually a concise overview or inventory. It suggests that this album could be a mini-encyclopedia of the work of its makers. In economics, indexes are measurements of the current state of an economy; which, in the case of this album, could be a vitality metrics of the Goodiepal & Pals/GP&PLS/BananSkole collective that produced it. In semiotics, an index is a sign that functions as a trace (like smoke as an index of fire). Because of their technology, vinyl records are indexical (with their grooves being indexes of sound waves), but in addition, this album could also be seen as a series of sonic traces, or footprints, left by the various activities of GP&PLS and Pruttipal over the eight years of their collective existence.
Everyday life, creative and social practice, learning and experimentation are constantly interwoven in these recordings. This is reminiscent of other experimental living, learning and music-making communities since the early 1970s, such as the French experimental ICEM/Freinet schools.
While the solo artist also known as Goodiepal can still be heard on this album - in spoken tracks and what sounds like half-improvised electronic pieces -, s/he has become gradually disguised and dissolved. The "Pruttipal Index" is thus a record of their latest self-reinvention, as they have been reinventing themselves periodically since the 1990s, including their latest identity Pruttipal, taken from the Danish word "prut" meaning "fart". Pruttipal may have become a boring old fart, or the fart may be a joke on the perceived noises of experimental music or the seeming casualness of the recordings.
There is, audibly, an eclectic stylistic mix of theater, group improvisation, choirs, folk music and children's songs, campy-ironic modular synthesizer electronics, highly-produced art rock and no wave jazz, heavy metal, techno, punk and catchy Scandinavian dance pop tunes interspersed with mock-conspiracy podcasting. Much of it could be called functional music derived from collective social performances to be reused for new collective social performances.
14,00€
In stock
2 CD
David JACKMAN
“Steadfast”
This is the seventh and last release in the Die Stadt CD series. Even though David Jackman gets the credit in the title, the music itself is pure Organum electronics—dense, noisy, and exactly what fans would expect. Emerging as a meditative gesture within the long and enigmatic arc of David Jackman’s output, Steadfast stands as both a summation and a deepening of concerns that have occupied him for decades. Issued as a double CD by Die Stadt, the release captures Jackman—best known for his work under the Organum moniker—at a moment of stark clarity and quiet force. His legacy, shaped through collaborations with figures like David Tibet and Steven Stapleton, has always occupied a space between austerity and intensity, drawing on minimalism, drone, and ritualized abstraction to forge a language uniquely his own.
Across the two discs of Steadfast, we find a music that is neither strictly acoustic nor electronic, but something in between—an environment, a slow unfolding. Analog synthesizers swell and recede like distant weather systems; field recordings and incidental sounds rise with spectral insistence before dissolving again into silence. There is a patience here, a sense of refusal, of staying with the sound long after others might have let go. Moments verge on the imperceptible, only to bloom suddenly into passages of engulfing texture.
Rather than a document of change, Steadfast feels like a portrait of duration—of persistence in listening and making. It does not seek to impress but to inhabit; it asks for time and gives it back in kind. For those familiar with the ceremonial gravity of Organum or the liminal poetics of Nurse With Wound, this work may feel at once familiar and startlingly new—a quiet epiphany from one of the most singular voices in experimental sound.
19,00€
In stock
2 CD
David JACKMAN
“Schining”
"Music and musical releases can be controversial for many reasons. Lyrical content, shocking covers, too loud, too quiet: David Jackman’s music is controversial for none of these reasons. His music isn’t noisy or silent, with no lyrical content or a shocking cover. I am not on any discussion group online and never was, but I can imagine a discussion with the topic: “Is David Jackman doing the same thing over and over again?”. I don’t know the answer, but I can guess. We can say the last few releases (and I am discounting his Organum Electronics releases; they are in a different league) contain the same musical elements.
I copy from my last review, “A drone, Shruti-like, some low gong sound, the occasional bang on the piano, a church bell and some crows flying overhead”. The crows may have flown away, but the other elements are there. I also wrote, “The drone is continuous here; the others appear irregularly. The whole work is slow and majestic. The music has a funeral aspect, like a black-and-white picture from an Edgar Allen Poe story. It is very similar to much of his recent work, and it is hard to figure out the difference(s). All of this fits my pop-art theory. I love this mystique and playing around with similar ideas and notions. I am sure this mystery will never be unravelled” - Frans de Waard
19,00€
In stock
CD
David JACKMAN
“Flames Of Fire”
David Jackman (Organum) presents "Flames of Fire", a mesmerizing 47-minute composition titled 'Flames of Fire & Stars of Lighte the Sun Ariseth'. The piece unfolds with a metallic hum, evoking the resonant vibrations of a sitar, before dissolving into vast, shimmering drones that stretch into infinity. Departing from his work as Organum Electronics, this recording embraces a more organic sound while retaining subtle electronic textures. A sinuous, undulating tone weaves through the composition, swelling and receding into the depths of the frequency spectrum, creating an immersive and meditative experience. Jackman reintroduces the resonant gong sounds that have defined his recent output, culminating in a surge of controlled noise toward the piece’s climax. Limited to 500 copies in a striking digisleeve featuring exquisite artwork by Jonathan Coleclough, this release is a must for devotees of deep, immersive soundscapes.
"The drones here are heavier, submerged in an orchestral darkness... A vast, nebulous mass, both mechanical and immense, painting a sonic portrait of bleak grandeur—a fitting soundtrack for shadowed times." — Vital Weekly
14,50€
4 CD
Jean-Claude ELOY
“Réminiscences”
The four pieces that compose Réminiscences, a masterpiece if ever there was one, create the equivalent of a human day, from dawn to night, from call to cry, from meditation to revolt, through the clash of the sounds of human and natural activities. Simply unique and grandiose.
Jean-Claude Eloy (1938) is a French composer with a classical background who moved away from the structures and models that had carried him until then (models imposed on contemporary music through various institutional and official hegemonies) to create, from the early 1970s onwards, long electroacoustic frescoes, vast poems of sounds and noises between Western and Eastern traditions, the main aim of which is to liberate the sound imagination.
__
« To achieve these four works (Incantation, Confrontation, Contemplation, Oppression-Liberation), I relied on the sound elements used for the creation of my former work Yo-In, from which I recycled all the electroacoustic parts created at the Institute of Sonology of the University of Utrecht in 1979/1980. I relied also on the huge amount of samples and recordings of percussion instruments made at my request by the japanese percussionist Sumire Yoshihara, in 1979, at the Studio of Electronic Music of Radio NHK in Tokyo ; a studio where I had worked a lot in 1977/1978 (realization of Gaku-no-Michi).
This, for the purpose of transforming this work into an entirely electroacoustic work, freed from the heavy practical constraints of the 1980 version (sound theater for an imaginary ritual), produced with the wonderful participation of Michael W. Ranta.
In other words, my aim was to refocus on the most characteristic sound sources of this work : sirens boats ; sounds from nature (solfatares, volcanoes, wind, rain, waves...) ; african bird song ; noise from machines and factories ; not to mention the many samples of metal, wood and skin percussion instruments...
With this new composition, I turn my back on the « live » aspects that were strongly present since the creation of Yo-In and i have good chances of making the listener focus on the « power of listening », on perception, on the concentration of consciousness around the concrete sound phenomena that were at the source of this work. We are now dealing with a celebration of sound, an acoustic celebration, through the many metamorphoses of its materials and the specific theme of each work. »
Jean-Claude Eloy
Réminiscences (2017-2019)
Incantation 77’20
Confrontation 79’30
Contemplation 71’40
Oppression-Libération 78’40
Total length : 307’ (5h 07’)
Production: Studio Eve-Défense (composer's home studio) 2017/2019.
Sound materials taken from previous works: “Yo-In”, electroacoustic realization at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht University (1979/1980).
Samplings of percussion instruments:
- Sumire Yoshihara, electronic music studio (Denshi Ongaku Studio), NHK, Tokyo (1979).
- Gaston Sylvestre (skin percussion instruments), Paris (1979).
- Michael Ranta, Asian sound, Cologne (metal percussion instruments). Conny's Studio, Neunkirchen (1984).
Various contributions of recorded sound material: Michel Fano, Daniel Deshays
5 panel digipak + 24 page booklet
(extract cd1)
(extract cd4)
30,00€
Out of stock
6 CD box
Costin MIEREANU
“Poly-Art Recordings 1976-1982”
Auryfa and Metaphon present Poly-Art Recordings 1976-1982, a lavish six-CD box set collecting Costin Miereanu's legendary series of self-published cassettes and LPs from 1982 and 1984. Culminating four years of meticulous work, this project breathes new life into these recordings, remastered from the original tapes by Stephan Mathieu and accompanied by restored artwork and a comprehensive essay by Vincent de Roguin. Born in Bucharest in 1943 and naturalized as a French citizen in 1977, Miereanu occupied a singular position within the French new music landscape -- one foot in the establishment, the other in a world of deeply personal, boundary-pushing creativity. Alongside his intricate orchestral works and demanding academic career, he also produced the semi-improvised solo performances and electroacoustic compositions featured in this collection. Drawing inspiration from Erik Satie, film soundtracks, semiology, Romanian folk and art music, Gilles Deleuze, avant-garde literature, Terry Riley, and atmospheric phenomena, these twelve pieces were crafted using an array of synthesizers -- Minimoog, Polymoog, PPG Wave, Prophet-10 -- supplemented by piano, organ, and a handful of other instrumental sources. Their textural palette and occasional whimsy bear affinities with 1970s meditative synth music, yet they eschew psychedelic excess or cosmic grandeur. Instead, they reveal a vibrant, nuanced complexity that becomes more apparent with each listen, rooted in Miereanu's extensive musical studies and commitment to the ideals of 1960s experimentalism. Within that period's context, this music ultimately sails in the same sonic currents as Harold Budd and Brian Eno's collaboration, and the output of David Behrman, Alvin Curran, or Laurie Spiegel. Originally released on Miereanu's own Poly-Art International/Records and initially met with limited attention, these recordings have since gained underground acclaim among new generations of listeners. They offer a rare synthesis of accessibility and formal ambition, reflecting Miereanu's unwavering pursuit of artistic freedom, a world away from the high culture dogmatisms inherent to the European modernist tradition. His wide-ran-ging associations -- from the spectralists (Horațiu Rădulescu, Tristan Murail, and Gérard Grisey) to mavericks such as Giacinto Scelsi, Luc Ferrari, and Walter Marchetti, as well as the French underground electronic music scene (including Philippe Besombes and Jean-Louis Rizet, who engineered much of this music, and Richard Pinhas) -- help illuminate his unique artistic position.
While not anomalies in a career that could hardly be described as normal, these recordings hold a special place within Miereanu’s body of work. Few composers of his generation, particularly in France, have covered such a broad spectrum, with works for instrumental ensembles, opera, ballet, and radical tape music (Luna Cinese in 1975 on Cramps Records) but also performances, videos, and sound installations. Yet these wondrous modal keyboard fantasies remain among his greatest accomplishments. Consistently original and captivating, they possess an undeniable magic, standing as some of the most essential yet overlooked documents of French minimalism, early ambient, and nonconformist contemporary music from that era.
All music composed by Costin Miereanu and originally released on Poly-Art International ⁄ Records in 1982 and 1984
58,00€
In stock
CD
VANLIGT FOLK
“Dischorealism”
Dischorealism was initially intended to be a conceptual work about ”milk” but we quickly got tired of the idea and the result was partly something completely different. Nevertheless, partly the same in the sense of sucking the life out of somebody, exploiting and over consuming trust in any form. Dischorealism explores the cost of dual nature and circulates around themes such as friendship, sex, violence and drug abuse.
Dischorealism is IMAGE and SOUND and a collaboration between Vanligt Folk and videoartist Tobias Toyberg. This is the SOUND part of the collaboration.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Yves De MEY
“The Velocity of Anguish”
Yves De Mey’s music comes in many shapes, swaying from sparse to packed, and everything in between. But always with a strong focus on details, on the grains of what eventually becomes a solid entity, a resonant construction. Precise sound design and elastic rhythms are key, whether it’s in his solo work or in collaborations. In the past he has worked with Peter Van Hoesen as Sendai, and more recently he started Grid Ravage, a trio with Louis Evrard on drums and Gino Coomans on cello.
Since 2009, De Mey had a string of releases on a wide range of labels. Line, Sandwell District, Opal Tapes, Spectrum Spools, Editions Mego, Latency, Entr’acte, Stellage, Superpang, his own Bandcamp (obviously)… an ever-growing list of outlets allowing for a broad palette of styles and moods. There’s also been a vast amount of live shows at respected festivals and venues; CTM, Atonal, Labyrinth, Mutek,… to name but a few.
During office hours, De Mey works as a sound designer, sound editor and re-recording mixer. And in the last few years he added (live) mixing and mastering to his service package.
The Velocity of Anguish was recorded over the course of a few weeks, multitracking a fairly renowned bass and lead module through some loopers, spring reverb tanks and a Koma Elektronik Field Kit. It’s a perfect fit for De Mey’s other single instrument releases (i.e. Exit Strategies I on Entr’acte…)
10,00€
Out of stock
CD
Bernard PARMEGIANI
“Lac Noir – La Serpente 1992”
Unreleased material composed by Bernard Parmegiani in 1992. Lac Noir - La Serpente is part of Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi's Lac Noir, a composite work inspired by a serpentine female creature or "snake-woman" that he saw in Transylvania in 1976, with a total of 33 pieces using various media, 24 by himself and 9 by other artists. All the materials used in Lac Noir were gathered on the land of the snake-woman between 1990 and 1992. The first coordinated broadcast ran from June to October 2019, like a theatrical display of media.
"At the end of May 1992, in Provence, in his Summer studio not far from the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Bernard Parmegiani played the first musical moments he had worked on from the sounds he and Christian Zanési had collected in Negreni in October 1990. A few days after this listening session, on 4th June, I wrote him a letter. I didn't mean to take control of what was to become the ninth movement of his composition, but to share with him some of the resonances I had heard in what he had composed, which mingled with my dreams and memories of the Transylvanian snake-woman, and outlined possible concordances with the other pieces underway for Lac Noir. In the midst of the garish chaos of the fair and its spectacular stunts, there could spread out -- still, silent eye of the cyclone -- the long waters of a lake. Calm waters. Patches cool but sensitive as skin. Between the waters there flows and ripples, there shows up and dives again a snake-woman born of the still waters. A sweet, good serpent whose song -- strange and melodious, sensual, yet already tinged, as if bitten by the black depths, with bitterness; that of prescience, shading it with melancholy -- is her very undulation, the rings of which appear, together or in turn, the way translucent veins overlap, slither over one another in a moving braid of metamorphoses." (Extracts from notes by E. Raquin-Lorenzi)
13,50€
Out of stock
CD
DEDALUS ENSEMBLE – Philip GLASS
“Music with Changing Parts”
Founding work of minimalism, Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the eight staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to a few notes that are repeated in patterns that expand or contract, the changes in orchestration refresh the listening experience by producing sonic contrasts. These techniques at work in Music with Changing Parts, written in 1970, will lead Philip Glass to renew his language and move from the monochromatic works that precede it to more dramatic works such as music in 12 parts and especially the opera Einstein on the Beach. When Philip Glass began rehearsing the piece, he was surprised to hear long notes when everything was written in eighth notes. After making sure that none of the musicians were playing held notes, he realized that the fact that the same notes were played by all the instruments in the ensemble produced, through a psycho-acoustic effect, a harmonic substrate of resonant frequencies. He then decided to add to the score the possibility of playing long notes to reinforce this effect. "For this recording, we chose to record first the eighth notes, then the long notes in re-recording. This utopian version, with each musician playing short and long notes at the same time (!), illustrates the minimalist aesthetic that plays with our perception and allows us to reconcile opposites and cultivate the apparent paradox of a music that moves forward without Moving and changes constantly while remaining the same." --Dedalus Ensemble
13,50€
In stock
CD
Ahmed ESSYAD
“Moroccan Electroacoustic Music 1972-74”
Composer Ahmed Essyad was born in Salé, Morocco, in 1938. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatoire (Morocco) he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a student of Max Deutsch and, later, his assistant. Trained in the avant-garde practices of Western musical composition, he also claimed the Amazigh folk music of Morocco as a fundamental source of inspiration for his work. In 1965, he was already incorporating elements of oral tradition in his work so as to question the language of his time, and therefore had to cope with the limits of musical notation and communication with musicians who did not share his cultural references. It was difficult to agree on what was implicit, "behind the notes," especially regarding the management of musical time and micro-intervals. In search of new compositional tools, he turned to electro-acoustic music. Working in a studio made it possible for him to be the interpreter of his own work, which ensured a certain continuity with music of oral tradition. The pieces presented here were produced between 1972 and 1974 in a studio dedicated to electro-acoustic music, the S.M.E.C.A, which was part of the Music Workshop founded by Jorge Arriagada in Paris. The studio was equipped with EMS and Minimoog synthesizers, a piano, a marimba, a xylophone, as well as various percussion instruments and a tape delay system. The practice of electro-acoustics may have been a mere parenthesis in Ahmed Essyad's long and prolific career as a composer of contemporary music, but the works presented here are nonetheless important. They show how strongly he both supported North African popular forms of expression and opposed its folklorizing through simplistic and "exotic" representations. It's not about fusing together East and West -- impossible, he says: "the real point is to open up an imaginary space where another modernity can exist outside the largely Eurocentric framework of avant-garde music. Synthesis means anticipation, knowledge. As for me, I'm increasingly ignorant. I write to discover what I don't know. Music feeds me, it pollinates me. It's my daily wine."
13,50€
In stock
2 CD
Marc NAMBLARD
“L’autre rive”
14-track album + 15-track bonus album
20-page booklet with translations of Wayãpi songs and dialogues into French / Booklet also available in English
At the end of 2023, Marc Namblard set out to record sounds in French Guiana for the purposes of a documentary film. Through a series of circumstances, he found himself in Bas-Oyapock with director Kevin Brunet to meet Sara and Saraka, a couple of Wayãpi originally from Brazil. They both shared the lives of their hosts for two weeks, engaging in traditional activities (preparing cachiri and cassava, maintaining the garden, singing, dancing...) along with «troubling» experiences and daily gestures...
From this stay, The Other Bank was born, a sound piece where the forest, the river, and both human and non-human voices intertwine and merge, inseparable, without any hierarchy, while simultaneously offering a testimony of a relationship with the world on the brink of vanishing...
17,00€
Out of stock
CD
Marc NAMBLARD
“Arctic Summer”
2025 was declared the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation by the United Nations, accompanied by the proclamation of March 21st of each year as the World Day for Glaciers starting this year. As they put it, “this is an opportunity to raise global awareness about the critical role of glaciers, snow and ice in the climate system and the hydrological cycle, and the economic, social and environmental impacts of the impending changes in the Earth’s cryosphere.” To celebrate this decision forms of minutiae presents a series of albums dedicated to glaciers and the acoustic multiplicity of the ice with field recording works by Marc Namblard, Ludwig Berger, Yoichi Kamimura, Pablo Diserens, and Cheryl E. Leonard.
Sprinkled throughout the year, the series launches on World Day of Glaciers with the album arctic summer, a journey across the sonic ecologies of Iceland and Svalbard, by wildlife sound recordist and nature guide Marc Namblard.
Arctic summer and its 12 tracks form a long continuous piece which unfolds in a documentary fashion. Here, Namblard’s pristine recordings invite listeners into the estival effervescence of the two polar islands. Scenes follow one another in a delicate but bustling volcanic, animal, and glacial tapestry, whose dimensions materialize through the artist’s play on perspective and space. This meticulous composition enables us to eavesdrop both on the vastness and the minute of the cryosphere and the life it fosters. Birds and mammals cadence the album with distinct acoustic behaviors. The air is filled with puffin wing flutters, arctic tern shrills, golden plover sharp pings, kittiwake nasal cries, and the uncanny winnowing sound of common spines. Below, an arctic fox calls in the twilight, a whale spouts off the coast, and walruses growl, grunt, and exhale like washed up steaming engines. Yet these animal voices aren’t sounding alone. They are enveloped by the voices of geologies. Pebble-laden tides lead us to the beating volcanic heart that lies beneath the ground. Geothermal mud pools bubble in viscous drummings, while sulphur vents whistle in perpetual sighs. There are whispers in the slurry. The scorched soil swells. The Earth sizzles. Geyser!
This scalding soundscape gradually evaporates into the heat of summer, bringing about the melting of the ice. In doing so, the ice shares a splendid variety both in form and sound. Glaciers crash in thundering calvings, icebergs drift in fizzling growls, while the moraine trickles in curtains of drops. The landscape thaws and leaks. The glaciers thin. The Earth oozes.
This melting pot of arctic bioacoustics weaves into an imaginary sound walk across the tundra, making Namblard’s profound affection for the environment palpable. His uncompromising delicacy is an invitation to listen to the cryosphere in order to better understand and nurture it. A cinema for the ears, arctic summer is a time capsule that maps the fragile soundscapes and ecosystems of a changing world.
12,00€
In stock
CD
Marc NAMBLARD
“Brames”
Brames brings together a series of recordings on the theme of the bellowing of the red deer, collected in different forest areas of France (in the Vosges, Loiret and Lozère) between 2011 and 2023.
12,00€
In stock
CD
SISSY SPACEK
“Entrance”
Entering its 26th year of activity, the morphing, Los Angeles based experimental outfit, Sissy Spacek, joins Shelter Press with Entrance, among the project’s most captivating outings to date. Encountering the duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma joined in various configurations by an incredible cast of collaborators - Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky, and C Spencer Yeh - collectively transformed into a series a deeply intimate and delicate gestures of musique concrète, Entrance radically repositions the possibilities presented by group improvisation outside of time and place.
Founded at the end of the last millennium, the Los Angeles based project, Sissy Spacek, initially emerged from the knotted, fiery context 1990s American noise and grindcore, producing sheets of visceral sonority that quickly set the scene on its head. Going through numerous evolutions, before eventually settling as a duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma - joined by a rotating and often recurring cast collaborators - over the last 25 years the band has continuously entered states of evolution that have defied the expectations of its own context, seeding the sonic extremes noise with subtle and sophisticated approaches to free improvisation and musique concrète.
Fiercely positioning its efforts within the outer reaches of contemporary experimental music, while resisting the constraints of a singular sound or proximity, Wiese regards Sissy Spacek as being primarily centred around the practice of musique concrète and the pursuit of extremes. From its earliest releases - collage treatments of material gathered from the band’s full throttle practice sessions - the project’s conceptual framework has continuously evolved within a deeply engaged process of experimentation, not only reworking tactical approaches, but also definitions and perception regarding the location and action of their work. In recent years, this has led to an increasingly varied and diverse output. Percolating within, is a thread marked by a striking sense of delicacy and intimacy, driving forward while doubling as an unexpected challenge, in real time, to perceptions connected to the band’s past. Entrance is the most recent of these.
Embarking upon the four compositions that comprise the finalized four sides of Entrance, Wiese and Mumma enlisted longstanding collaborators, Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, and C Spencer Yeh, as well as new initiate, Ralf Wehowsky (of the seminal German electronic noise collective P16.D4), requesting a contribution of sounds from each, determined by a general set guidelines that dictated certain qualities the given sonorities, while allowing for the expression of each player’s distinct creative voice. The sets of resulting recordings were then chopped, harvested, manipulated, and reassembled as the four tape compositions that make up the album - Web Of Unfolding Appearance, Figure Of Reflected Light, Trancher And The Inheritors, True Dimension (From The Opaque - Spike) - each blurring the lines of authorship and clear creative proximity in remarkable ways.
Where historical gestures of musique concrète tend to draw upon non-instrumental sound sources - regarding its sonorous material as raw elements, unburdened by inherent meaning or association, to be transformed and imbued with musicality - Sissy Spacek turns this position on its head. Entrance comprises works of musique concrète that not only draw upon instrumental sound sources, with all their possible meanings or associations, but also individual characters and personalities of their players, crediting each resulting piece to its respective configuration of contributors.
As such, Entrance is an effort of sound collage defined by a rare sense of intimacy and humanity: four pieces that often take on the resemblance of group improvisation, but have, in fact, been assembled outside of time and place. Bent under the ever-present hand of Wiese’s tape treatments and manipulation, each of the album’s four compositions unfurl startling states of sonic abstraction and percolating texture, marked by a striking sense of hard-shifting structure, that culminate as tense, driven manifestations of ambient music: scrapes, squeals, rattles feedback, rolling drums, bouncing tones, whispers, bent electronics, electric artefacts, and seemingly everything else under the sun, configured into immersive, sublime mediations in sound from the most improbable events.
17,00€
CD
Jean-Claude ELOY
“Faisceaux-Diffractions – Macles – Boucle et Séquence”
A series of instrumental pieces documenting the years before the switch to the long electroacoustic compositions more characteristic of the composer.
Faisceaux-Diffractions
(1970) for 28 instrumentalists including a Hammond organ, and two electric guitars.
Recording of the world premiere, on October 30, 1970, in Washington D.C. (USA) by the New York Contemporary Chamber Ensemble.
"The instrumental ensemble is subdivided into three strongly isomorphic orchestras, allowing the treatment in the space of similar musical structures. This tone-color isomorphism allows sometimes to leave "floating" the synchronization between the three orchestras, the conductor being able to combine the "tiling" of the orchestras, following a large number of possibilities, but within strictly defined temporal proportions."
Macles (1966 - short version)
extracts of the music of the film La Religieuse (The Nun) by Jacques Rivette
For various groups of instruments including a solo Zarb and a Cymbalum.
Ensemble Musique Vivante under the conducting of Boris de Vinogradov. Zarb solo played by Jean-Pierre Drouet.
"At the time of the realization of this work, in 1966, I was a teacher at the University of Berkeley, and I was trying to find a theory to unify the modal music (repetitive, with uses of fixed harmonic fields and use of notes poles, etc.) to atonal chromatic music, serial or not (variational, fluctuating, ornamented, etc.): this by directly organizing the structural blocks, and not by deducing them from a serie."
Loop and Sequence (1968) for 19 instrumentalists
Very short musical sequences for the film l'Amour fou (Mad love) by Jacques Rivette.
"These two very short musics were written in 1968 at the request of Jacques Rivette for his film l'Amour Fou (Mad love), which he was shooting (Sequence is the music of the very last scene of the film - in its oriiginal version - when Jean-Pierre Kalfon leaves walkking alone in the streets of Paris...). In hindsight, they constitute a sort of "premonition" of the writing and aesthetics, which will then be affirmed, in 1970 and 1971, with Faisceaux-Diffractions and Kâmakalâ (use of repetitive loops; mass heterophony; intervals filled in active aggregates; etc.)."
13,00€
In stock
CD
MERZBOW
“Red Magnesia Pink”
First released by Extreme in the massive, infamous 'Merzbox,' "Red Magnesia Pink" is extracted and recontextualized as a standalone release for the first time. Recorded in 1995, "Red Magnesia Pink" sees Merzbow in peak form. A psychedelic whirlwind of synthetic transmissions; harsh, wet, screeching sounds that could only be produced by Masami Akita. Featuring two previously unreleased bonus tracks from the same era.
15,00€
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€
Out of stock
4 CD box
Joshua BONNETTA
“The Pines”
4xCDs housed in oversized digisleeves.
Hardcover slipcase.
12pp booklet with original text by Robert Macfarlane and foreward by jake moore
Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording? His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, released on February 28, 2025 via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator jake moore, who suggests the forest knows when it is being listened to.
Macfarlane’s luminous essay proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around – entangling it in the surrounding environment, to ask what sort of noise it and other plants and animals make when there is no human listener; asking what sounds come to the fore when we step out of the frame, and in what ways a microphone might alter the way we listen in the environment.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree’s trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, each of which captured events in and around the tree’s branches and immediate environment. We hear weather and wildlife; coyotes and owls; the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans; a time lapse of the audible world around the circumference of a single tree. The microphones used, and the methods of editing, are tech borrowed from conservation bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring, which offered Bonnetta a way to engage much more deeply than any standard field recording would.
The Pines I-IV is not bombastic sonic work, but is subtle, often contemplative and sometimes soothing, as when rushes of rain sweep over the landscape, or a flock of geese pass overhead. It is not about exotic renderings of place or or mythically veiled field recording, but about accessing a new way of listening to something familiar, by removing a human presence and extending the listening window beyond usual human capacities. Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew, and which he had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. "For over a decade I taught in Ithaca" he says "and spent a lot of time exploring southern central New York, but never made any projects there. We decided to relocate to Munich a couple years back and before I left I wanted to document the sounds of this environment that I spent so much time in and had come to love. This technology afforded me the opportunity to be able to keep a record across a year and when I started to listen back I was surprised with results and began to devise a system to edit the work. There are several great bioacoustics applications which can analyze and interpret the data but I wanted to manually browse and edit the materials so that I could collect sounds outside of what the applications might traditionally identify: mainly weather and the sounds of the tree itself. The Dim Coast saw the potential in the work as an installation and publication and helped me realize that there might be a project outside of it just being a personal document."
He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum. He spent time listening to re-familiarize himself with the soundscape and then scanned the visual data for ‘events’ in the files, a method of analysis more typically used by scientists mapping bird and wildlife populations.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape: “I grew up in a rural area in Ontario, and I have a very early memory of two brothers from our small school who had said they had made a recording of wolves, which were only rumoured to be as far south as we were. The previous evening they had taken their portable cassette recorder to the edge of their lane, which backed on to a large forest preserve, and claimed to have recorded wolves howling. They played it back at school the next day and I remember that the sound was primarily noise and hiss, but we were all listening intently and straining to hear something as they kept playing back the tape. Whether they were really there or this was just the collective imagination of a group of children, we started to hear wolves – or more likely coyotes. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience”.
45,00€