Out of stock
CD
Lance Austin OLSEN / Bruno DUPLANT
“Coïncidence”
Born in 1943, Lance Austin Olsen is a Canadian artist and composer. He started painting in his youth and has since continued developing his work as an artist. In 1997, Olsen met sound and visual artist Jamie Drouin and became interested in experimental music. In Olsen’s creative process, composition and painting are closely related and inspired by each other. French musician Bruno Duplant is an energetic and acclaimed creator on the contemporary experimental music scene.
This CD’s single 33-minute track, “Coïncidence,” is a duo performance by Lance Austin Olsen (guitar, field recordings, wax cylinder recordings, MIDI organ, amplified objects) and Bruno Duplant (piano and sounds). Several types of indistinct and rather soft sounds, and hard piano sounds that resonate slowly one by one, create contrast as they continue throughout the piece along with a disturbing mood.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Akira SAKATA / Ken IKEDA
“Gauche”
Alto sax/clarinet player Akira Sakata is a legend of Japan’s free jazz scene. Ken Ikeda is a musician who resided for many years in New York and London, and has been based in Tokyo since his return to Japan from the UK in 2020. In 2021, Ikeda released "Signal and Signaless," a duo CD with Rie Nakajima, on the Ftarri label. This album, "GAUCHE," is Sakata’s first release from Ftarri.
On May 21, 2022, Akira Sakata and Ken Ikeda gave a duo concert at Ftarri, Tokyo. This CD consists of two improvised performances (29 and 36 minutes long) from that concert. Sakata played alto sax, clarinet and several types of bells, while Ikeda played synthesizer. When people think of Akira Sakata, they usually think of the kind of extremely powerful, ferocious performances he gave many years ago with the Yosuke Yamashita trio—but on this album we hear a different Sakata. Perhaps influenced in part by Ikeda, whose distinctive electronic sound features smooth and supple timbres, Sakata’s winds playing throughout is calm and composed—the epitome of self-possession. Partway through, he rings bells in silent spaces, adding further to the broadminded mood. This superb album was born of the auspicious combination of these two musicians’ distinctive musical styles.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Tetuzi AKIYAMA / Ayami SUZUKI
“Allelopathy”
Ayami Suzuki, a musician based in the Tokyo area, performs a unique kind of ambient drone using electronics and voice. Since 2020 she has been performing at Ftarri in Tokyo, both as a soloist and with other musicians. Acclaimed guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama is active on the international improvised music scene. In 2021 Akiyama gave many outstanding performances at Ftarri; recordings of a number of these concerts were subsequently released as CDs. "Allelopathy" is one of these recordings.
Akiyama and Suzuki performed together at Ftarri on October 10, 2021. This CD contains two of the pieces they played in that concert. In alignment with Suzuki’s characteristic ambient drones and carried along on her electronics and Akiyama’s electric guitar playing, a voice performance incorporating Suzuki’s cryptic word-like sounds unfolds calmly and spaciously throughout. This superb work abounds in entrancing charm.
10,00€
Out of stock
CD
Junji HIROSE / Otomo YOSHIHIDE
“DUO-1”
Improviser Junji Hirose is not just a sax player; in the 1980s he started playing the SSI (self-made sound instrument), which he created by combining numerous devices and everyday objects from which noise sounds are produced in a scattered way. In 1989, Hirose recorded the SSI/turntables duo album Silanganan Ingay with Otomo Yoshihide and released it independently as an LP. Three decades later, in 2022, a new SSI/turntables duo album by Hirose and Otomo has finally been made!
This CD contains live performances of three works that took place at Pool, Tokyo, on June 6, 2021. Otomo produces wild, wriggling noise sounds on two turntables. Hirose, in the first piece, uses the self-made sound instrument, version 4 (SSI4), which he set up with two bicycle wheels as central components. In the second, he plays the SSI6, which produces white noise by directing powerful bursts of air onto PE tape with two air compressors. And in track three, he uses the no-instrument air noise (NIAN), which turns powerful bursts of compressed air directly onto a mike set up on a stand, creating roaring noise that sounds like fierce wind.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Magnus GRANBERG
“How Lonely Sits the City? (version for quartet)”
Composer/improviser Magnus Granberg, who lives in Stockholm, has presented outstanding composed works through Skogen, the ensemble he directs, and experimental music ensembles, projects and labels from around the world. He has released three CDs on the Meenna label: Whose Words? (meenna-983 / 2017), documenting a trio improvisation performance with Tetuzi Akiyama and Henrik Olsson; and two albums titled Come Down to Earth Where Sorrow Dwelleth (meenna-970, meenna-966 / 2020), each containing a different version, performed by a different ensemble, of the same composition by Granberg.
When Granberg accepted an invitation he received in September 2019 to participate in a project planned by Swedish artists including Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Stina Hellberg Agback (harp) and Eva Lindal (violin), it was the first step on the road to creating the work recorded on this CD. Granberg wrote the composition in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that began the following year, completing the quartet version, "How Lonely Sits the City?" (54 minutes). In October 2020, Sander, Agback, Lindal and Granberg (on prepared piano) recorded the work, and that recording is presented on this album.
Granberg subsequently prepared the extended version of "How Lonely Sits the City?" for his own group, Skogen. This was recorded by a seven-member Skogen ensemble, and released on the UK label Another Timbre in February 2022.
10,00€
Out of stock
CD
Tetuzi AKIYAMA / Leo OKAGAWA
“Metaphor of Metamorphosis”
This is one in a trilogy of live recordings made at Ftarri, Tokyo, documenting some of guitarist/improviser Tetuzi Akiyama's outstanding performances of 2021. The CD releases feature covers drawn by artist Shigeo Mizuta. The two tracks on this CD, each around 25 minutes in length, were recorded at Akiyama's duo concert with electronics player Leo Okagawa at Ftarri on June 21, 2021.
Okagawa is known for releases on overseas labels of many collage works using environmental sounds, noise and so on. He's also a gifted improviser on electronics. There's a highly effective contrast between Okagawa's sound, comprised mainly of static sustained tones, and the sound produced by Akiyama's electric guitar, which is dynamic and hard-edged and has a psychedelic feeling.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Tetuzi AKIYAMA / Ryotaro MIYASAKA
“Odd Jobs Are the High Road of Work”
This is one in a trilogy of live recordings made at Ftarri, Tokyo, documenting some of guitarist/improviser Tetuzi Akiyama's outstanding performances of 2021. The CD releases feature covers drawn by artist Shigeo Mizuta. The two tracks here (31 and 39 minutes respectively) were recorded at Akiyama's duo concert with percussionist Ryotaro Miyasaka at Ftarri on February 8, 2021.
Born in 1995, percussionist Ryotaro Miyasaka lives in Tokyo. In this concert he placed numerous percussion instruments on the floor--snare drum, bongos, cymbal, tambourine, bell, cowbell, etc.--and picked up one instrument at a time to produce various sounds. Akiyama played electric guitar and fired off a series of spiky, noisy sounds. The contrast between myriad colorful, dry percussion sounds and abstract guitar noise makes for an exquisite performance.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Seijiro MURAYAMA
“To listen To As far As possible”
Seijiro Murayama is a drummer/percussionist and improviser/composer who lives in Paris. His first CDs on Ftarri's three labels (Hitorri, Ftarri and Meenna) came out in 2009, and he has since released a total of 12 solo, duo, trio and quartet albums on Ftarri labels. Of the solo albums, the first was Downdate (2017), followed by The Empire of Slip of the Tongue (2018) and mi-tai (2020). While Downdate and The Empire of Slip of the Tongue are electro-acoustic works, mi-tai is an album of improvisation with percussion and voice.
This album is Murayama's fourth solo release on the Hitorri label. Like the preceding album, it's a compilation of improvisational performances. The seven tracks (each between 4 and 11 minutes long) were recorded in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in January 2022. Murayama uses instruments including cymbal, bass drum, snare drum, voice, and various small objects. Along with the previous work (mi-tai), this album is an ideal introduction to Murayama's boundlessly original and distinctive work as an improviser.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Taku SUGIMOTO
“Octet”
On this album, works composed in 2018 and '19 by Tokyo-based composer/guitarist Taku Sugimoto are performed by musicians based in Berlin. Sugimoto has in recent years been working on a series in which pieces written as scores for solo performance can also be played as ensembles, with each musician using their respective solo score. For example, a score for guitar solo and a score for cello solo can be played as a duo performance by a guitarist and a cellist using their respective scores. "Solo for Violoncello 1," one of the tracks on this CD, is the first work of this type composed by Sugimoto. It's also the first piece in the series he named "Solo for Strings," which is performed on bowed stringed instruments using only natural harmonics. In the pieces in this series, the lengths of tones and performances can be changed by the performers.
When he was asked by Berlin-based clarinetists Michiko Ogawa and Sam Dunscombe to write a composition for their ensemble, Sugimoto thought of using the pieces in the "Solo for Strings" series. He prepared one piece for wind instruments to be performed by the trio of Ogawa (clarinet), Dunscombe (bass clarinet) and Rebecca Lane (flute), and five solo pieces from "Solo for Strings"--one each for contrabass, cello, and guitar, and two for viola. These pieces were performed and recorded in Berlin. Also recorded was the 25-minute work "Octet," performed by an ensemble of eight musicians using all six scores. This album is comprised of these seven pieces.
In addition to Michiko Ogawa, Sam Dunscombe and Rebecca Lane, the performing musicians are Johnny Chang (viola), Catherine Lamb (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Jon Heilbron (contrabass), and Fredrik Rasten (guitar).
11,00€
Out of stock
CD
Toshimaru NAKAMURA / Tetuzi AKIYAMA
“Idiomatic Expressionism”
Both Toshimaru Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama started their musical activities in earnest in the 1990s. Today, both hold concert tours around the world on a yearly basis, have a long list of releases, and count among Japan's leading improvisers. Nakamura constructs sound with the instrument he calls the no-input mixing board, which creates feedback through irregular hard wiring of an analog audio mixer. Guitarist Akiyama plays either acoustic or electric guitar in highly original performances ranging from lyrical to noisy.
Nakamura and Akiyama have been collaborating for a long time. Over a period of several years in the early 2000s, they co-organized the monthly improvised music series "Meeting at Off Site" (held at the now-defunct gallery Off Site). While they have since appeared together many times in performances with other musicians, they've given a relatively small number of duo concerts. Surprisingly, Idiomatic Expressionism is only the second duo album by Nakamura and Akiyama and the first since their debut duo CD Semi-Impressionism (Spekk) was released 12 years ago (in 2009). While that CD consists of edited live recordings of overseas concerts, Idiomatic Expressionism is made up of studio recordings. This ambitious work was created in a deliberate, unhurried way from 2020 to 2021. In the album's five improvised music tracks, Nakamura's no-input mixing board and Akiyama's acoustic guitar produce an accumulation of sounds in a profound and exquisite manner.
10,00€
In stock
CD
Brad E. ROSE
“Annular Silhouettes”
From Brad E. Rose
There are many times when I’m working on a music project that, in the moment, I’m not sure what I’m really doing. I don’t believe there’s some otherworldly power guiding my hands or thought processes unless our own subconscious could be classified as such a thing. It’s mostly about trying to be present at that moment and letting the ideas and sounds unfold in a way that isn’t forced. Oftentimes, after the fact, it will become clearer to me that certain feelings or thoughts were trying to find their way out, but my brain, as is often the case, wasn’t sure how to process them and let them go. Sound has often acted as that medium for me over the last three decades; a way to channel difficult thoughts into a language I can understand.
One evening as I watched the snowfall in mid-January, after thinking about what Annular Silhouettes was, it finally hit me. Recorded during the depths of 2020, during a time spent within the vicinity of where I live, it’s a bit of a love letter to the place I grew up. I live in the house that my grandparents lived in for over 20 years, that my grandfather gutted and rebuilt with his own hands. It’s the last place he ever called home and his spirit remains firmly etched into its walls. I live less than 10 minutes from my childhood home, where both my parents still live. I moved away and eventually came back. I am lucky to gain a different understanding of this place than I had growing up.
Place is a strange thing in the way it can influence and shape us, for better or worse. Nearly 20 years ago, when I moved back here with my partner, she would tell me how she couldn’t get over how big the sky felt in Oklahoma. I still think about that often. For a place that is stuck moving backward in so many ways, the possibilities above us can be endless beyond the forces dragging us back into the soil. We all find our way to the dirt eventually and one circle will close, but during my time inhabiting this space, I hope to have started a few new circles along the way so that the cycle will grow.
14,00€
In stock
CD
SENYAWA + ENGLISH / ENDEAN / KNIGHT / SVOBODA / TALIA
“The Prey And The Ruler”
From Lawrence English
The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa’s performance that day did just that. It was a monstrous portent of things to come. A promise, in sound, of the energetic force that has since come to mark them as one of the truly unique and visionary musical pairings from South East Asia.
This project, The Prey And The Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid 2021. As the pandemic plodded onward, and lockdowns were a thing of the everyday here in Australia, Peter Knight and I were talking about the situations unfolding in our respective states. We also got to talking about friends in the region and found ourselves pondering the situation just north of us, in Indonesia. It was around this time we thought to reach out to Rully and Wukir from Senyawa and to hear how things were first hand for them, and their communities.
Following that initial conversation we collectively decided that it was a good moment to commence a project that could cut through the geographic isolation of those long months, and also seek to create some opportunities for a community of instrument builders, friends of Senyawa, who had been significantly hit by the force of the pandemic.
A few weeks after this exchange, Wukir sent a series of videos; grabs from his cellphone. The videos were of plastic moulds, smoke, spray paint and sound. In each short clip, instruments were being conceived, tested and forged. These were new instruments coming to life before our eyes, and ears. It was these instruments, and the audio possibilities they suggested, that are at the very heart of this edition.
Following several more exchanges we started passing recordings to one another. The process of sharing materials back and forth quickly took on the shape of the works you hear on this album.
Once all the contributions were in place I set about forging them. On the first listen there was a deep sense of intensity to all the performances, like an outpouring or eruption. This was no doubt the result of people being largely locked away, a chance to break the looping around of their own daily routines. These sonic offerings from Senyawa, these instruments with their sounds so unfamiliar and at times unexpected, seemingly unlocked approaches from everyone in surprising ways. It was as if everyone was leaning into the sounds, applying themselves to the particular qualities of these new instruments.
What you hear on this edition then is a collective effort at expanded listening. It is an album that affords a certain act of leaning in. The results trace many individual minds, applied to the same collective actions.
Wukir Suryadi - Industrial Mutant instrument
Rully Shabara - voice
Helen Svoboda - double bass & voice
Peter Knight - trumpet & Revox B77 reel-to reel tape machine
Joe Talia - drums
Aviva Endean - clarinets & harmonic flute
Lawrence English - organ, electronics
14,00€
In stock
CD
Aviva ENDEAN
“Moths & Stars”
From Aviva Endean
Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy - so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky.
The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other.
Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.
14,00€
Out of stock
CD
Lawrence ENGLISH
“Approach”
From Lawrence English
I often find myself thinking about the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." When the book was written in early 1980s, a dead TV channel was a deadened grey of noise. Revisit the book now though and its character has shifted, for in the digital age a dead channel is a richly saturated sky blue. The referential effects of time are not constant, but they rather provoke new perspectives and ideally new understandings.
This album, Approach, is an echo that has travelled with me for 33 years, even if I wasn’t fully aware of it. It’s a record about memory, about how seemingly cursory encounters shape us and how experiences accumulate in time. It’s a distorted mirror catching the diminished glow of the fires that forged me.
The record draws its root from Yoshihisa Tagami’s seminal manga Grey. In many respects this album is a soundtrack to that manga. What makes Grey unique, in the west at least, is that it was amongst one of the first Manga to be translated and distributed outside of Japan (yes, even before the touchstone that is Akira). It was one of the first droplets that has since become a torrent pouring outward from Japan. It was also the first Manga I bought for myself, when I was 13, and read as a serial.
I tend not to think or speak very much about my teenage years. I had some profound experiences that have carried forward, I forged deep emotional partnerships that carry to this day. The majority of that time however was something of a slog, a day by day performance of self-preservation. Those years were a quiet war to push back against expectations for a way of being I had no interest in sharing.
All boys’ schools, one of which I attended, are a maleficent prison if you are not participating in, or as was my case you are maintaining an antithetical position to, hegemonic masculinity. There’s no real need to detail my experiences but suffice to say several years after high school a classmate approached me in a stationery store and asked for my forgiveness for what he had done to me. I was only too happy to give him that relief, it was obvious he wore scars from those experiences that seemingly ran deeper than my own.
I don’t find myself dwelling on those negative experiences partly because during those years I was a sponge for culture. It’s difficult for me to quantify how much cultural consumption happened during my teen years, but I recognise now how formative so many of those exposures have become. An example of this came into sharp focus last year when I happened to remember, and then re-read Tagami’s Grey.
As laconic and occasionally unlikable as the main character, Grey, might have been I associated deeply with their sense of determination. Grey’s rejection of societal expectation (which is foregrounded by the edition’s introduction penned by speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison, who highlighted the class politics that haunt the storyline), and his refusal to accept the immobility of systems, and social codes, clearly resonated with me. Add to this a delightfully nihilistic optimism matched with unquenchable rage and that young version of me was sold; I knew already that sensation of rage, when applied with focus, would be my fuel throughout those years.
This record then is also a kind of sonic postcard retrospectively drafted for that very unsteady and volatile version of myself. It’s more than that of course, but I want to recognise and thank that belligerent young person, who seems so distant to me now. I recognise that their way of navigation, their determination to be curious and try to discover who they were, not who they were told to be, allowed this version of me to exist today. It also pays homage to the family and friends (and the cultural artefacts such as this manga) that helped cushion and guide that young body and mind. Without them, it’s difficult to know how I might be in the here and now.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Manuel MOTA & David GRUBBS
“na margem sul”
From David Grubbs
This recording documents Manuel Mota’s and my first public performance as a duo. We had played together previously for a recording session—a relaxed afternoon at Lisbon’s ZDB, where I recall zoning out, guitar in my hands, watching the endless throng of people Sunday-strolling past the plate glass window next to the stage. That deeply pleasurable afternoon session felt like a live accompaniment to a film.
This recording also documents, for the both of us, a first indoor collaborative performance since the beginning of the pandemic. It felt familiar—I do remember how to do these things—and yet upped in its intensity of focus, and afterward that much more imprinted in memory, even prior to sitting down with this recording. It seemed I could have narrated it after the fact, its various twists and turns, which is not often the case for me with improvised concerts, details of which often vanish—to return who knows when—or transform into a series of disconnected impressions.
One of the things that I love about Manuel’s playing is that as a listener I quickly abandon my search for the logics of continuity that apply to most performers. With Manuel I rarely feel that I anticipate the shape of a given phrase in the time of its unfolding—as a duo we’re definitely not finishing one another’s sentences—nor do I sense that I’m tracking larger structures in the making to serve as signposts for the performance as a whole. The two of us first met more than a decade ago, but throughout many conversations we haven’t spent much time speaking analytically about playing, never really compared notes from inside. It’s not that we’ve chosen not to talk about music, or that there’s a barrier or unspoken ideology to doing so. There’s always something else to talk about.
This concert took place in the Biblioteca Municipal of Barreiro, a smaller city to the southeast of Lisbon across the Tejo River estuary. “Na margem sul” means “on the south bank,” and is commonly used to refer to the area south of the Tejo. For a first time returning in many months to playing in an indoor setting, the library seemed an especially welcoming location.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Pierce WARNECKE
“Deafened By The Noise Of Time”
From Pierce Warnecke:
‘The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.’ - W.G. Sebald, ‘Austerlitz’
Deafened by the Noise of Time is a speculative take on how sound might decay and disappear; a reflection on the unavoidable entropy and dislocation of all things over time through 4 compositions, one with video. The titled is borrowed from Julian Barnes' novel 'The Noise of Time' (itself borrowed from Jewish Russian poet Osip Mandelstam), a fictional biography of Shostakovitch.
I first started working on the material for this album for a performance at Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris in 2017. Following the concert, I sat down to edit the music but struggled with the pieces, every time finding new flaws, unable to follow through with the original compositional ideas. Somewhat frustrated, I decided to strip down the musical content to form more bare-bone structures and look for a different principle or process to tie everything together.
For this, I shifted focus to a long running part of my video practice: the deterioration of things over time, where I use my camera with simple lighting and slow movements to focus on rusty, dirty, burned or broken found objects. I like the idea of these things being both recent and ancient, contemporary artefacts of a world in constant decay. I like the idea of being able to still sense memory on objects even when they’ve become almost entirely unrecognizable. I like how this pushes back against the inevitability of impermanence. I like the act of scavenging and reusing discarded objects to put them in new but uncertain light. I like to think of it as a kind of ritualistic transformation of 'trash-to-treasure', a conjuring of a thing's entire past through imperceptible clues left on it's surface.
For Deafened by the Noise of Time I wanted to apply these ideas to sound, and consider how a musical idea might disappear under an accumulation of interferences, as a kind of sonic sedimentation and erosion. External elements such as conversations, field recordings, generative noises, silence and inharmonic tones cover the original music similar to the way rust covers metal, or how memories dim and fade, or the way debris accumulates and compresses an object, casting it in stone. For these pieces I looked at Time as a continual burying of the present moment, leaving visible only small details of the 'now' (and the things within it) as echoes towards the future.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Madeleine COCOLAS
“Spectral”
From Madeleine Cocolas
Spectral is built on a foundation of sounds I collected from my immediate surroundings in recent times. It’s a familiar story, casting your ears close to home. I captured these sounds as a type of aural diary to mark days and weeks as they passed. As our physical worlds seemed to become smaller, my senses of observation and perception of my immediate surroundings sharpened. Inside these small spaces I found a wellspring of materials that seemed to offer themselves up.
At the time I didn’t know why I was collecting sounds or what I would do with them, it just felt like something I needed to do and it helped me stay connected and feel tethered to my surroundings. With my phone on hand, ready to record on walks around the block, past whirring industrial machines, deafening crickets and crashing storms, I found so much beauty and meaning in the sounds and the recordings I collected.
As the collection grew, I could sense these links between them, some sounds seemed to gravitate towards one another, they self arranged almost. It felt very natural to then build layers over the top of them, to be able to express some of the emotions that the sounds triggered, of memories from the moments from when they were captured.
At its core, Spectral is about deep stillness, observation and perception underpinned by emotional expression. It is a subtle shift in memory, a recolouring of the world we think we know and a willingness to lean into that possibility.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Yui ONODERA
“Too Ne”
From Yui Onodera:
These pieces are what can be described as almost static ambient tracks. They are about a recognition of perceived stillness, even when there is change in the sounds’ relationships with each other, and with the listener.
“Too Ne" is an old Japanese word that refers to a sound that is sounding from far away. It is about distance, and also perhaps about reaching out to those sounds that seem to exist far away from us.
Too Ne is a word that is not often used in modern Japan, but it has a long history, and can be found in the oldest extant collections of Japanese waka (poetry in Classical Japanese), such as "Manyoshu".
It is sometimes understood that there are many sounds that appear in people’s minds here, when they think of an imagined landscape. Sounds as memory markers, but also as devices to help us imagine more deeply the places we visit and recollect with our minds. Here, I recall in my mind the distance of static sounds like vague clouds, delicate sounds like a state where cherry blossoms whirl in the wind and resemble snow falling.
14,00€
Out of stock
CD
Phill NIBLOCK
“Ghosts And Others”
Lawrence English on Phill Niblock’s Ghosts And Others...
Ghosts And Others is a singular work in the Phill Niblock canon. It’s singular not just in its material content, but also in its methodology and approach. It represents a highly focused exercise in editing, location recording and acoustic observation.
In many ways, this work reflects a kind of acoustic mirroring of his practices as a film maker. It makes itself available to the world and in doing so reveals a particular perspective that says as much about its creator as it does about its subjects.
Like all of Niblock’s works this is a piece of patience. It is a work that dwells in the places it finds itself in, allowing certain moments to dominate in some sections, and seemingly vanish away in others. It suggests a movement within boundaries, in that it bounces from one locale to another counterpointing their gradual evolutions across time.
There’s a sense of collision throughout Ghost And Others. Explosions of Chinese percussion punctuate the piece, dynamic strikes to ward off ghosts during a funeral procession in Aberdeen, Hong Kong. They clang between bursts of car horn, the bellows of cows from collective Soviet-era farm in Hungary and various other sonic ephemera. Elsewhere a reeded instrument tries to carve a space for itself, but the world does not allow it to hold. It is a work that celebrates proximity as much as an aural vista.
Transit is also a theme here. What is a fascinating about Ghost And Others is the sense of movement in the work. Trains divide up this piece, marking points of transition, of distraction and of discovery. They act as gate-keepers almost, allowing us through into new spaces and suggesting new relations between the sounds as they combine or detach.
As a work of field recording, Ghosts And Others is generous, invitational and most of all effortlessly deep. It is resonate sensing of place, people and things.
14,00€
In stock
CD
PINKCOURTESYPHONE
“All Intensive Purposes”
A decade has passed since Pinkcourtesyphone's unexpected debut album 'Foley Folly Folio' (LINE)... time does fly in face of expectations, since expectations are just future resentments. 'All Intensive Purposes' is a lush compliment to Pinkcourtesyphone's previous outing for Room40 'Leaving Everything To Be Desired'
Immured within the deep deep pink velvet lining of their sonic smudge satchel ooze forth the obsessions and peculiar delicacies that have captivated both Pinkcourtesyphone and audiences alike. Moody glowering, ghostly utterances re-situated, hissy, distant and sad, all the while light and tender. It is that Sound that is at the fluffy heart of a long string of successful though surprisingly varied albums. A new sparkling jewel that already gathers cloudiness in its facets. This album can be best characterized by one word — charm, well, maybe two words — questionable charm.
"I could listen to it for hours" — a possible proclamation for these inconsistent consistencies.
Theoretical A and B sides makes one long for the warmth of antiquated plastic possibilities, if only for a moment to distill the gnawing hungry need for consumption within. Seven "songs" lilt and wallow, indefinable, intangible, yet always... there.
This is "catastrophe muzak", the sound of sympathy amplified, leaving the room.
Here is a collection of moods which we anticipate and enjoy with no misgivings. A long trail of evening debris awaits your ears' pleasure. Let it procure that pleasure for you, let it devour you.
I can’t imagine... you will.
14,00€
In stock
CD, Book
ZIMOUN
“Guitar Studies I-III”
From Zimoun
With the Guitar Studies series I’ve dealt solely with noises and sounds produced by guitars.
Partly I played the guitars by hand in a more conventional way, but more often I prepared them, or activated them by using small DC motors. I used various microphones for the recordings, as well as the loose contact of a pickup and many different amps; from a small toy amp that was partially defective to a beautiful Magnatone amp with analogue tremolo from the sixties and an old Fender Amp I bought together with my first guitar when I was 10 years old.
I also played recorded sounds back in different environments, for example inside a cardboard tube or in different rooms with various sizes, and then recorded them again. This way I added natural resonate and spatiality to the sounds. I also created a distorted sounds by sending the signal of the guitar to a naked speaker membrane lying on the table, and then put some sand on the membrane itself. The friction between the membrane and the sand then created various forms of distortion. I was trying to test various processes of iteration to discover how transformed the guitar might become.
I did not work with loops in any of the compositions. For each layer in each piece, I recorded whatever I was exploring over the whole period of about an hour. In this way, I put together countless hours of sounds. Through the almost endless overlaying and long recording takes, I have tried to achieve a kind of liveliness, even if at the same time no major changes happen in the composition. It’s never exactly the same, but never going somewhere else either. In that sense these compositions also have a strong sculptural component.
After this process, I started working on the microstructures of the recordings. For example, I recorded slow equalizer shifts in some of these tracks over the whole period of time. I also played these live via various controllers and analogue equalizers. This approach allowed the individual frequencies to become more present over long periods of time or mix with others. Figuratively speaking, this is similar to using a lamp (or various lamps) to illuminate a sculpture from different perspectives, or to create slow changes in light, which affects our perception of the sculpture. At different sonic stages, this can also provoke additional psychoacoustic phenomena. Through these methods I have tried to create a complexity in the microstructures of the sounds and their evolutions.
All three compositions last about an hour each. Digitally, they are released in their full length, while the CD contains shortened versions.
18,00€
In stock
CD, Book
Lawrence ENGLISH
“Viento”
In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect.
Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos.
What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm blew in unexpectedly. Conditions exceeded expectations, and before long it was clear the transport could not take off. The situation was only compounded by adverse weather along the Antarctic Peninsula.
Whilst the scientists and military personnel we were travelling with bunkered down in their quarters, I found myself drawn outside into the howling air. The wind in Patagonia is, well, breathtaking. Literally, there were moments where it was so physical, that it was difficult to catch my breath. Across three days I recorded abandoned buildings, lone trees folded over in fields of tundra-like grasses, quivering road signs, wailing fences and other objects shaken into life by the wind. It wasn't a comfortable experience by any means, but the multiplicity of sounds I was able to capture, I hope, speak for themselves.
The Antarctic recordings were made during two blizzards at Marambio and Esperanza bases. During the blizzard in Marambio, the temperature dropped to -40 degrees centigrade (with wind chill) which made recording particularly challenging. The wind battered the base’s structures and telecommunications equipment, making a range of unsettling, phasing choral drones and deep low frequency vibrations that resonated inside the base itself. The blizzard at Esperanza was mild by comparison, but still strong enough to coat penguins in layer of snow as they huddled together during the worst of the storm.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of completing these compositions and since that time, I have had the pleasure to diffuse them on numerous occasions. With those experiences in mind, as well as the format on which these works are now being made available, I have revisited them and completely remixed and remastered the pieces.
Listening back to these recordings I am struck by the sheer physicality of the wind. It's rare that you feel physically reduced by the motion of air, but in both Patagonia and Antarctica that is just how I felt. A small speck of organic dust in a howling storm.
Recorded on location in Patagonia and Antarctica in the summer of 2010.
Mixed and mastered at Negative Space 2022.
18,00€
In stock
CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“The Little Dipper Minus Two Plus (Echo Poeme Sequences)”
ICR is pleased to re-issue this long deleted release, now enhanced for CD in a gatefold ecopack.
This originally came out in 2005 on CDR, as a limited edition of only 200 copies by ICR and Klanggalerie, only available at the Vienna live shows featuring Steve Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron and Diana Rogerson. The gigs were held on 6 & 7 May 2005 at The Anatomical Museum / Narrenturm, Vienna (Austria). Each concert was limited to 50 seats. Fun was had. Lab coats optional.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Daisuke SUZUKI
“D.D.D.”
‘D.D.D.’ is a field recording album recorded by Daisuke Suzuki and was originally released by Texas based IDEA in 2001 in an edition of 300 copies on LP.
Sometimes field recordings can be appreciated in relation to the conceptual art form, or as an on-site sound study and documentation of a very specific phenomena. However, Daisuke had no concept of the idea of building sonic panoramas and was specifically only concerned with gathering lots of intriguing sound matter for his personal listening.
‘D.D.D.’ was mastered by Gary Todd, who was the founder of the Cortical Foundation. Gary and Daisuke became good friends when Gary visited Japan as Red Crayola live sound engineer in the late 1990s and they developed a mutual trust with each other after that.
Sadly in September 2001, Gary fell from his apartment balcony, which left him hospitalized ever since. On June 25, 2022 Gary passed away at the age of 59.
Daisuke said, “Gary was always generous and had a kind heart. He gave me a lot of friendship and warmth. I’ve decided to re-issue 'D.D.D.' to keep him in memory and heart.”
The CD includes an expanded version of ‘Cricket Voice’ which did not appear on the original IDEA LP release.
The CD is in edition 200 copies and is presented in a facsimile card sleeve of the original release, newly designed by Andrew Chalk.
11,50€
In stock
CD
Daisuke SUZUKI & Andrew CHALK
“Drifting”
A collaboration does not mean you have to share everything or to do each and every activity together as a team. If your words or sounds inspire someone to open a challenge to something new,or open the door of possibilities-you can call it collaboration.
Your personally recorded sounds never fail to reveal your true face and the sounds always speak more than words can.
‘Drifting’ is the very first collaboration between Andrew Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki, which has remained unsurfaced since then-their private recording in 1996. In early 1996 Daisuke sent Andrew a DAT tape which included some unedited pieces that he recorded with found objects in his garden.
Those fragments of recordings inspired Andrew to make a spontaneous recording and he made a live mix directly to cassette recorder with his instinct and archaic vision. ‘Drifting’ is a kind of archaic low-fi recording, but it has great atmosphere and perfect unison in texture.
‘Drifting’ was also a prelude to their long-term collaborations and the beginning of the change of direction in Andrew’s approach to music.
Remastered by Denis Blackham in 2023, and CD comes with glossy card sleeve in edition 300.
11,50€
Out of stock
2 CD
COMPILATION
“Fluxus & NeoFluxus: Stolen Symphony (Part I)”
Double-CD version comes in digipack; includes 72-page booklet.
All in all, there are more than 50 pieces, new and old, live and studio, finished pieces and scores to be performed, acoustic and classical, solos and pieces for ensemble, using classical and special instruments. This Fluxus edition features (in alphabetical order): Eric Andersen, Ay-O, George Brecht, John Cage, Giancarlo Cardini, Giuseppe Chiari, Henning Christiansen, Philip Corner, Öyvind Fahlström, Ken Friedman, Sten Hanson, Geoffrey Hendricks, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joe Jones, Bengt af Klintberg, Milan Knízák, Alison Knowles, Larry Miller, George Maciunas, Sara Miyamoto, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Opening Performance Orchestra, Benjamin Patterson, Josef Anton Riedl, Terry Riley, Takako Saito, Tomas Schmit, Dieter Schnebel, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, and La Monte Young. The musicians and performers Anna Clementi, Agnese Toniutti, Deborah Walker, Werner Durand, Luciano Chessa, Miroslav Beinhauer, Petr Bakla, Nicolas Horvath, Petr Ferenc, and Premysl Ondra have played, performed and declaimed the Fluxus pieces, Arditti Quartet and S.E.M. Ensemble provided one piece from their archives. Milan Knízák, Petr Rezek, Petr Kotík, Olaf Hanel, Eric Andersen, Per Brunskog, Peter van der Meijden, Pavlína Morganová, Natasha Lushetich, Joseph Nechvatal, Natilee Harren, Martin Patrick, Diedrich Diederichsen, Christopher M. Reeves, and Hubertus von Amelunxen have written Fluxus-themed texts. Archivio Conz in Berlin provided access to their extensive Fluxus archives and Edizioni Conz provided coproduction. Ursula and René Block made possible the realization of John Cage's historical composition "Rozart Mix" from the Edition Block archive. The photographic material comes from Marie Knízáková and Milan Knízák's private archive, the German photographer Wolfgang Träger, Archivio Conz's Fluxus archive and Opening Performance Orchestra's digital archive. The cover themes are paintings by Milan Knízák, while the graphic design is the work of Jaroslav Buzek.
20,00€
In stock
CD
BRUME
“A Treatise On Ethnography”
Brume/C Renou: Analog & digital electronics, percussion, metal, DIY wind instruments, amputated electric guitar, acoustic guitar, voice, electronic toys, tape (reel to reel & cassette), field recording, 60's radio, tv, effects, etc... + mix.
11,00€
In stock
CD
Aliénor GOLVET
“Point, Line, Surface”
PhD student at Ircam-STMS lab in the {Sound, Music, Movement} Interaction (ISMM) team under the supervision of Frédéric Bevilacqua and Benjamin Matuszeswski.
"My music is an exploration of sterility, mundanity and stillness interpreted through personal feelings and subjective experience.
My composition process is intuitive and personal. The recordings I use are of the following nature : souvenirs of lost moments, recordings of natural and urban empty spaces, microphone and object manipulation, deformed voices, non-expertly played instruments, resonances."
11,00€
In stock
2 CD
Eliane RADIGUE
“Naldjorlak”
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."
21,00€
In stock
CD
Francis PLAGNE & Andrew CHALK
“The Painter’s Family”
A beautiful collection of duets, melodic & drifting. An escape......
Edition of 300, comes in a mini handmade gatefold jacket with obi.
Recorded 2008-2016 and originally released on cassette in 2018.
The Painter’s Family is the first duo release from Andrew Chalk and Francis Plagne, recorded intermittently, both together and apart, over eight years, in Hull, Melbourne and various places in Japan. Eight pages from the sketchbook, sequenced into two languorous side-long suites.
“He tried by every means to come close to nature, lying in the fields before daybreak and until nightfall in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning sky of sunrise, sunset and the evening hours”
Mastered by Joe Talia.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Jean Noël REBILLY & Andrew CHALK
“Tsilla”
Somewhat different to the other recent releases involving Andrew, this music on this collaboration has a very different atmosphere. Somewhat mysterious & brooding, with a wide palette of electronic & acoustic instruments.
From the label : “On Tsilla, Jean-Noël Rebilly and Andrew Chalk pay homage to the late French writer and engraver Cécile Reims. While she may be best known as interpretative engraver for surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, and she also worked with Leonor Fini and briefly for Salvador Dali, Reims’ most powerful and enduring works were made either in collaboration with her husband, the writer and artist Fred Deux (who signed their collaborative work “cf deux”), or by herself. Later works by Reims, like the L’Elan Vitale suite, or the Histoires Naturelles series, manifest denuded, obliterated landscapes; spiralling abstractions; engravings that shiver with an unearthly radiance, where etchings of great intricacy hint at intimacy and the velocity of rapture, before opening out to aching empty spaces. The music on Tsilla is similarly evocative, a tender weaving of emotional complexity carved with the hand-held and simple tools of artisans. Much like Reims, Rebilly and Chalk enact a similar transfiguration of base materials. For Reims, natural order is made “more sinuous and curious through the rounded flow of her graver,” Kate McCrickard once noted. For Rebilly and Chalk, these seven pieces, cast under the shadow of a great artist, inhabit that sinuousness, and tease out the eternal flow of tone.” -Jon Dale
With a beautiful gatefold sleeve,handmade by Andrew, an edtion of 300.
Mastered by Dennis Blackham
14,00€
In stock
CD
Andrew CHALK
“Dreams: Scenes I – XV”
Another fine album from Andrew, in a similar vein to his recent ICR CD 'The End Times'.
Edition of 300, comes in a mini handmade gatefold jacket.
Dreams, subtitled Scenes I-XV, captures imaginary scenes and sequenced into a full album of 52 minutes length at Impression Lointaine.
Dreams being archaic and unpredictable in its composition, such as dreams themselves that make little sense upon waking and assembled using time limited constraints. And while immersed, and in privacy, form a thread of personal communication like a nostalgic memory-a painting of which we inhabit ourselves.
14,00€