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LP

John DUNCAN – SCHEINTOT
“Split LP” [!!damaged cover!!]

Pochette abimée avec au minimum 2 coins pliés. Damaged cover with at least 2 corners bumped / folded. John Duncan's "SAXMIX" is one massive piece of contemporary experimental music, which lets noise collide with free jazz and extreme minimalism. Duncan is a master when it comes to these things, and he is an artists constantly evolving, mutating and challenging. The sax thing then? JD has invited some of his fav sax players to collaborate with him; Mats Gustafsson, Antoine Chessex, Martin Escalante, Dror Feiler and Ulrich Krieger. Did I say MASSIVE? Well, it is. Scheintot is a new debuting trio consisting of Mats Gustafsson (sax/flute), Henrik Rylander (mixing desk) and myself on Korg MS20 which might be my fav synth ever, or right now at least. This is weird stuff. Not sure where this is going but I guess you will enjoy it if you are into stuff we have done before, but this sits comfortably in its own corner, and we are not smart enough to be ashamed over sounding so infected. Nice cover by Tochnit Aleph boss Daniel Löwenbrück. Hot stuff, basically! Joachim Nordwall, November 28th 2024. Edition: 200 on black/transparent splatter vinyl

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LP

Mats LINDSTRÖM
“Low Fidelity” [!!damaged cover!!]

Pochette abimée avec au minimum 2 coins pliés. Damaged cover with at least 2 corners bumped / folded. ‘Low Fidelity’ was commissioned by Anna Koch / Weld with support from the Swedish Arts Council for the performance Insisting On. Sneak premiere for Issue Project Room, Saint Vitus Bar, Brooklyn, USA in December 2015. First performance at Weld, Stockholm, Sweden in February 2016. ‘Invocation I’ is an excerpt from a live recording at Inter Arts Center, Malmö, Sweden, January 2017 based on Lindström’s ‘giant electronic feedback set-up.’ ‘The True Laptop Quartet’ is named after a set of instruments built on electromagnetic feedback principles. Both the instruments and the piece were commissioned by Bergen Assembly 2016 for Tarek Atoui’s Within project. Track recorded at Sentralbadet, Bergen, Norway, June 2016 with Mats Lindström overdubbing on all instruments. Official world premiere: September 1st 2016 with Tarek Atoui, Espen Sommer Eide, Mats Lindström and Kaya Molsen as the musicians. ‘Light Vessel 21’ was a collaboration with Anna Koch and presented as an A/V installation on board the historic LV21 vessel. LV21 saw most of her service off the Kent coast on the Varne and East Goodwin stations. The piece was commissioned by Töne Festival, Kent, England. World premiere: June 20th 2014. ‘Sotto il Ponte’ was recorded live, with Alba G. Corall on live video, at Huset Under Bron, Stockholm, Sweden in February 2014. ‘Shadow of the Dutchman’ was an overture to the Wagner opera in a version for three pianos and live electronics. The piece was commissioned by Folkoperan, Stockholm, Sweden. Its debut performance was in February 2013.

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LP

ROEDELIUS / HAUSSWOLFF
“II” [!!damaged cover!!]

Pochette abimée avec au minimum 2 coins pliés. Damaged cover with at least 2 corners bumped / folded. Deep and beautiful ambient experimentalism from two true masters. “Roedelius / Hausswolff II”is this duo’s second album. The two met in Vienna in 2016 when Carl Michael invited Hans-Joachim to participate in the collective sound-installation and concert””freq_out ”. Since H-J had been, and still is, organizing the festival “More Ohr Les“ in his home town Baden just outside Vienna it has been natural for him to invite CM to collaborate and perform here. As a result of this iDEAL Recording released the CD “Zurufe“ in 2021 where H-J and CM collaborated with American Tim Story and Brit/Swiss Christopher Chaplin. Like the duo’s first album - ”Nordlicht” (released in the USA in 2017) - this new one follows the path where a dark ambient drone style reveals several epic landscapes and formulas.

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LP

Mark VERNON
“Call Back Carousel” [!!damaged cover!!]

Pochette abimée avec au minimum 2 coins pliés (emballage médiocre du label).

Damaged cover with at least 2 corners bumped / folded (poor packaging from the label).

***** “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.” (Don Draper) Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind’s eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listener’s mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from Vernon’s own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has collected over the past twenty years. Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners’ imagination in the classic tradition of ‘cinema for the ears’. It’s a little like looking through a family photo album where only the hand written captions and moun1ng corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of our tour guides accompany us on a sonic journey that fractures time - and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into our present.

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LP single-sided

Giuseppe IELASI ‎
MMXX-10 “Untitled, 2020”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

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LP single-sided

Jim O’ROURKE ‎
MMXX-07 “In all due deference”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

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Charlemagne PALESTINE ‎
MMXX-06 “Vvvoooodddoooo Ddddooooodddddooooo”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

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CD

Takuma KURAGAKI
“Bottomless / Blank”

Electronic sound artist Takuma Kuragaki was born in 1968. Since he began his musical activity in the 1990s, he has presented his creations not only in live music venues, but also in museums and galleries. In 2009, Kuragaki earned an award for excellence in a contest featured in Sound & Recording Magazine in which entrants produced works incorporating material field-recorded by Ryuichi Sakamoto in the Arctic Circle. In 2017, Kuragaki took part in the 3-CD compilation album Prix Presque Rien Prize, made up of entries in the international contest Prix Presque Rien--a competition of outstanding works making use of French composer Luc Ferrari's sound archives. The newly released CD BOTTOMLESS / BLANK is Kuragaki's first full album. Drawing inspiration from the activities and creations of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this album--with its key words ''bottomless'' and ''blank''--aims to have listeners become ''users'' who incorporate into their daily lives the experiences gained through the works. In contrast to conventional works of music, which stir up listeners' emotions and provide each individual with their own unique experience, this album--in which radically curtailed minimal sounds are placed sometimes regularly and sometimes at unpredictable intervals--will likely bring listeners the reality of time segmentation. This experience will surely be recalled at unexpected moments in daily life, which is overlaid with a network of various rhythms. How it is applied in these situations is left to each listener.

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CD

Phil MINTON & DIEB13
“With, Without”

Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter. He is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. Minton is perhaps best known, however, for his completely free-form work, which involves "extended techniques" that can be as unsettling as they can be mesmerising. His vocals often include the sounds of retching, burping, screaming, and gasping, as well as childlike muttering, whining, crying and humming; he also has an ability to distort his vocal cords to produce two notes at once. Dieter Kovačič aka Dieb13 is an Austrian improvisational musician who mostly works with turntables. Since the late 1980s he has been experimenting with cassette players, vinyl records, CDs and harddiscs. He has a duo with Billy Roisz which combines electronic music with experimental filmmaking. Their first collaborative album has been recorded live at various festivals, including Wels Unlimited, Disobedience Ljubljana or Instants Chavires, Montreuil.

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2 CD

Marcus SCHMICKLER
“Richters Patterns”

Double-CD collecting five of Schmicklers key-works composed & recorded between 2006 and 2016. Edition of 400 copies in fullcolour digipak with 8-page booklet.Edition of 400 copies in fullcolour digipak with 8-page booklet. "Richters Patterns (2016) is a collaboration among Marcus Schmickler, artist Gerhard Richter, director Corinna Belz and the Ensemble Musikfabrik. In 2011, Richter took an image of his work Abstract Painting (CR: 7244) and divided it vertically into strips and gave them to Belz who utilized specially developed software operations involving cuts, mirroring and reproduction to create a movie from these images. Schmickler and Belz worked in parallel, with the film and composition following their own independent logic. Schmickler’s idea was to extend Richter’s method to divide, mirror, repeat into sound and time. Richters Patterns was commissioned by Koeln Musik and had its premiere on September 9, 2016 at Cologne Philharmonic Hall. Marco Blaauw (Trumpet), Helen Bledsoe (Flute), Christine Chapman (Horn), Bruce Collings (Trombone), Diamanda Dramm (Violin), Florentin Ginot (Double Bass), Benjamin Kobler (Piano, Synthesizer), Ulrich Löffler (Piano), Heidi Mockert (Bassoon), Melvyn Poore (Tuba), Axel Porath (Viola), Carl Rosman (Clarinet), Dirk Rothbrust (Percussion), Marieke Schoenmakers (Harp), Peter Veale (Oboe), Hannah Weirich (Violin), Dirk Wietheger (Violoncello), Marcus Schmickler (Computer), Paul Jeukendrupp (Soundprojection). "Kemp Echoes" (2013) refers to a physical phenomenon in the ear discovered by physicist David Kemp in 1978. Otoacoustic Emissions (OAE) are signals in the ear (that can be detected with high quality small microphones) that are emitted by the cochlea, either spontaneously or in response to stimuli (frequently clicks). I have strived to create a piece that can seem ‘electronic’ to the ear without actually utilizing electronics. With Helen Bledsoe (Flute), Peter Veale (Oboe), Carl Rosman (Clarinet), Heidi Mockert (Bassoon), Christine Chapman (Horn), Ales Klancar (Trumpet), Bruce Collings (Trombone), Melvyn Poore (Tuba), Ulrich Löffler (Synthesizer), Benjamin Kobler (Piano/Sampler), Dirk Rothbrust (Percussion), Thomas Meixner (Percussion), Juditha Haeberlin (Violin), Hannah Weirich (Violin), Axel Porath (Viola), Dirk Wietheger (Violoncello), Benedict Ziervogel (Bass), Marcus Schmickler (Computer), Paul Jeukendrup (Soundprojection). Conducted by Enno Poppe. "Fokker Bifurcations" (2014) marks a departure into microtonal works for keyboards and mallets and maintains the composer’s penchant for juxtaposed fixed pitches with pitch continua. Recorded live at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn on Nov 7 2014. The recording has been edited for this publication. With Laura Barger (piano), Ning Yu (piano), Ian Antonio (percussion), Russell Greenberg (percussion). "E-UROPAS / Plurality of Centers" (2006). Shall we say goodbye to modernism? I dare to confront the myths of new music in this music theater creation. Layers containing the manifestos of Cornelius Cardew, Guy Debord and sound materials from six decades of the avant-garde create a collage that utilizes some of the formal principles guiding John Cage’s Europera V. With Hayden Chisholm (Voice), Juditha Haeberlin (Violin), Axel Porath (Viola), Dirk Wietheger (Violoncello), Ulrich Löffler (Piano), Dirk Rothbrust (Percussion), Marcus Schmickler (Voice, Computer, Radios), Carsten Goertz (scenography). "ATA OTO" (2017) for Robot instruments TEMBLO, TINTI, TROMS, XY by Logos Foundation & computer.

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CD

suzueri
“Fata Morgana”

suzueri: piano, gadgets. Sound artist/improviser suzueri started her musical activity in the 1990s, and her wide-ranging work since then has included concerts, exhibitions and installations. It was in the late 2000s that she began the style of performance heard on this album, combining upright piano and handmade devices. She continued to develop her concerts featuring this combination, and in the 2010s she earned widespread recognition and praise among improvised/experimental music fans for her unique "suzueri" style. Three CDs of suzueri's performances at Ftarri with upright piano and self-made devices have previously been released on the Ftarri label: Live at Ftarri (meenna-993), a 2013 concert by the trio of suzueri, Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar) and Makoto Oshiro (self-made instruments), plus a quartet by these three and British drummer Roger Turner; Ftarri de Solos (ftarri-887), pairing solos performed in 2017 by suzueri and Hong Kong sound artist Fiona Lee; and Duo (ftarri-886), a 2018 duo performance with Makoto Oshiro. While these three CDs are all live recordings, what might be called a "definitive" studio-recorded solo album by suzueri has now been released. Fata Morgana, made up of two tracks of 25-plus minutes each, was recorded in February 2019 by Makoto Oshiro (who has an established reputation as an engineer). Various devices including a small electric fan, a motor and a radio are placed on, attached to or arranged near an upright piano whose upper and lower panels are removed and insides exposed. The devices themselves produce sounds; and when touched by these devices, the piano strings and keyboard emit sounds repetitively (every few seconds) or continuously. These myriad sounds overlap and become a united whole, and at the point when they fill the space like a foundational layer, suzueri strikes the keyboard with both hands, forcefully and persistently unleashing clusters of sounds. This album overflows with suzueri's magical appeal, which combines concentrated musical creativity with turbulence and disarray.

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LP

Charlemagne PALESTINE & TRRMA’
“Sssseegmmeentss frrooom baaari”

Stochastic music for percussion and synthesizers from New York avant conceptualist and keyboardist Charlemagne Palestine, here on voice, piano & electronics, with the Italian duo Trrma' a multifaceted project formed by Giovanni Todisco (percussion) and Giuseppe Candiano (synthetizers) in two side-long works of irregular rhythm, complexity and dissonance that build and recede in a suspenseful journey. Recorded in 2018.

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10"

Jean-Philippe GROSS – GOLDEN ORIOLE
“Optical Cadillac – The Granitoid Panics”

A split 10inch with Jean-Philippe Gross on one side and Golden Oriole on the other. The first one delivers 7'30" of an impulsive electronic quicksand where everything seems unstable and elusive, with that strange feeling of not knowing if you are moving forward or not, or that experience of a "non-Newtonian fluid" - a fluid you can walk on. In short, we are between immobility and speed, between raw materials and etheric frequencies! The second Golden Oriole, Thore Warland, drums, and Kristoffer Riis, guitar, who used to play in trio under the name of Staer, produced here by Jørgen Træen, alias Sir Dupermann, gives us a side of a harmonious and reverberated groove that Bill Laswell or Golden Palominos wouldn't have disavowed !

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CD

Xavier CHARLES – Bertrand GAUGUET
“Spectre”

Xavier Charles, clarinet (acoustic & amplified). Bertrand Gauguet, alto saxophone (acoustic & amplified). "[...] this is some very radical music. It is mostly about playing lengthy sustaining passages in which the amplification can seem to take over from the actual playing. However, that said, this is not about total feedback, noise or distortion. Charles and Gauguet maintain a strong level of control over their work, in which they can easily play for a few minutes very quietly and yet one feels a lot of tension between the players. Everything seems to be about this level of control. Each of the six pieces is carefully played out and most of the times it didn't seem like two amplified wind instruments; it could have been some amplified string objects, but not with a lot of reverb. It doesn't sound like a long string instrument. When you play this loud, the sound will be overwhelming and an attack on the ears, but at a moderate level seems to bring out some equally great beauty, without being such a burden upon the listener." Vital Weekly 1234

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LP single-sided

Daniel MENCHE
MMXX-05 “4424”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

matière-mémoire · MMXX - 05 DANIEL MENCHE (4424) - Extract

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LP single-sided

Reinier VAN HOUDT
MMXX-04 “Les Champs Lissajous”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

matière-mémoire · MMXX - 04 REINIER VAN HOUDT (LES CHAMPS LISSAJOUS) - Extract

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LP single-sided

CM VON HAUSSWOLFF
MMXX-03 “For Marietta”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

matière-mémoire · MMXX - 03 CM VON HAUSSWOLFF (FOR MARIETTA) - Extract

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John DUNCAN ‎
MMXX-02 “Panic @ 11000 Feet”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

matière-mémoire · MMXX - 02 JOHN DUNCAN (PANIC @ 11000 FEET) - Extract

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LP single-sided

Franck VIGROUX ‎
MMXX-01 “Tension 24”

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.

matière-mémoire · MMXX - 01 FRANCK VIGROUX (TENSION 24) - Extract

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CD

Anla COURTIS & DAS SYNTHETISCHE MISCHGEWEBE ‎
“Squenun”

"We somehow tried to use sounds as idioms. Turning them upside down and back again, make them collide with each other's distorted mirror image, let them mean everything one would usually not think them to mean. "Careta" meaning someone who acts like someone they are not. A sound, in music, usually one would say doesn't mean anything, but the sound of the word "word" does (if you have learned English). But, a collaboration allows to pretend it would mean something else and language is but a collaboration, words and meanings have to be shared to exist. Maybe to craft their own little world." Recorded in Rennes & Buenos Aires 2017 - 2019 ℗ Ferns recordings 2020 © Anla Courtis & Guido Hübner 200 copies

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LP

C. LAVENDER
“Myth of Equilibrium” [!!damaged cover!!]

Tranche du haut fendue. Split at upper edge. C. Lavender is a New York based sound artist and sound healing practitioner whose third full-length album explores meditative physical rituals of sound with binaural recordings from inside a geodesic dome in the Catskill Mountains of New York. “The future is a choice between utopia and oblivion,” noted architect, futurist and geodesic dome theorist Buckminster Fuller. Myth of Equilibrium delves into these divergent paths by featuring equal parts of pastoral raw acoustic percussion combined with C. Lavender’s signature “devastating caustic drones” (Ad Hoc) via her custom bass guitar and synthesizers. An assistant to the late pioneering electronic composer and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, C. Lavender’s astute editing and the binaural recording process places the listener within the heady fluctuating underworld she has created on this album. The recording environment of the geodesic dome allowed for sounds to transfer out beyond the confines of the walls as well as allowing outside sounds from the surrounding wilderness to permeate in like that of a mutating cell. The album suggests “headphone listening” for the full hypnotic experience Myth of Equilibrium presents to the listener. C. Lavender is a 2020 Pioneer Works (New York) Music Artist-in-Residence.

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CD

LAST DREAM OF THE MORNING
“Crucial Anatomy”

John Butcher: tenor & soprano saxophones, John Edwards: double bass, Mark Sanders: percussion. THE LAST DREAM OF THE MORNING is the new band from three UK masters of contemporary improvised music – they released a trio cd under this title on Relativ Pitch (NYC) in 2017, now choosing it for their bandname for continuing activities. Recorded live at Cafe Oto, August 2018 Press: This is a very worthwhile record that I've listened to repeatedly since it's release. If you haven't heard their debut it's also very much worth picking up as well if you enjoy this one. All of the best qualities of the musicians involved are fully demonstrated throughout, never a lag, never a misstep, and never a dull moment. I look forward to more releases from this finely tuned, explosive trio. Really great music, highly recommended. - Nick Metzger, FreeJazzBlog

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LP

Sven-Åke JOHANSSON & Thomas KAPIELSKI
“Das Moabiter Duo – recovered”

The LP "recovered", mixed and mastered by Frieder Butzmann, features a previously unreleased concert recording from 1983. Joint performances by Kapielski and Johansson took place in clubs like the Korrekt (Alt-Moabit, Berlin) or - as part of the experimental concert series "Materialausgabe" initiated by Heiner Goebbels and Christoph Anders - at the Batschkapp in Frankfurt/Main. Das Moabiter Duo, as we can see from today's perspective, already anticipated live performances between noise, improv and advanced electronics that now almost daily enrich the nightlife of a city like Berlin. But back to the concerts of that time: Kapielski's electronic manipulations of sounds from everyday objects resulted in, as he himself puts it as ironically as conceitedly, an "ingenious-stockhausianistical" performance. Meanwhile, Johansson explored the sonic possibilities of shoe trees, lashed out with towels, grabbed his accordion with its attached rear-view mirror, and, last but not least, played, of course, his astonishing drum kit. Confusion arose - both during the actual performance and, in a completely different way, decades later, when Kapielski rediscovered the audio tape with a concert recording in an old carton - because of a typically unique idea by Johansson: "With a professional gesture, in the middle of the concert and while playing, Sven-Åke exchanged the cymbals, mounted on stands to the left and right of the bass drum, for large ‘cymbals’ made of thick foam pads. And he continued to play on them. We laughed - but we heard nothing. Or presumably even more. Each of us something different. That was enlightening - how else would this scene still be so present in my memory after 35 years." (Heiner Goebbels, text excerpt from the booklet) Obviously, listening to the original recording on which the LP is based you wouldn't be able to see Johansson playing his foam cymbals, in order to, as it were, hear them before the inner eye. Moreover, as Kapielski remembers in an e-mail to Johansson printed in the booklet, the recording microphones were placed in such a way that little of Johansson's drums could be heard anyway. So, across decades, a special kind of improvisation emerged: Johansson added new, "real" sounds with his drum kit, turning his improvisations with Kapielski into a, not only in a temporal sense, genuinely free-floating undertaking: "recovered". In addition to a download code, the vinyl album contains an extensive format-filling 16-page booklet with drawings by Sven-Åke Johansson, a text by Heiner Goebbels, an e-mail from Thomas Kapielski and photographs by Gerald Domenig of the legendary performance.

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LP

Crys COLE
“Beside Myself”

Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist Crys Cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (2015, Black Truffle), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focusses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'. Francis Plagne (November, 2019)

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2 LP

ELEH
“Living Space”

Following ‘Slow Fade for Hard Sync’ (2009) and Location Momentum (2010), Living Space is Eleh’s third physical release for Touch. Seven years in the making, this new release consolidates the artist’s parallel narrative between a series of vinyl and CD releases for Important Records – where the emphasis is on a minimalist aesthetic – to a visual counterpoint that hints at the cinematic and painterly qualities of the music. Sound, as a healing force, is an idea as old as the medium itself. Inspired by the legacy and above all the spirit of John Coltrane, Living Space features 5 new compositions that seek to express the beauty of slow change, not only through the microtonal shifts in sound that Eleh navigates but moving with the atmospheric and shape–shifting conditions that the music creates as it interacts with the listening space, whether bedroom or concert hall, each one of them unique. If the ambition of Living Space is to reflect both personal and collective growth cycles, the experience of its audition has the effect of stopping time. Melodic and harmonic progressions are implied and not stated obviously, to enable listeners to apply their own emotions and feelings to the music. Using modular and analogue synthesisers, piano, organ, bass and symphonic chimes, Living Space stresses the promise of the final track – ‘Lighter Touch’ – forsaking the forceful hand for an approach that mirrors the slower and softer exposures of plant life and leaf formations, slow moving waters, not flash floods nor forest fires. For those for whom Eleh needs no introduction, see if you agree. Anyone who has yet to experience the artist’s sonic alchemy, Living Space is the perfect starting point. Now available as 2LP with gatefold cover.

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LP

INDEX
“Kainos”

Simon Scott (Slowdive) debuts his Index alias with a visceral new sound that absorbs and transmutes political, ecological and psychic dread into a caustic, dissonant style of noise sculpture for iDEAL Recorded 2016-2019 in Los Angeles, ‘Kainos’ sees veteran UK composer, field recordist, drummer and mastering engineer Scott explore ongoing concerns of his oeuvre via a prism of formative musical influences from the post-industrial music of Coil, Throbbing Gristle and early Black Sabbath, plus non-musical and conceptual inspiration from the turmoil of Brexit - including recordings of the Houses of Parliament - thru to the radical feminist scientific writing of Donna Haraway, and the conceptual vigour of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, ‘The Art of Noises’. The album’s title ‘Kainos’, from the ancient Greek meaning “new” or “fresh”, characterises Scott’s efforts to glean something practical from this world’s current state of chaos. When taken in context of its use in Donna Haraway’s 2016 book, ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene’, and its central tenet that “our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events on a damaged earth”, Scott’s enacts a tectonic shift from bucolic sonic signifiers to signposts of the post-industrial world that could hardly be more apt at at a time when electronic and ambient music are prized for their safe and sterile wallpaper qualities, rather than a potential to evoke and invoke more powerful feelings. Based around modular synth-mangled live stream recordings of the Houses of Parliament during the prelude to Brexit, Scott’s compositions take these fractious debates as building blocks for the album’s caustic improvisations and compositions, ranging from convulsive clangour to pulsating tracts of strobing distortion and gutted, lurching post-dubstep rhythms riddled with the voice of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, before eventually resolving with a more spacious, textured sense of relief by the album’s close. His results are chaotic and noisily abrasive in a way that holds up a mirror to the modern world, reflecting a putative state of unrest and agitation that resonates with the artist’s profound discontent with the lack of “equilibrium we have right now and how disconnected we have all become in relation to nature and each other.” In concept this is nothing new for Scott, as previous release have variously explored ideas of climate change in ‘Below Sea Level’ (2012) and ‘Flood Lines’ (2016’, but the product this time is far more pointed, even aggressive, in its noisy insistence. Limited edition of 300 copies pressed on bottle green vinyl.

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TONGUES OF MOUNT MERU
“The hex of light”

Tongues Of Mount Meru is the duo of Jon Wesseltoft & Lasse Marhaug. Jon Wesseltoft is a versatile electronics composer and musician, having worked with noise, electro-acoustics, improvisation and experimental sound-work for over 20 years. Lasse Marhaug is an experimental musician, improviser and composer with a long history within noise, improvisational, and experimental music with numerous releases since the 1990’s. He is also a producer, graphic designer, label head and publisher. Wesseltoft and Marhaug started Tongues of Mount Meru in 2008 as a way to explore their mutual interest in long-form music, psycho-acoustics, and the phenomenology of sound, and its correlation to perception. Their work as Tongues of Mount Meru is characterised by a stringent and multilayered flow of sound information, with an almost hypnotic quality. This is music that at times is clean-cut and saw buzzing, and at times lucidly beautiful, but always in demand of the listener's full attention. This music was recorded in 2013 and consists of two pieces that reflect into each other. Both stringent and close-knitted with microtonal frequency interaction, with a slowly unsettling shifting movement. Both pieces gradually blooming within its own sonic time-space, to reveal microscopic movements in tonality, binaural beat patterns and ghostly strata of overtones.

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CASSINI DIVISION
“Eta Carinae”

Around the turn of the century, a psychedelic fellow from Argentina – Miguel Sosa – swapped the grass for the rainy streets of Antwerp. Miguel lived in the long-standing Villa Delfia squat and played classical acoustic guitar pieces on the street to earn the necessary survival dough, winding down with a sustained assault of endless Moog dreambient at home. In no time and seemingly out of nowhere, he’d become a weirdo fixture in town — and ten years later he vanished just as swiftly. In the ensuing decade, we confess to have forgotten a little about Miguel’s music; it was so present in our lives that it was easy to take for granted. Then, a few monthsago, he sent us this mind-bending master of a record he had been working on for years. His essence seems to be etched into these pieces: filmic, dramatic, plastic-classical electronic music that could very well serve as the soundtrack to a documentary about this sweet Argentenian tripper. Much in the vein of Miaux or Blake Hargreaves, and somewhat like Miguel himself, this is music that sounds like it has always been there. We cannot express how happy we are to be putting this record out! Limited edition of 200 copies

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UN DRAME MUSICAL INSTANTANÉ
“L’homme à la caméra / La glace à trois faces”

"Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: rock; jazz, and classical modern music; as well as movies or world news; they were the first in France to give a new impetus to live music on silent movies. After having improvised freely for many years, they led a fifteen-piece orchestra from 1981 to 1986, and from 1989 onwards they produced multimedia shows (live video remix on a giant screen, fireworks, choreographies). Still their music was the most important technique, they called their recordings 'blind cinema'. The Drame used to mix acoustic and electronic instruments in real time as well as original instruments built by Vitet (a reed trumpet, a multiphonic French horn, a variable tension double-bass, a giant balafon with frying pans and flower pots keyboard, a fire organ, plexiglas flutes, etc.). After Francis Gorgé left the band in 1992, Birgé and Vitet went on recording and producing with other musicians close to the 'family' such as percussionist, Gérard Siracusa, or multi-instrumentalist, Hélène Sage. Un Drame Musical Instantané always remained independent (they always owned their own recording studio and record label GRRR) and stopped its activities in 2008, with Birgé being the only one active until this day. L'Homme À La Caméra was originally released on GRRR in 1984 and features 15 musicians. In addition to the original album, we offer you a whole new section of previously unreleased music from the time entitled La Glace A Trois Faces which is another soundtrack to a silent movie from 1927."

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FOVEA HEX
“The salt garden III”

"The starlit nocturnes of Fovea Hex bind electronics, drones and voices into song-spells that are untimely in the best possible sense; their intimacy and raw emotional power feel centuries old, but the experimental sound-design can be shockingly modern." Drew Daniels (Matmos) The frequently claimed "impossible to categorise" tag applies well to Fovea Hex. The songs are dominated by a voice that's too strong to be deigned ethereal, but remains too otherworldly to file alongside more conventional female singer-songwriters. The pace tends to be languid, the arrangements intricate and fragile. Comparisons have been made to This Mortal Coil, Emily Dickinson, Nico, Dead Can Dance, and even Schubert, but really this music is quite unique, a mix of electronic and acoustic sounds from a palette which ranges from state-of-art to ancient and arcane.

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Jenna SUTELA
“Nimiia vibié”

Aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness and our planet, nimiia vibié sounds the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation. Drawing on nimiia cétiï, Jenna Sutela’s project on machine learning and interspecies communication, the record manifests a more-than-human language. This language is based on the computer’s interpretation of a Martian tongue from the late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela, as well as the movement of Bacillus subtilis, an extreme loving bacterium that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The bacterium is also present in nattō, or fermented soybeans, a probiotic food considered as a secret to long life. Beyond Bacterial-Martian culture, or Martian gut bacteria, the project attempts to express the nonhuman condition of computers that work as our interlocutors and infrastructure. Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living materials. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20. The project originates in n-dimensions, Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-residence program at Somerset House Studios. Machine learning in collaboration with Memo Akten and Damien Henry. Miako Klein in the contrabass recorder and Shin-Joo Morgantini in the flute, with sound production by Ville Haimala.

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Christine ABDELNOUR & Joachim NORDWALL
“A higher state of body and mind”

Lebanese saxophonist Christine Abdelnour brings an impressive, extended instrumental vocabulary to Joachim Nordwall’s cryptic electronics in this live recording made at Ystad Konstmuseum for Sweden’s Firework Edition Recordings Falling deeply within the label’s taste for sounds that exist on the liminal edge of perception, ‘A Higher State of Body and Mind’ sees Abdelnour coaxing spittle-inflected small sounds and bestial whimpers from her brass tool while Nordwall colours the negative space in elemental, greyscale drones and sheets of coruscating electronic texture. Their results are organic and drily, soberly expressive in a transfixing style of sonic dialogue that covers all tiers of the frequency spectrum. As the release’s title implies, ‘A Higher State of Body and Mind’ is attuned to extremes of penetrative highs and rich, sonorous low end, but neither dominate the other, rather they buoy and balance each other in their quest to elevate listeners to experience, feel and perceive the recording on its purely sensual, synaesthetic terms.

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