In stock
LP
AMM
“Ammmusic”
2023 repress
Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMM, Ammmusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe’s beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label’s founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMM’s influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track ‘flaming’ on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies Ammmusic’s first side, ‘later during a flaming riviera sunset’).
Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging british jazz avant-garde – Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare – amm quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaf, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe’s prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies.
Evan Parker famously described the improvisational logic of AMM’s music as ‘laminal’, in contrast to the ‘atomistic’ approach more common among the generation of british improvisers (Bailey, Rutherford, Stevens and co.) To which he himself belonged. AMM improvised in layers: layers of sound subtly rising and falling or abruptly starting and stopping without being propelled by the implied pulse of free jazz improvisation. Rather than a pulse, AMM’s music began with the sound of the room in which it was played, the cageian anarchy of silence. By embracing the non-synchronous simultaneity of layered sound, AMM was able to create a musical container into which nearly anything could be incorporated at any moment: on ammmusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew’s purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music (and, on the lp’s second side, an extended fragment of ‘mockingbird’).
AMM’s clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Where improvised music has tended to foster the development of idiosyncratic stylists who move freely from one group to another, AMM, initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on ammmusic the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices. - Francis Plagne
22,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Oren AMBARCHI
“Grapes From The Estate”
2023 repress.
Black Truffle is pleased to make Oren Ambarchi’s Grapes from The Estate available once more on vinyl. Originally released on CD on Touch in 2004 and reissued on Southern Lord as a limited 2 LP in 2006 during Ambarchi’s tenure as a member of Sunn O))), Grapes from the Estate was a landmark release for Ambarchi, seeing him expand his sonic palette beyond the clipped, bass-heavy electric guitar tones he was known for at that point. Incorporating subtle layers of strings, keyboards, percussion over a bedrock of his signature guitar tones, in retrospect this album can be seen as the beginning of a broadening and evolution in Ambarchi’s work that would lead to his acclaimed, densely layered epics for Editions Mego, Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Beginning with the shuddering pure tones of opener ‘Corkscrew’, which looks back to previous guitar-only releases such as Suspension (2001), the album’s next two pieces show a progressive broadening of the instrumental palette and a corresponding move away from textural abstraction and sustained tones towards more traditional notions of musicality. This reached its high point on the album’s third piece, the fifteen-minute long ‘Remedios The Beauty’, where guitars, both acoustic and electric, strings, piano, and bells build from a murmur to an interlockinging web of repeating melodic patterns over gently swinging brushed snare and cymbals. The epic closer, ‘Stars Aligned, Webs Spun’, returns us to a space populated only by the electric guitar, but unlike everything Ambarchi had produced up until this point in his career, the piece has a liquid, psychedelic edge that looks forward to the shimmering harmonics of his more recent work. As Brendan Walls wrote at the time of the original release, this is ‘another outpouring of personal, intimate and enduring music from Oren Ambarchi’. Presented in a stunning gatefold sleeve featuring the original artwork and design by Jon Wozencroft. Redesigned by Stephen O’Malley. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin.
32,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Pauline OLIVEROS
“The Well & The Gentle”
The Well & The Gentle, two of the major works of Pauline Oliveros, are presented here in a first time reissue on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes.
If Oliveros had followed a more conventional path she may have, all social obstacles aside, been considered among the major composers of her time. However, Oliveros approached composition in a more egalitarian manner. She wrote music for musicians to interact with or, in the composers words, she wished to create "an inclusive and interdependent and unfolding world of relationships."
Oliveros' propensity towards inclusion is part of what makes this work so remarkably distinctive. The Well & The Gentle is carefully crafted, allowing performers to participate in the creation of the work. Players are asked to collaborate, focus, react and make imaginative choices. Only then can the performers "pass through stages of awakening to the possibilities inherent in making music, working together, leading to the essence of what can shape musical impulses and individual freedom simultaneously."
Unlike most major composers of the era, Oliveros' work focuses on collaboration and improvisation. For Oliveros, the processes involved in making music are as fundamental as the music itself. Oliveros creates, as Arthur Sabatini put it so eloquently in the liner notes, "A world in which sound and the practices entailed in making music merge; become, at once, source and atmosphere, energy and essence, presence and dynamic."
Pauline Oliveros was an electronic music pioneer, accordionist, composer and educator who resided in Kingston, New York. Her instrument was tuned in Just Intonation and she often included it in her meditative improvisational music. Her music is not meditative in the sense that it is intended for listening to while meditating, rather each piece is a form of meditation, such as her aptly titled Sonic Meditations.
A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the U.S. West coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvised with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.
39,00€
In stock
LP
BOSCH & SIMONS
“Three Music Machines”
From 1985, the beginning of their collaboration in Amsterdam, Peter Bosch and Simone Simons have been involved in performances, concerts and theatre productions. Since 1990, however, they have focused in particular on the development of autonomous music machines.
All these machines are dynamic: Sound and movement are constantly evolving. »Krachtgever« is their best-known piece for its Golden Nica, received at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, 1998. The other projects on the LP are »Cantan un Huevo«, commissioned by the Ives Ensemble in 2000 and awarded in 2002 at the 29th edition of the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art, Bourges, France, and one of their first installations, »Was der Wind zum Klingen bringt«, from 1989/90, shown in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1990, as part of the exhibition »Energieën«, and in 1991 at the Multimediale 2, Z.K.M., Karlsruhe. The LP demonstrates that sound produced by the Bosch & Simons music machines can also be listened to as autonomous »music«.
20,50€
In stock
LP
Jens BRAND
“Motors / Ratchets”
Jens Brand has created a large number of installations, musical performances and interactive media works. He uses the concepts of parallel activities rather then ideas of fusion. The pieces presented on this recording focus on sonic events related to electronic music (such as intense volumes and dynamics, white noise, square or sine waves) but stay entirely acoustic.
On a live performance of »Ratchets«, the sounds are generated with the idea of a physical, sculptural, yet invisible presence. It might happen that the body of a person moving around in the audience has more impact on the sound then the variations produced by instruments themselves.
"I was always interested in the idea of making acoustic music that has the quality of electronic music," muses Dortmund based musician and visual artist Jens Brand. "Electronic music is fantastic, but I don't like speakers very much."
Take his performance entitled »Motors And Styrofoam«. Pieces of glistening white styrofoam fitted with small motors hang from the ceiling above the audience's heads, squatting balefully in mid-air like lopsided clouds. Acting as a resonator, the styrofoam amplifies the whirr of the motors, which builds up into a loud, persistent drone overlaid with overtones.
Equally uncompromising is »Ratchets«, which deploys a number of football rattles, those small wooden devices originally used by hunters. The ratchets are set in motion by motors whose speed and direction are controlled by a computer: they click busily away, producing a dense, enveloping sound reminiscent of heavy rainfall. In performance, the sound of the ratchets is spellbinding in its rawness and intensity, attaining impressive volumes as it interacts with the features of the space.
20,50€
In stock
LP
JEUGDBRAND
“Siamese Dream (Team)”
Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music.
Inside the multiverse that is Dennis Tyfus’ oeuvre there exists this body of detailed pencil drawings of various sizes. In these drawings the artist puts himself in many tragic situations. Like vomiting on his way home after a long night at the bar. Boiling right wing idiots. Telling sweet little lies on your Tinder profile. Or, you know, taking out the garbage on a Sunday evening. The horror. These seemingly hermetic pencil drawings show a deceivingly simple world. But you’re often stuck with a bitter aftertaste when you understand a bit more what is actually happening behind the colorful masque.
When it comes to his music - and in contrast to aforementioned drawings - Dennis pencils a more piecemeal picture. His recordings and performances often feel like spliced excerpts. Strange sentences and funny remarks waiver by and interconnect. Musical symbols are casually thrown on the table. Instead of a clear picture, we now have the feeling of looking at a bunch of different doodles. Like… sometimes I have the feeling compared to how focussed Dennis works on his drawings, how unfocussed and sketchy he treats his music. We are simply thrown from emotion to emotion. From laughter to tears. It’s a bumpy ride.
I’d like to imagine that Dennis constantly notates all the shards of conversation he picks up during his regular walks in the centre of Antwerp - a wormhole congested with characters, the one more tragic than the other. In a kind of R. Murray Schafer way, Dennis takes in every sentence very un-arbitrary… and that’s the soundscape. Dramatic, normal, boasted, silly, urgent…
Enter Jeroen Stevens. Antwerp’s number one percussionist. If I would have to list all the bands he performs in this text, well, we would be truly wasting data and printers. Jeroen is the grand gift of the wellschooled session musician. But thank the heavens of white improv, he is also sweet and creative. Jeugdbrand is his second entry in the Edições CN catalogue, after taking care of some of the percussive fragments on the “KAGIROI" LP with Sugai Ken (2021). Recently Jeroen has been performing very lengthy - thus correct - performances of Satie’s Vexations for midi instrumentation; Christmas music; and his famed De Stoeltjes project, where he covers Stooges songs on a camping chair. Apparently much to the confusion of Iggy himself. This might all feel like a big joke to you, but when you dare to listen, you will have to admit that Steven’s adventurous music is very rewarding. Special stuff.
The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this album does it a bit short. Most important, this is music how it could be: incomprehensible, hilarious, serious, ludicrous, well crafted, sloppy, non-genre. With a strong sense of personality. You know, a fragmented beam for your own overstimulated temple. To shake things up a little … “They told us, they told her. I told everybody.”The albums comes with a drawing by German artist Albert Oehlen and with a text by Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records, Boston.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Gavin BRYARS
“The Sinking of the Titanic”
Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
"The Sinking of the Titanic", Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage. Bryars eloquently reconstructs the passengers' experience – at once forlorn and eerily calming – through assemblages of understated strings and indeterminate elements. A core principle of the piece is that the ship's band continued to play as the vessel went down. One of the most sublime works in the modern classical canon, Titanic remains Bryars' magnum opus.
"Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", the album's second sidelong track, is based on a tape loop of a London street singer captured in the early 1970s. Featuring Derek Bailey, Michael Nyman and John White, Bryars' composition gradually builds around the cripplingly poignant voice until its emotional force is almost too much to bare. It's no surprise that Jesus' Blood is known as Tom Waits' all-time favorite piece of music.
Produced by Brian Eno in 1975 as the inaugural release on Obscure, "The Sinking of the Titanic" draws the listener in to a majestic world. While these exquisite, hymn-like recordings have not changed in nearly 50 years, their deeply personal nature and the audience's attention to their subtlety have only strengthened over time.
32,00€
In stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Shifted in Dreams”
Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with his new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Over the years, Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press on different projects, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), a theorist (The Music To Come) or as Director of parisian institution INA GRM (SPECTRES, Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM). The common axis of all these actions is the exploration of the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances.
Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research but takes a somewhat deviated path. If we use the metaphor of music as a paradoxical mountain — an unreachable "Mont Analogue", then this record tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler and marked out by the distinct presence of familiar harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear: its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. We grope our way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. We leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce.
Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro-editing and asynchronous looping. Mixing the electronic waves of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with resonances of a Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sounds produced by complex modular synthesis patches, among other things, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation.
25,50€
In stock
LP
Colin Andrew SHEFFIELD
“Don’t Ever Let Me Know”
About "Don't Ever Let Me Know"
Don't Ever Let Me Know is Sheffield's first solo release since 2018's Repair Me Now (Glistening Examples) and is a work in a similar mode to that album in that it comprises two lengthy pieces of multiple movements and moods. For this new work, and as a kind of ode to his late father, Sheffield has employed samples entirely taken from (or inspired by) the city in which both men were born. In this way, the sounds have been utilized as a kind of shorthand for the specific subjects at hand. The two audio assembla ges, meanwhile, mirror the ways in which loss and memory are processed - with both melancholy and wonder in equal measure: at once beautiful and confounding.
The audio has been mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin. The LP has been released in an edition of 200 copies and comes in a lovely jacket featuring photography by the late Allen W. Sheffield and extensive spot gloss printing.
About Colin Andrew Sheffield
Colin Andrew Sheffield (b. 1976, El Paso TX) is a composer whose work is focused on the recontextualization of samples derived from various commercially available recordings - generally those taken from his own expansive collection of records, tapes, and compact discs. Conceptually his output is akin to plunderphonics-style sound collage, though aesthetically it is seemingly closer to soundscapes of ambient drone. Since his earliest recordings from the 1990s, his work has developed into a kind of hybrid of the aforementioned approaches.
19,00€
In stock
LP
STRAFE F.R.
“Octagon Sphere”
The new album Octagon Sphere by Duesseldorf duo Strafe F.R. comprises of four pieces recorded in 2020 and 2021 at the group's own studio. The work features heavily treated female vocals and includes rhythmic patterns and electronic sounds contributed by Detlef Klepsch (of the group keit). The overall atmosphere is tense and moody, both dark and uplifting at the same time. Octagon Sphere was mastered by Kai Blankenberg at Skyline Tonfabrik.
Octagon Sphere is the sister release to last year's CD Soundless Sphere – both albums are tied together by rhythmic alchemy and sound manipulation in highest detail.
19,00€
In stock
LP
KALLABRIS
“Red Circle”
On “Red Circle”:
Though severely cut, Red Circle doesn't exactly sweep along. It has a deliberate pace as Kallabris sets up the score of thirteen chance acquaintances who plan and carry out the sacking of our acoustic consciousness... Understatement is the method of these compositions for a small modular synthesizer. If there ever was something like heist music, this here surely is. (Vincent Canby, with a few minor changes and adaptions).
Biography:
Kallabris is a musical project that was begun in the mid 1980ies out of the scene around Coitra's Clan. Since ist inception Kallabris has persistently neglected any usage of advanced recording technology. Ever since not technical or compositonal innovation is at the core of the group’s work but, the active engagement with the limitations and the objects of every day life. This sound positivism can result in stylistically varied outputs ranging from chanson or country blues to musique concrète – while all musics live by their surfaces. Save the surface and you save all.
19,00€
In stock
LP
La Monte YOUNG – Marian ZAZEELA
“31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM”
La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.
Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.
Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.
Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.
“La Monte Young is the daddy of us all.” — Brian Eno
32,00€
In stock
LP
David CUNNINGHAM
“Grey Scale”
David Cunningham was born in Ireland in 1954. His work ranges from pop music to gallery installations including several collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single "Money," an international hit in 1979.
Originally released in 1976, Cunningham's first solo album Grey Scale has become a landmark statement of DIY minimalist composition – continuing in the vein of the wild explosion of arthouse experimentation from the early '70s. Cunningham, then a student at the Maidstone College of Art in Kent, drafted fellow student non-musicians and (using whatever instruments available) crafted an endlessly shifting sonic palette with an improvisor's keen sensitivity to space, texture and tone.
As Cunningham states in the liner notes, his approach was to "pursue something (which may appear trivial or meaningless) so rigorously or relentlessly to the point that it reveals something new."
Cunningham was influenced by live performances he was attending at the time by English composers Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman as well as free improvisors Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, David Toop and Paul Burwell.
The inaugural release on Cunningham's own Piano label, Grey Scale was indeed "something new" in 1976. The artist quickly integrated his experimental sensibilities to produce art-rock pioneers This Heat, whose debut appeared on Piano in 1979. His popular success performing as The Flying Lizards (with two electro-punk albums on Virgin during the New Wave era) was presaged by this seminal work of fascinating sound collage and tonal freedom. First-time reissue.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Nikolaus UTERMÖHLEN
“Karlsbad”
Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais.
Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.
25,50€
Out of stock
LP
ELODIE
“Clarté Déserte”
New 10 track studio album by Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, recorded 2020-2021 at Impression Lointaine and Kulta Saha.
24,50€
In stock
LP
Timo van LUIJK & Kris VANDERSTRAETEN
“Autour du Lac d’Asselt”
"Playing with Kris always reminds me of doing expeditions in a lake. Some kind of under water sound fiction observing sonic creatures. This album is a live recording (28-01-2012, Kunstencentrum Belgie, Hasselt, Belgium) which to me always felt like one of the best concerts we did. As with our previous album Arrêt au Lac Chimère Vincent de Roguin put his heart in editing and mixing the recordings, extending the dimensions of exploration to the deep bottom of the lake." Timo van LUIJK
300 copies
23,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kali MALONE
“Living Torch”
2023 repress.
Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire.
Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre.
Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist.
Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities.
GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch.
The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.
Composed & Produced by Kali Malone at INA GRM 2020-2021
Trombone & Bass Clarinet recorded at EMS Elektronmusikstudion 2020
Pre-mastered by Emmanuel Richier at INA GRM
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin.
Photograph by Estelle Hanania
Painting by Ross Caliendo
Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley
Trombone: Mats Äleklint
Bass Clarinet: Isak Hedtjärn
ARP 2500, Modular Synthesis, Pura Data & Boîte à Bourdons: Kali Malone
21,50€
In stock
2 LP
PITA / FRIEDL
“Pita / Friedl”
Electronic music legend and head of Editions Mego, Peter Rehberg, teams up with zeitkratzer mastermind Reinhold Friedl. 3 side-long pieces melting electronic / contemporary avantgarde. Uncompromising.
When Peter "Pita" Rehberg and Reinhold Friedl first met each other, they did not like each other "at all," as Friedl emphasises with a hearty laugh. The two would however eventually bond over the years thanks to a mutual respect for each other's music. In the summer of 2021, they entered the studio together for the first time. Their joint album for Berlin's Karlrecords is a faithful document—no editing, no overdubs—of their improvisations during two recording sessions shortly before Rehberg's sudden and untimely passing on July 22nd of that year. The three pieces see Rehberg working with electronics and Friedl with his inside piano, proving that they had indeed managed to find a common ground—up to a point where it at times becomes hard to tell who plays what on this record.
27,00€
In stock
LP
ZEITKRATZER
“James Tenney”
By zkr director Reinhold Friedl’s personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: Zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney.
James Tenney (1934 - 2006) was a composer, music theorist and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositonal work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charlemagne Palestine, Carl Stone Or Catherine Lamb, and a close friend with Eliane Radigue.
This album by Zeitkratzer presents three compostions by Tenney whose music has been part of zeitkratzer’s repertoire since their beginning:
- « Critical Band » – Tenney’s late classic – with maximum clarity and precision of bearing tone rhythms and microtonal tuning as light effect.
- the first recording of « Harmonium #2 ».
Both works demonstrate the remarkable power and resplendent sharpness which Tenney achieved with his microtonal settings.
Zeitkratzer’s approach to Tenney’s music as a sensual sound adventure, finally available on vinyl.
20,50€
In stock
LP
Tony CONRAD – Arnold DREYBLATT – Jim O’ROURKE
“Tonic 19-01-2001”
Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the second the trio heard here. As Dreyblatt points out in the wonderfully informative and reflective liner notes written for this release, this was a collaboration across generations, reflecting the profound impact of Conrad’s pioneering minimalism on Dreyblatt and O’Rourke. Both Dreyblatt and O’Rourke came to this collaboration armed with a deep appreciation of Conrad’s music and the just intonation principles at its core, Dreyblatt having first encountered the incredible power of Conrad’s precisely tuned violin chords during his tenure as an archivist for La Monte Young in 1975, while O’Rourke had performed with Conrad in various settings since the mid-1990s (as well as admiring, reissuing, and performing Dreyblatt's music).
The flyer for the concert promised ‘massive, ecstatic, pulsating overtones’, and the trio certainly delivered. From the moment this keening stream of bowed strings begins, it is clear, as Dreyblatt writes, that we are in ‘Tony’s sonic universe’, as massively amplified, slowly shifting combinations of precisely chosen pitches fill the room with complex beating patterns and ghostly difference tones. For more than twenty-five minutes, the music operates at a level of intensity comparable to classic recordings such as Conrad’s Four Violins, until the texture thins out slightly in the performance’s final quarter, allowing for the listener’s first recognition of the individual voices that make up this enormous, overwhelming harmonic edifice. The constant stream of bowed tones is broken by a beautifully rich pizzicato from Conrad on monochord, the sliding low tones and metallic shimmer of the other strings taking the set's final moments on an unexpected detour into spacious pastoral psychedelia.
Though produced by three individuals known for their own distinctive bodies of the work, this is egoless music, the perfect expression of Conrad's desire 'to move away from composing to listening', to 'working "on" the sound from "inside" the sound'. Historically important and overwhelming in sonic impact, this release also serves as a moving tribute to Tony Conrad from two musicians profoundly marked by the example set by his art and life.
24,50€
Out of stock
LP
Alvin CURRAN
“Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri”
2023 repress.
Black Truffle is pleased to announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran’s classic Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, the cooperative label run by Curran, Roberto Laneri, and Giacinto Scelsi. Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers Dark Flowers) – its title inspired by an intersection in Milan – is the second in the series of four solo recordings Alvin Curran issued in the 1970s and early 1980s, preceded by Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden (1975), followed by The Works (1980) and Canti Illuminati (1982).
Each of these solo works combines field recordings with performances on synthesiser, various acoustic instruments, and voice, arranged in languorously paced, dreamy sequences. Far from the bracing pointillism of much musique concrete, the elements encountered on the meandering course followed by Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri – whether a frenetic piano improvisation, dense layers of Serge synthesiser and ocarina, or a monologue from Frederic Rzewski’s five-year old son, Alexis – often occupy the foreground of our attention for minutes at a time. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with “whole blocks of recorded time”.
The purring of a cat, toy piano, a child counting, plaintive synthesiser tones, the cacophony of exotic birds at the London Zoo – each disappears into the next, until, on the LP’s second side, a solo piano performance takes centre stage, moving unexpectedly from percussive minimalist permutations to a halting rendition of Georgia on My Mind. A subtle yet stunning work that more than forty years on still seems charged with possibility, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri arrives in a loving reproduction of the original sleeve, featuring Edith Schloss’ beautiful cover painting, remastered audio and with new liner notes by Alvin Curran and Francis Plagne.
24,50€
In stock
10"/25cm
SMALL CRUEL PARTY
“Ἡσυχασμός”
These two pieces were recorded in Paris in December of 2017 at the request of Banned Productions who then released them as a cassette. However, only very few copies of the tape were made and distributed, which is the reason for this new edition, mastered for the occasion by Paul Lavigne at Kontrast Mastering.
17,50€
In stock
LP
Christoph HEEMANN
“End of an Era”
"end of an era" was produced over a period of 23 years. It began with a few short recordings of lightly processed sine waves that came to me via Asmus Tietchens and Achim Wollscheid. The work on these resulted in a first version and release of "time is the simplest thing" (Three Poplars 2003) which I was never fully satisfied with, so I continued working on it further until a definitive version was completed in 2018.
I began work on "time and again ... and again" in 2013 when experimenting with analog electronics. Again I made a first version that I was not entirely happy with and picked up again and completed it in 2022 with the help of Ronnie Oliveras who engineered parts of the remix. The titles for the pieces are related to American writer Clifford Simak whose novels and short stories have been a source of inspiration since adolescent days.
300 copies, clear vinyl
23,00€
In stock
LP
David TOOP – Peter CUSACK – Steve BERESFORD – Terry DAY
“Alterations”
Never released before recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions at Logos Foundation, Gent, Belgium on January 3, 1981. "The music is free-improvisation -- that is we make our music co-operatively while playing: by listening, reacting, throwing in new ideas, not by following preplanned schemes. At its simplest the group's intention can be said to be to play together as well as possible and to enjoy ourselves while doing so. We are very interested in the result and intend that the audience is as well. As well as the musicians reacting to each other the music itself is pretty reactive to context. In other words, room acoustics, background noise, audience response have a strong effect on what happens. This is particularly true of the audience. We have done performances where conversation has broken out with some audience members. There is much to see as well as hear -- this is partly to do with the instruments. Together Terry, Steve and David have hundreds, all sizes, all sorts, most colors. They completely cover the floor. Many of these are non-western. The wide range of instruments means that an extremely broad sound spectrum is covered, from sudden bangs to very quiet low notes, from squeaks to normal guitar sounds. This is what fixes the overall group sound." Personnel: David Toop - flute, home-made reeds, percussion; Peter Cusack - guitar; Steve Beresford - piano, small instruments; Terry Day - percussion, home-made reeds.
Logos Foundation: Belgium Flanders' unique professional organization for the promotion of new music and audio-related arts by means of new music production, concerts, performances, composition, technological research and other activities related to contemporary music. This organization has been founded in 1968 by Godfried-Willem Raes.
16,00€
In stock
LP
Otto SIDHARTA
“Kajang”
Previously unreleased music by Otto Sidharta, pioneer of Indonesian electronic music. Inspired by Indonesia's multifarious styles of traditional music, that he tries to preserve, the four pieces on Kajang express a contemplation of the self. Otto Sidharta loves to travel, everywhere within Indonesia, in order to collect almost any environmental tones and harmonies he can gather, as an endless source of composition. He is also deeply inspired by Indonesia's multifarious styles of traditional music, that he tries to preserve, as in some remote places, they keep their own tradition very strongly. What really interests Sidharta is musicians not interacting with other kinds of music, as in those deep villages, where one might find sounds that feel like very "natural". It results in works expressing Sidharta's personal impression from their music: "I just use my own feeling, with no calculation", not using the tribals motif or style. Kajang is the name of a tribal people living in the south of Sulawesi, a giant island in eastern Indonesia, a closed community, that Sidharta visited twice: "They cut off their communication with the outside world. They live in a very traditional way and try to avoid any new development in culture that might impact their way of life." Sidharta's previous album collected early pieces under the title Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-92, released on Sub Rosa in 2017 (SR 452CD). Kajang gathers a quartet of compositions from 2015 to 2020. White vinyl.
16,00€
In stock
LP
SOTE
“Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran”
Green vinyl.
It's an all-electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic-synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic, and vivid in nature. The making of this album was intentionally a very personal process, going into self-therapy territory at times interpreting the composer's contemplating mind dealing with tolerance, destruction, compassion, misery, grace and tyranny in an auditory manner. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works, awash with euphonic sound vivid in its essence, with a deep focus on various synthesis techniques within a compositional framework. Dedicated to Peter Rehberg aka Pita.
Ata "Sote" Ebtekar composes music with a deeply-held conviction that rules and formulas should be deconstructed and rethought. He alters musical modal codes from their original tonality and rhythmic tradition to achieve vivid, synthetic soundscapes. Over the last three decades, his work has been published by labels such as Warp, Sub Rosa, Opal Tapes, Diagonal, Mute, and Morphine, among others.
16,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Two Extended Pieces For Four Pianos”
2023 repress, black vinyl.
Four Pianos (1979-80): It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too.
Julius Eastman: There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers: Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer; Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist; Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music; Wilhem Latchoumia, embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma.
20,00€
In stock
LP
Jim HAYNES
“Turbulence”
Turbulence is a prequel of sorts, with two twenty minute studies in smoldering noise and concretized electricity, as evinced through shortwave radio, corroded metal-on-metal, and glass being vibrating just shy of the point for shattering.
Thick, fluttering, heated rays of sound building a slow tension of rhythmic, oppressive structures. Piercing, crackling tones increase and decrease, layered with icy cold precision. Muffled segments of basspressure enters and are abruptly cut short, leaving just enough room to breathe inside the mechanical stasis.
Edition of 250 copies in printed color sleeves with hand-drilled holes of varying amounts, size and placing.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Anthony PATERAS
“Two Solos”
Futura Resistenza is pleased to present the latest release from the prolific, restlessly creative composer-performer Anthony Pateras, two side-long pieces – one performed by Callum G'Froerer on double-bell trumpet, the other sung by Clara La Licata – in which soloists are accompanied by numerous pre-recorded tracks of their own instrument or voice, creating acoustic halls of mirrors where the distinction between live performer and recorded accompaniment becomes difficult to perceive.
Palimpsest Geometry (2020) for double-bell trumpet & tape works with rapidly pulsed single trumpet notes, at brisk tempos that hover at the perceptual threshold between rhythm and tremolo. The interaction between different rates of pulse produces skittering echoes, as if G'Froerer’s layers of trumpets were really a single sound bouncing around the sonic space. There Is A Danger Only Our Mistakes Are New (2021) for voice & tape goes to work on a see-sawing two-note melodic cell, insistently transposed and transposed again, hummed or sung with open vowels, contracting to a semitone and expanding to a minor third. More than anything in the canon of Western art music, the piece calls up the criss-crossing repeated figures of Inuit vocal games or the interlocking repetitions of Banda-Linda music, where rhythmic and harmonic displacements of repeated motifs fuse together individual parts into the illusion of an impossibly rich and multi-faceted unitary sonic organism.
Essentially homogeneous in texture yet built up from constantly changing details, broadly static yet always moving and shifting, these pieces exemplify Pateras’ recent work while also pushing it into a new, strikingly immediate direction. Here, form grows organically out of the material itself; the results are sparkling, immersive, and quietly uncompromising.
- Francis Plagne
22,00€
In stock
LP
Joshua BONNETTA
“Innse Gall”
Bridging acoustic ecology and interdisciplinary creative practice, Joshua Bonnetta returns to Shelter Press with Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, his second LP for the label. Recorded and assembled between 2017 and 2020 and acting as a companion piece to Bonnetta’s film, An Dà Shealladh ‘The Two Sights’, these two interrelated side-long works - Innse Gall I and Innse Gall II - respectively deploy a rigorous approach to field recording and auditory phenomena, pursuing the complex relationship between landscape, place, language, and culture in the Outer Hebrides, where both the film and album’s source material was gathered. Representing a radical rethinking of the potential of sound collage, Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, is issued by Shelter Press as a limited edition, deluxe vinyl LP, housed in a 7mm reverse-board outer sleeve and a heavyweight reverse-board inner sleeve, accompanied by a sixty page booklet containing extensive photographic studies made for ‘The Two Sights’ by the artist and an essay by Erika Balsom, as well as a postcard to download the film An Dà Shealladh ‘The Two Sights’, generously provided by Cinema Guild, and Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst.
While very much the byproduct of sound collage, rather than the states of abstraction and ‘pure’ sonority most often pursued by musique concrète, or an experimental music “free of individual taste and memory (psychology)”, as pursued by John Cage, Bonnetta’s work displays a deeper sympathy with Luc Ferrari’s notion of ‘anecdotal music’, in which the social and autobiographical contexts of the source material / recordings - with their embedded dimensions of meaning - is accounted for and retained. Rather than enforcing a fixed vision of the artist, the listener in encouraged construct a narrative of their own. This is no less the case for Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, comprising two audio works constructed by Bonnetta from field recordings made on the Outer Hebrides islands of Barra, Berneray, North Uist, Harris, & Lewis between 2017-19.
Drawing upon Bonnetta’s fascination with sound as a primary means to survey place and people, Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’ draws upon a vast range of sonorous material: hydrophone recordings made over extended periods in lobster creels and of gases escaping a peat bog, interview fragments, and field recordings feature capturing the sounds of maritime industry, song, seals, corncrake, snipe, and other elements of the natural world. Meticulously collaged and reworked within an exploration of the interrelated acoustic ecology of these diverse elements of the islands’ make-up, the album’s two works - Innse Gall I and Innse Gall II - bristle with the subcutaneous narratives embedded within these ancient and modern landscapes, played against the disappearing Gaelic oral traditions which hold their memories, resulting in a deep, auditory reflection on the relationship between narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another.
Challenging the perceived boundaries and interconnectedness of place and occupation - to what extent the perception of an environment is modelled by language, culture, and myth, or that the environment underscores the very becoming of those things - Bonnetta’s Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, draws profound poetry, beauty, and meaning from the everyday, rethinking the terms of field recording and sound collage every step of the way.
27,50€
Out of stock
2 LP
Peter “Sleazy” CHRISTOPHERSON
“The Art Of Mirrors (Homage To Derek Jarman)”
2108, warhouse find. White/Black Splatter Vinyl.
Shortly before his musical partnership as Coil ended following the death of Jhon Balance, Peter Christopherson performed a live soundtrack to his old friend and collaborator Derek Jarman's abstract 1973 Super 8 short The Art Of Mirrors in Paris.
Sleazy had worked with Jarman on many occasions, including providing the music as a member of Throbbing Gristle for In The Shadow Of The Sun in 1974, Coil's highly-charged compositions for The Angelic Conversation, as well as their singularly psychedelic disco contributions to the director's final swansong, Blue.
Since The Art Of Mirrors is barely six minutes long, quite how Christopherson made more than an hour of music to accompany the film's screening is something those who were there can answer best, but ultimately it's more or less irrelevant to the music as it appears here.
Split carefully across three sides of vinyl, the LP divides a continuous performance into what are now essentially three interrelated movements.
Each ebbs and flows with the same hallucinatory feeling that so much of the music that Christopherson made with others has, especially in Coil, and it soon begins to seem that time itself has become far more of an unnecessary frippery than usual.
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
SMEGMA
“Infringements”
Alga Marghen's third installment of Smegma's original "Suburban Primitive Avant-folk music" period (1973-1975) based in Pasadena, featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the deep vault of their home recordings. In the beginning, the band Smegma had only one rule. No musicians. Starting from scratch, they took the road much less traveled. They were inspired by outsider musical artists of the time such as John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fisher, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, etc. and they recorded every experiment with youthful enthusiasm. Mostly they only succeeded in tormenting their own friends and neighbors (except for the few who joined the band) but somehow, they never chose imitation, but stumbles on a path that allowed past (shamanistic) and future (space) sounds to lead the way. The titled track gently pulls you in and carries you off with a way-out inner-mind group jamming/not-jamming trip, featuring prepared piano, modular synthesizer, human mouth sounds, pan pipes, tabla, and electric bass guitar. "Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow" (defiantly not the 1960s pop hit) rips you straight into a high energy New Years Eve Party jam, in a romping free jazz style with stream of consciousness vocals and exuberant alto sax solos. Side B starts with Beatnik finger popping and wild dogs barking from a record player, while breathless flute playing leads you down the rabbit hole of mysterious group vocalizing, including imitating the cry of the wild tropical parrots that lived in the palm trees in the front yard of the house in Pasadena that they had lived in. Always out of sync with their own time, 49 years later these tracks still throb and pulsate Beautifully with their own inner logic. Edition of 230.
21,50€