Out of stock
LP
Steve LACY
“Straws”
At long last, after remaining out of print for decades, the Milan based imprint, Dialogo, dives into the legendary catalog of Cramps, bringing forth the first ever vinyl reissue of Steve Lacy’s LP, "Straws", issued as the sixth instalment of the label’s DIVerso series in 1977. Truly singular in the legendary American saxophonist’s discography - featuring stunning solo excursions and dialogs with himself - it remains one of the great documents of 1970s improvisation, and is as engrossing, creatively riveting, and as ahead of its time today as it was when it was laid to tape. Complete with original liner notes penned by Lacy himself.
Edition of 300 LP on black vinyl. Audiophile pressing, including printed inner. Perfect replica of the original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound.
I can’t explain my work in words. For me, the music explains itself in sounds.
The saxophone is a machine like another, and it is only by breathing life into it, that it becomes of human interest. When I began to explore the possibilities in the soprano sax in 1950, it was in almost total disuse. By now, due largely to the example and inspiration of John Coltrane, but also somewhat to my own efforts, this instrument is in full flower.
Performance and composition are the two principal sides of my musical activities. Naturally, there is a constant feedback from one to the other. However, a musician is a sort of «medium», and quite often, the work is done in a state of trance, and only afterwards, can one realise what has happened, especially in a music which deals in large doses of improvisation.
This record contains two solo pieces, two more with celeste accompaniment, as well as two collages with background tapes.
Pinochle is a game of cards, enjoyed by the great pianist, Art Tatum. One of the most important «players» in jazz, Tatum had an enormous influence on me, especially as virtuoso, self-contained, soloist. In the course of this interpretation, I quote from a standard tune that Tatum used to like to play («Get happy» by Vincent Youmans).
Straws was written when Igor Stravinsky died, but has not been played ‘til now. This version uses a single strand of the melody, superimposed on a tape I made of three clarinet players and two saxophonists (myself included), trying out reeds, in a room at the Vandoren Reed factory in Paris. The piece is a solemn blues with joyou’s interferences.
Hemline is a recent tune, dedicated to Janis Joplin, the rock star, who was a tragic swinger, and one of the more interesting of the «new style» ladies on the scene in the late 60’s.
Bound to Irene Aebi, my «old» lady, whose voice I prefer to all others. This song (written in 1971), begins as a ballad, then turns blue (finally becoming grey and wise, at the and.
Feline (portrait of Marilyn Monroe). I wanted to capture the allure of the ordinary girl within the goddess, and the solitary space surrounding a «star». The celeste was discovered in the studio. The pussy-cat improvisation was sipped through the saxophone, as if it were a straw.
The rise is built upon a tape recording of sounds from the construction of the, still unfinished, centre culturel de Beaubourg, in Paris. Five layers of soprano sax are added on, all of them, improvised. A sort of « poeme sonore », it is dedicated to my good friend, Brion Gysin, the many-sided artist, who is himself, a «rising star».
Steve Lacy
26,00€
In stock
LP
Francisco LÓPEZ
“Animast”
"Few albums would be as fitted for vinyl release as this one. Drawing on both analog-material and digital-immaterial undisclosed sources, "Animast" plays with the sonic textures and responses most suited for the characteristics of this particular analog medium: noisy crispness, compositional 'loopiness', contrasting sharp-and-thick textures and cycling dynamics. A must for experimental heads and adventurous DJs alike!"
untitled #369
Created at mobile messor (Anatananarivo, Dublin, Madrid, Den Haag and Dune Studio (Loosduinen), 2018-2019
untitled #365
Created at mobile messor (Paris, Valencia, Oslo, Venice and Dune Studio (Loosduinen), 2018-2019
20,00€
In stock
LP
Pascal BATTUS & Magali SANHEIRA
“Froid solaire”
Pascal Battus : guitar pickups, objects
Magali Sanheira : microphones, metal, stone, motorized bow, effects
Coming from different backgrounds and driven by an experimental (and plastic) relationship to music, these two improvisers come together through the choice of their instruments and aggregates of so-called poor materials, which they use for their qualities of texture and color, in order to create a composition where the importance of the sound gesture is primordial.
It is this gesture, always delicate, which by insistence or intermittence comes to draw fleeting figures of a bottomless background, thus developing an abstract and vibrant landscape that invites the listener to travel in the sound wave.
100 copies.
22,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Luc FERRARI
“Labyrinthe de Violence”
Capturing the four soundtracks conceived in 1975 for the multimedia/audiovisual performances at Galiéra Museum in Paris, the previously unreleased Labyrinthe de Violence stretching across two LPs represents a peek into Luc Ferrari's creations connected to his Atelier de Libération de la Musique experiences. Luc Ferrari was always keen to disrupt habits and engrained practices, to open his mind to new ways of apprehending the world of art, considering it not so much as a separate realm but as an inroad into society. In keeping with the spirit of 1968, he advocated taking part in daily life, casting a critical, but amazed, eye on the world around us, and always questioning the meaning of the occupations and preoccupations the world imposes. From the 1970s, Luc also wished to shed the solitary status of the artist, and to truly communicate with society. He thus gathered around him a group of people from different backgrounds with an aim to create, together, new ways of working and new forms of expression that would address unusual audiences rather than traditional concert audience. Having created his Studio Billig in Paris in 1973, Luc wanted to make the most of that place to promote exchanges with other artists, to share, think, and improvise together. This is what gave rise to the Atelier de Liberation de la Musique workshops, whose objective was to "Liberate music from the constraints of style and esthetics." The idea was precisely to free the artist from abstraction, leading him to perform accessible and intelligible actions; to promote the imagination; to use the dramatic dynamism of sound and image to trigger ideas; to ignore the sensational and instead to observe our social environment and daily life with an intuitive eye-ear; to invite the visitor to come up with their own analysis. This craving for collaboration led Luc Ferrari to create, in 1975, a collective of musicians with Martin Davorin Jagodic, Philippe Besombes, Alain Petit and David Jisse. That year, they worked at Labyrinthe de Violence, a looped audiovisual labyrinth which evoked the violence of contemporary society, and was a reaction to the political situation of the time. It was a multimedia work, spread across four rooms, on the following themes: Power/Profit/Violence/Pollution. Each side of this 2LP set reproduces the sonorization of one of the four rooms in the Museum, automatically mixing in the central space. The same recordings focus on questions of utopia through many of the same themes. As in the rest of his work, pleasure was also at the heart of these pieces. First press limited to 500 numbered copies; gatefold sleeve.
34,00€
Out of stock
LP
Elko BLIJWEERT
“De Nor Des Hoofds / Prison Of The Mind”
De Nor ('the can', or prison, in comic book Dutch) is an open-air venue/sculpture/pavillion at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp. During its inaugural summer, Elko Blijweert played a live concert there that left an indelible mark on those lucky enough to witness it. What exactly did he do, you ask? Well, Blijweert basicly used the entire garden as an instrument alongside an array of pre-programmed pedals, keyboards, drum machines, guitars, a mandoline, and booze-bottle flutes.
This record, a re-created version of that fabled performance, is a concept album of sorts. Your personal prison experience begins on Side One. You will be miserable! Terrified! You will fantasise about being released, or escaping, every night. The entire ordeal is narrated song-by-song with Blijweert's liner notes.
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
IGNATZ & DE STERVENDE HONDEN
“Saturday’s Den”
On their third LP for Ultra Eczema, psychedelic blues gloomers Ignatz & De Stervende Honden have driven off the bendy sideroads and onto a straight, if not exactly narrow, path. And there's new sounds coming out of the stereo: The Les Rallizes Dénudés-type guitar fuzz of previous journeys has been phased out in favour of softer, repetitive VU stumbling and even some Fleetwood Mac-esque romance. But it remains an unmistakenly Ignatz & De Stervende Honden record, with all the necessary ingredients for long car rides, living room break-ups, morning glory, sunsets and drunken rambles about length, size and whatever else matters.
20,00€
In stock
LP
Bernard PARMEGIANI
“Mémoire Magnétique, Vol 2.”
Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique Vol. 2 spanning 1966-1993, revelatory collection of short and secret music by electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani.
Since the late 50's, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some eighty two concerts music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation films but also musical pieces for dance, stage or television. If many of his pieces are landmarks in the history of electroacoustic music (De Natura Sonorum, La Roue Ferris…), his application music compositions are strongly embedded in the subconscious landscape of the French public (Stade 2, Roissy Paris Airport…).
The second volume of this compilation allows us to discover some of unreleased rarities from Bernard Parmegiani’s personal archives and unpublished recordings which were composed for the screen or the performing arts.
24,00€
In stock
LP
Sarah TERRAL (Clément VERCELLETTO)
“Le Ménisque Original”
Le ménisque original is Clément Vercelletto‘s (Orgue Agnès, kaumwald, Arlt, Les Sciences Naturelles, Tape Ensemble) first solo album under the Sarah Terral moniker.
The album was composed and played with a very small modular synthesizer in order to remain instinctive and minimal.
19,50€
In stock
LP
Yann GOURDON
s/t
One third of the drone trio France and part of the La Novia collective, Yann Gourdon's practice focuses on acoustic phenomena and dynamic relationships with the environment. Having learned to play traditional music from Auvergne by listening to field recordings, Gourdon re-orientates tradition via minimalism, honing in on a place or location's unique vibratory fields, volumes and surfaces.
Co-production La Nòvia / three:four records
19,50€
In stock
LP
Rafael TORAL & João Pais FILIPE
“Jupiter and beyond”
João Pais Filipe: Bass Drum, Gongs, Bells.
Rafael Toral: Feedback (modified MS-2 amplifier), Guitar.
Jupiter, the gas giant in our Solar System, with thunderstorms a thousand times more powerful than on Earth, rainfalls of diamonds in the atmosphere, temperatures below -100°C, plenty of hydrogen, 79 moons and a South pole that looks like an abstract painting, has just the kind of environment this music seems to emanate from.
Jupiter and Beyond, the second collaborative effort of composer/performer Rafael Toral and percussionist João Pais Filipe as a duo (after Saturn in 2016), is definitely not quite a record of Earth music. On the contrary, Jupiter and Beyond, is indeed gas music, unfolding over two long movements without solid body or any tangible outline, between ambient and noise. A music of sheer volume and beauty, icy, massive, in which the elements of Toral's signature, in particular his use of jazz-inspired electronics and feedback, dissolve to become a labile, nebulous, expansive material, occasionally struck by abyssal depressions and masterful densities, magnified by the return, after 17 years of silence, of the electric guitar in Rafael Toral's instrumentarium.
Towards the end of Beyond, the second piece on the record, lurking behind the volutes of feedback, a bell and a bass drum, one can detect from the distance... a barking dog, as a surreptitious and prosaic reminder of where we are here and now, a calling back to Earth. Between sadness and joy, anger and peace, movement and stillness, Jupiter and Beyond is indeed a mirror held out to us, music reflecting our times and that emotionally speaks first of all about us.
"While João Pais Filipe was drummer in the Space Quartet, we played a live duo set. During soundcheck we were jamming for a while on bowed gongs and feedback and lost track of time, it just flowed so well. I joked "we could make a whole record with this!". But later we took the idea seriously and set to record an improvised session at his cymbalsmith workshop (he made the gong on the cover and it was used in the recording). When we listened to the first take the mass of sound was amazing. At some point it reminded me of the complex clusters of sound in Ligeti's music as it appears on Kubrick's 2001 scene "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite". In the end the title felt like an apt choice for Saturn's successor. Back at my studio I felt the need for some more layers of density in some sections. I thought of using trombones, but ended up picking up the electric guitar, which I hadn't used since 2003.” Rafael Toral
18,50€
In stock
LP
Pierre-Yves MACÉ / Silvain VANOT
“Split LP”
Brocoli is pleased to announce a split LP release of two previously unpublished works that bring together two established composers for the first time. On one side (who knows if it is side A or side B?) we find Silvain Vanot, who was at the forefront of 90s French indie rock alongside the likes of Dominique A and Jean-Louis Murat. He has also collaborated with Jim O'Rourke. The other (side B or perhaps side A?) goes to Pierre-Yves Macé, a stalwart of the label. A composer of instrumental (his work is regularly performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain) and electroacoustic music.
At first glance the reason for bringing these two artists together may not seem obvious. And yet... these two pieces are both built upon the same principle: they are both instrumental music set in urban outdoor spaces. For Silvain Vanot this meant walking at dawn with his portable recorder in the Butte Montmartre, Paris. Then, once in the studio, improvising over these field recordings. Five locations resulting in five tracks. All recorded in one take. Pierre-Yves Macé first wrote a score for trombone, horn, oboe and percussion. He then recorded each musician separately at a different location in Paris. Finally, reassembling the piece in the studio. He allowed himself to be guided as much by the score as from the happy coincidences which occurred during the recordings.
As coherent as it is surprising this split LP navigates with ease between field recording, contemporary music, improvisation, ambient and musique concrète.
19,00€
Out of stock
LP
Limpe FUCHS
“Solaia”
Limpe Fuchs' first solo record came about by accident. Initially, Christoph Heemann invited the famous Anima duo to do a studio record in his home-town Aachen, but Paul Fuchs decided not to join in, so Limpe went on her own - and the recording sessions taking place in late 1986 and early 1987 turned out to become "via", Limpe's first solo-record and the (visible) starting point of her ongoing exceptional career as an internationally performing, independent female improviser. Besides a plethora of (partly self-built) acoustic instruments that can also be heard on her legendary Anima (music) records, such as violin, saw blade, chimes, wood block and limpe's unmistakable unique vocals, "via" featured a korg-synthesizer, that drew Limpe's attention in the studio and she decided to give it a try and recorded a lot of electronic music for "via" - and in all the years to follow since then she never got near the instrument again; neither for studio recordings nor live performances . Fast forward to 2015: after not having met Christoph Heemann for many years, they got in contact again and performed selected dates (as Macchia Forest together with Timo van Luijk) when he proposed to Limpe another korg-synthesizer recording. not having touched the instruments in decades Limpe was reluctant at first but warmed up to the idea eventually and improvised a wonderfully meditative and soulful electronic piece of music. She also recorded five of her pendulum strings exclusively for the first time (with a bit of vocals, too) - huge self-built instruments of various size with an amazing sound rich of oscillating overtones. The both side-long recordings - one side korg, one side pendulum strings - featured on "solaia" are a visceral document of Limpe Fuchs' artistic versatility and musical sensibilities. It's fair to say: the spirit of her musical approach is captured perfectly on this new studio-album (mixed and mastered by her son Zoro Babel), which is released in conjunction with a first-time re-release of "via" - both to celebrate her long-standing musical career (and her eightieth birthday). "via" and "solaia" are available now as two separate lp's. Both records are released in an edition of 300 copies and accompanied by a 30-page longform interview with Limpe Fuchs and Christoph Heemann to give an insight in their collaborative history and portray Limpe's outstanding artistry.
19,00€
Out of stock
LP
Limpe FUCHS
“Via”
Limpe Fuchs' first solo record came about by accident. Initially, Christoph Heemann invited the famous Anima duo to do a studio record in his home-town Aachen, but Paul Fuchs decided not to join in, so Limpe went on her own - and the recording sessions taking place in late 1986 and early 1987 turned out to become "via", Limpe's first solo-record and the (visible) starting point of her ongoing exceptional career as an internationally performing, independent female improviser. Besides a plethora of (partly self-built) acoustic instruments that can also be heard on her legendary Anima (music) records, such as violin, saw blade, chimes, wood block and limpe's unmistakable unique vocals, "via" featured a korg-synthesizer, that drew Limpe's attention in the studio and she decided to give it a try and recorded a lot of electronic music for "via" - and in all the years to follow since then she never got near the instrument again; neither for studio recordings nor live performances . Fast forward to 2015: after not having met Christoph Heemann for many years, they got in contact again and performed selected dates (as Macchia Forest together with Timo van Luijk) when he proposed to Limpe another korg-synthesizer recording. not having touched the instruments in decades Limpe was reluctant at first but warmed up to the idea eventually and improvised a wonderfully meditative and soulful electronic piece of music. She also recorded five of her pendulum strings exclusively for the first time (with a bit of vocals, too) - huge self-built instruments of various size with an amazing sound rich of oscillating overtones. The both side-long recordings - one side korg, one side pendulum strings - featured on "solaia" are a visceral document of Limpe Fuchs' artistic versatility and musical sensibilities. It's fair to say: the spirit of her musical approach is captured perfectly on this new studio-album (mixed and mastered by her son Zoro Babel), which is released in conjunction with a first-time re-release of "via" - both to celebrate her long-standing musical career (and her eightieth birthday). "via" and "solaia" are available now as two separate lp's. Both records are released in an edition of 300 copies and accompanied by a 30-page longform interview with Limpe Fuchs and Christoph Heemann to give an insight in their collaborative history and portray Limpe's outstanding artistry.
19,00€
Out of stock
3 LP
COMPILATION
“The Harmonic Series Volume 2”
A collection of long-form works in just intonation by Kali Malone, Duane Pitre, Catherine Lamb, Tashi Wada, Byron Westbrook, and Caterina Barbieri. Each artist occupies an entire side of the collection's three LPs.
Curated by Duane Pitre, Important Records returns with its second volume of compiled works in just intonation. The Harmonic Series II, issued as a triple LP collection, features a series of long-form compositions by six of the most important emerging voices of contemporary experimental music;
Unlike equal temperament - the tuning system most commonly encountered in contemporary music - which equally divides an octave into 12 fixed notes, just intonation utilizes intervals of whole number ratios - chosen by a composer - to determine tonal positions, which can result in a highly individualised tonal language and holds the potential for more nuanced relationships and striking, sympathetic resonances. Rooted in ideas that trace their way across the last 2500 years - seeking to mirror the natural behaviour of sound within music - just intonation lays at the foundation for numerous Indian, Persian, and East Asian musical traditions, as well as a substantial amount of European music prior to the 17th century. Reintroduced into western music during the 20th century by composers like Harry Partch, Ben Johnston, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, it has left an indelible mark on experimental practice ever since.
In the years following the appearance of The Harmonic Series in 2009 - presenting works by Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Michael Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Curtis, and others - the broad interest in just intonation has continued to swell, inspiring Duane Pitre to curate a second compilation, exploring the work of a new generation of composers that have been drawn toward its remarkable potential.
The full scope of The Harmonic Series II engages the possibility of a multitude of intertwining sequences and relationships between its works. Kali Malone’s "Pipe Inversions” - played by Malone on a small pipe organ, joined by Isak Hedtjärn on bass clarinet - belongs to a larger body of microtonal organ works that have increasingly placed the composer at the forefront of contemporary minimalism and drone music. Thick blankets of shimmering harmonics - sliding at a glacial pace within a fractal structure of rhythmical and melodic sequence - converge as a poignant unwinding of cultural, temporal, and historical location, embedded within the disarming beauty of its interwoven tones.
Across the length of Duane Pitre’s "Three for Rhodes” - a chamber piece for ”unknown instrumentation” - deconstructed rhythms and melodic fragments swell in a dance of harmonic interplay, rising and falling within the work’s engrossing architectural complexity. Imbued with a startling sense of humanity, tonal footsteps and syntactic patterns flower with life, delivering an exacting image of the metaphorical potential of sound.
Catherine Lamb’s "inter sum” - one of a tiny number of available works to encounter the composer and renowned violist working on synthesizer - endeavours to break the visualisation of harmony as a vertical reality, rendering it multidimensionally in space. With its materiality drawn from Lamb’s own environmental field and filtered by the synth - presenting a radical rethinking of the terms of composition and musical mater - subtle tonalities and harmonics, embedded within sheets of textural atmosphere, culminate as a spectral vision of the latent musicality of the natural world.
A canon for eight-violins played by Marc Sabat, Tashi Wada’s "Midheaven (Alignment Mix)” - guided by the internal logic of its tuning system - shape-shifts into an elegantly poetic form of musical conceptualism. Interlacing long-tones bloom with complex harmonic interplay and delicate overtones, as two mirroring, overlain realizations of the composition - one moving forward as the other simultaneously moves backward - slowly converge toward a crescendo of dissonance at the midpoint, imbuing the work with emotive tension, before returning to a final ecstatic release.
Byron Westbrook’s "Memory Phasings”, composed and recorded on a combination of computer controlled modular synthesizers and a Yamaha TX802, employs the ratios of just intonation as harmonic building blocks for texture. Shifting long-tones and insectile buzzes underscore patterns of rapid appreciations and carefully balanced punctuations, forming a shimmering collective of abstractions, that blurs the lines between synthetic and organic readings of sound.
Deploying just intonation as a means for psycho-physiological exploration, Caterina Barbieri’s "Firmamento” - composed for synthesizer - deftly intervenes with the expectations of minimalism, durational music, and drone. Brooding and ecstatic - pushing the possibilities of organised sound into unexplored realms via the triggering of emotional and mental states of being - across the work’s slow evolution, sublime tonalities ride a razors edge between darkness and light, colliding in dense layers that rethink ancient modes in futuristic terms.
Taking form within the gestures of six crucial voices of contemporary experimental music - Malone, Pitre, Lamb, Wada, Westbrook, and Barbieri - The Harmonic Series II sculpts a profoundly human vision of the potential of art, where the historic becomes present and future, and the divisions imposed by cultural and temporal boundaries dissolve. Like the generations that have embraced it before them, each artist harnesses just intonation as a means to progress toward unknown territories of creative possibility and to readdress how we hear, arriving at a musical space that is highly individual and personal - captured by the diversity of the works presented within - while speaking within a collective whole.
45,00€
In stock
LP
Lawrence ENGLISH
“Observation of Breath”
Do you remember the last time you were breathing consciously? Either way, you are likely doing it now. On his new album "Observation of Breath" for the Swiss-based Hallow Ground label, Lawrence English worked exclusively with an organ for four compositions that are exercises in "maximal minimalism," as their creator himself notes in a nod to Charlemagne Palestine, who coined this term. While it seems somewhat fitting that those four pieces based on a steady flow of air were conceived and recorded in a situation of accelerated standstill caused by a respiratory disease, the Room40 founder is not so much concerned with capturing the zeitgeist than rather incorporating the spirit of time itself.
"It is a record about presence and patience," he explains. Exploring the unique sonic affordances of a singular instrument, "Observation of Breath" is not only devoted to the durability of sound but also to its density. That it marks his debut on Hallow Ground after having shaped its sound by mastering most of the label's releases in recent years is just as fitting then as its release following albums by Kali Malone and FUJI|||||||||||TA, whose innovative work with organ instruments have facilitated a rediscovery of their possibilities.
English's compositions however are neither directly indebted nor responding to these musicians. His exploration of the organ's many facets started a decade ago when the composer was given access to an instrument built in 1889 that is presently housed at The Old Museum in Brisbane. After it had already played a crucial role on his seminal albums "Wilderness Of Mirrors" and "Cruel Optimism," last year's self-released "Lassitude" was the first record that English entirely composed and recorded with that instrument. "During the soft lockdowns, I spent many days playing to an empty concert hall, recording the pieces that became >Lassitude< and then, this album," says English in regards to an unfortunate situation that fortunately provided him with time and space-two major themes but also key qualities of the four new compositions. In this sense, he goes on, "Observation of Breath" resolves a number of the questions originally raised by "Lassitude."
23,00€
In stock
LP
Jan JELINEK
“The Raw and the Cooked”
Faitiche releases an album version of the radio piece Vom Rohen und Gekochten (The Raw and The Cooked) originally composed and produced by Jan Jelinek for the state broadcaster SWR2. The album The Raw and The Cooked brings together five sound collages that deal with the consistency of material and its mutability.
Solid, raw, boiling, powdery, liquid, broken and folded - categories which describe the nature of material. They can also be read in a chronological sequence: solid becomes broken becomes liquid becomes powdery... Material tells of its essence as it drifts through its states, always in correspondence with external energies. The Raw and The Cooked observes the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius as they design their paper and metal objects and the artist Peter Granser as he ritually prepares Japanese tea, it shatters glass, bends metal and burns wood. The resulting audio documents capture processes of material transformation as sound.
The Raw and The Cooked was created with the help of ITO Raum Stuttgart and Thomas & Renée Rapedius. Originally produced for radio broadcast on Südwestrundfunk in 2020 it contains a variation of the collage Zwischen/Raum that was made with funding from Musikfonds. Many thanks to Eckhart Holzboog and Beatrice Theil, as well as Frank Halbig/SWR.
19,00€
Out of stock
LP
Pascal COMELADE
“Sentimientos”
Originally released in 1982, Pascal Comelade's Sentimientos is one of the most elusive and sought after LPs in the French composer's vast catalogue. Recorded on a two-track Revox machine, the album is an eclectic series of brief pieces – only two of the twenty tracks exceed four minutes – showcasing his poetic imagination and impressive range.
While much of Comelade's early work hints at many of the major electronic movements to come, Sentimientos remains earthbound and organic. Melodic fragments performed on piano, organ, plastic saxophone, vibes, guitar, toy piano, ukulele and synthesizer place Comelade's boundless creative spirit on display.
It is telling that Comelade chooses to cover a Brian Eno tune not from the ambient pioneer's seminal Music For Airports, released just four years earlier, but rather the more traditional "Taking Tiger Mountain," here rendered to highlight the song's previously hidden hymn-like qualities.
Like fellow countryman Ghédalia Tazartès, there is something distinctly unclassifiable about Comelade's music. Undoubtedly, the two artists share a flair for the mischievous.
Sentimientos is an unapologetically whimsical, frequently dizzying and loveably anarchic album of manic energy and radiant mystery – a perfect introduction to Comelade's singular musical mind.
29,50€
Out of stock
2 LP
HEMATIC SUNSETS
“Aroma Club Adieu 5”
Final release by Asmus Tietchens’ death lounge project Hematic Sunsets
Farewell greetings by Michael Rother, Felix Kubin, Heinz Funk, Okko Bekker and more
The Hematic Sunsets shut down the Aroma Club with a final release. The album “Aroma Club Adieu” features 12 exquisite pieces of death lounge electronic pop performed on electronic organs and entertainment devices of various kinds. Under the moniker Hematic Sunsets, legendary avantgarde composer Asmus Tietchens has explored his love of the Darth Vader organ sound – a cheesy, spooky, deranged but still catchy form of electronic pop. The body of work of Hematic Sunsets stands out as unique, displaced and in a sexy way out of fashion. As a bonus to the final album of the project artist friends of Asmus Tietchens have composed short hommages and farewell greetings that are included here in the form of a single sided 12” on white vinyl. Among those saluting are such illustrious musicians as Heinz Funk, Felix Kubin and Michael Rother.
29,00€
In stock
LP
Annea LOCKWOOD
“Becoming Air / Into the Vanishing Point”
Following on from the acclaimed Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion LP (BT028), Black Truffle is thrilled to present two major new instrumental works from legendary sound artist and experimental composer Annea Lockwood. Demonstrating the ever evolving and radically open nature of Lockwood’s practice, these two recent works were developed in close collaboration with their performers. ‘Becoming Air’ (2018), developed with and performed by trumpeter Nate Wooley, uses extended technique and electronics to interfere with Wooley’s virtuosic control over his instrument, pushing him into areas of fluctuating pitch and timbral instability. Motivated by a desire for ‘the letting go of sound to be itself’, ‘Becoming Air’ unfolds as a series of texturally distinct moments separated by pauses, each fixing on a particular approach to the instrument (long tones, upper-register whistles, breathy wooshes) and maintaining it in an essentially static fashion, focussing our attention on subtle changes and variations. Dipping into near-inaudibility in the fragile high tones of its opening section, the piece dramatically increases in volume and intensity in its final third, climaxing with a passage of roaring distortion, where the interaction between feedback and trumpet pitches calls up the shuddering interference effects of Robert Ashley’s Wolfman.
‘Into the Vanishing Point’ (2019) is a collaborative work developed with New York piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, who have performed work by major contemporary composers such as Olivia Block, Catherine Lamb and Klaus Lang. Carrying on the ecological and environmental concerns of some of Lockwood’s previous works, ‘Into the Vanishing Point’ was inspired by a devastating news article on the global collapse of insect populations. Discovering that the four members of Yarn/Wire had also read this text, Lockwood mapped out a loose structure for the piece that would allow the composer and four performers to explore their ‘feelings about what is happening ecologically’. Working with a huge variety of instruments, objects and techniques of sound production, the resulting work is an alluringly lush, organically unfolding tissue of unorthodox textures and haunting tones. Though not intended to sonically represent ecological issues in any direct way, its unique sound world of rubbed piano strings, gently handled objects and chiming pitches often calls up natural images: of insects and frogs, wind rushing through trees, a bird’s wings in flight.
Presented in a stunning gatefold cover with liner notes by Lockwood, Wooley and Yarn/Wire, Becoming Air/Into the Vanishing Point is a testament to the generosity and experimentation that continue to characterise the work of this extraordinary artist, active for over fifty years.
25,00€
Out of stock
LP
Amelia CUNI
“Parampara festival 13.3.1992”
Black Truffle is pleased to announce Parampara Festival 13.3.1992, a stunning performance by Amelia Cuni captured live in Berlin almost thirty years ago. Milanese by birth and resident in Berlin for many years, Cuni lived in India for over a decade, studying the classical vocal style of dhrupad under masters of the form. Though perhaps known to many listeners primarily through her performances of the vocal music of John Cage and collaborations with Werner Durand and Terry Riley, she is recognised internationally as one of the great contemporary proponents of traditional dhrupad singing. These recordings document her performance at the 1992 Parampara Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a landmark event celebrating the global spread of Indian classical music, bringing together Indian teachers with their international students.
Accompanied by Gianni Ricchizzi on vichitra vina (a plucked zither played with a glass ball slide) and her own tanpura, Cuni stretches out for a languorous side-long performance of the late night Raag Bageshri, the limpid tones of her vocal improvisations illuminating the droning strings like flashes of the moon revealed by rushing clouds. Initially working patiently through a series of subtle dialogues between Cuni’s melodic extemporisations and phrases in response from Richizzi’s vichitra vina, the performance builds to a series of strikingly beautiful, virtuosic held notes from Cuni at the beginning of its second half, before picking up some brisker rhythmic articulation on the way to its conclusion.
On Devino Amor, Cuni presents her own composition, a setting of mystical texts by the 13th century Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, elaborated through various traditional raags. Like the words used for most dhrupad compositions, the text Cuni has selected from da Todi praises divine love, thus linking her otherwise unorthodox use of Italian text to the dhrupad tradition. The result is a performance of a yearning intensity that communicates across any language barrier. On the final performance, Cuni and Ricchizzi are joined by Helmut Waibl on the two-headed pakhawaj drum for a piece using a 14 beat rhythmic pattern that sets in motion a cycle of tension and release, metrical dissolution and resolution, possessing a subtle grandeur.
Illustrated with archival images of the performance and accompanied by new liner notes from Peter Pannke and Lars-Christian Koch, Parampara Festival 13.3.1992 invites listeners to lose themselves in Amelia Cuni’s unique approach to ancient tradition.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Dave PHILLIPS
“Disappear”
disappear was born of something that ceased to be, suddenly, unexpectedly, painfully. like two mirrors that reflected too strongly and burst. the shards that were left tell a story. of a trance meeting of an insect and a flower in a self-made paradise and the resulting journey that took them towards new dimensions but was brutally cut short before these could be explored. the sun disappeared. the resulting daze looked back and saw... mirrors don’t reflect what we want to see.
disappear consists of 7 pieces composed alongside a presence. the story linking the pieces unfolds when the presence disappears and the 8th, last piece of the album appears, a cleansing lament disguised as an abomination. marnować means waste in polish. composed between january 2018 and november 2019, a period also known as the berlin daze. mastered by riccardo mazza. edition of 300
18,00€
In stock
LP
Antoine CHESSEX
“Echo/cide / The Experience of Limit”
ECHO/CIDE (2018) - for 4 hammered dulcimers and cimbalum
Composed by Antoine Chessex. Performed by Ekleto ensemble.
Recorded by Thierry Simonot at l’Alhambra, Geneva, October 2018
THE EXPERIENCE OF LIMIT (2019) - for grand piano
Composed by Antoine Chessex. Performed by Tamriko Kordzaia.
Recorded by Nicolas Buzzi at Theater Rigiblick, Zurich, March 2019.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
21,00€
Out of stock
LP
MATHS BALANCE VOLUMES
“A Year Closer”
It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, or hidden away where nobody is supposed to find them. When things fall together—when the wooden creaks and radio hisses gather for a minute alongside bass lines and melancholy voice—there is a beauty that sounds like it was made by nobody and for nobody.
The city of Mankato, Minnesota has been the steady gathering point for the band since its beginnings. Mankato had always provided an ominous backdrop: built on stolen Dakota land, the city was the site of the largest mass execution in US history, when 38 Dakota prisoners were hanged on in 1862 in a straightforward act of genocide. But in their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture—only as ghosts or unliving effigies.
A Year Closer tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn’t working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in “Dark Skies.” We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in “We Had Time” or the romantic lament of “When I Drink.” In “Work Last Monday,” all of life passes with cold automatism in an “office apartment,” as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of “Over the Hill” isn’t apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a “man,” but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. “Angel of Mercy” tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world.
But these are just the moments when A Year Closer speaks in words clear and audible enough to be understood. The giddy, agitated voice of “The Price” speaks only to itself in a private language, hidden away in a tin can somewhere. Musically, A Year Closer is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide. These are the moments that the listener of Maths Balance Volumes always knows are coming, waits for, and settles in temporarily for a moment of repose. Maybe this is the meaning of A Year Closer: while waiting for the worst, things come together, a “we” with no name but with a rhythm, a tenuous but definite harmony to share as the clock ticks. Even if, when the lights are turned on, it turns out nobody was there. – Paul Buchholz
20,50€
Out of stock
4 LP box
Graham LAMBKIN
“Solos”
The years between Graham Lambkin’s tenure with the legendary Shadow Ring and his more recent improvisational duos mark a distinct period of creative production within the artist’s insular career. Living with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 2001 through 2011 Lambkin recorded and self-released four solo albums that valorized mundane domestic situations while reveling in the liminal spaces between the acts of listening, recording, and producing. Created through an ingenious economy of means, these solo records are as beguilingly seductive as they are uncanny. Perpetually laughing in his own duplicitous face, Lambkin breathed new life into musique concrète and sound poetry, giving outmoded forms a contemporary consciousness while setting the gold standard for a continuously unfolding canon of 21st century tape music.
Poem (For Voice & Tape), Salmon Run, Softly Softly Copy Copy, and Amateur Doubles are now remastered and finally back in print, with Salmon Run and Softly Softly Copy Copy available on vinyl for the first time. This deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin’s first four solo records includes an expansive 42-page book featuring unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections providing fresh insight and divulging hermetic secrets by Ed Atkins, Mark Harwood, Matt Krefting, Lawrence Kumpf, Samara Lubelski, and Adrian Rew.
Graham Lambkin (b. 1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early ‘90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. As a sound organizer rather than music maker, Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, continually transforming quotidian atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, chance operations, and the thick ambience of domestic field recordings. His Kye imprint, founded in 2001, was an instrumental platform for the dissemination of and dialogue between work by an intergenerational cast of artists using sound, including Henning Christiansen, Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, and Gabi Losoncy. He began showing his visual art in 2014 with Came To Call Mine, an exhibition curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Justin Luke at Audio Visual Arts in conjunction with the publication of Lambkin’s children’s book (for adults) of the same name, and has since exhibited his work at 356 Mission, Künstlerhaus, PiK, and Blank Forms.
99,00€
LP
Steve RODEN
“the radio – airria (hanging garden) – vein stem is calm”
Sonoris is pleased to announce the release both on vinyl and cd, with a new mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi, of some important works from the influential and respected artist Steve Roden. These tracks, which mix conceptual composition and musicality, transcend the ambient or lowercase categories too quickly applied to his music, due to its ghostly beauty.
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In the tradition of John Cage's Cartridge music amplified objects, Steve Roden extracts a fine and delicate music through his manipulation of specific objects, with an apparent simplicity that hides a captivating magic. Whilst reinventing a form of ambient music which is discreet and atmospheric, Steve Roden delivers sound textures, gives shape to color swatches, traces vibrant frequencies and creates visual art objects.
Roden, both a visual and a sound artist often tagged as minimal for want of a better description, builds the sound design of a life, a new construction for the future which encompasses architecture, visual arts, and painting in a single form.
• The radio (1996): The sound sources are derived from the object itself: the airwaves as well as the internal mechanics (aerial,springs, knobs ...). Originally released as a miniCD by Sonoris, this work centered on Roden's voice and found sound loops is now unexpectedly considered a classic and was seen as "a particularly modest form of genius" in a review by The Wire at the time.
• Airria ( hanging garden ) (2003): Arnold Schönberg's work " The book of hanging gardens " haunts the piece, and is used as a backbone over which a ghostly and exhilarating vocal hovers. Both unsettling and relaxing, this track from the "Speak no more about the leaves" CD has strangely become a mini phenomenon on youtube with its number of views and comments.
• Vein stem is calm (1996): A few seconds taken from a Ralf Wehowsky piece are shaped into a nocturnal raga imbued with substances of an indeterminate nature.
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Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case – sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
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Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Cut by Fred Alstadt at Studio Angström
18,00€
LP
Jérôme NOETINGER & Lionel FERNANDEZ
“Outer Blanc”
Highly electrified guitar, anamorphosed, perforated, and tainted by all sorts of effects, implodes its rage and its urgency in the magnetic nets of a tape recorder as cannibal as it is destructive. From various recordings Lionel Fernandez & Jérôme Noetinger have created and produced these ten pieces: big, biting, dangerous and acerbic – like the intoxicated meeting of a chainsaw and a microphone. Real garage music: grease, gutted car bodies and outdated alternators, like a soundtrack ripped from an unreleased Tobe Hooper film.
Lionel Fernandez and Jérôme Noetinger: a musical encounter between two important and uncompromising figures in contemporary experimental music in France. This duo emerged during an evening of the label Premier Sang programmed at Instants Chavirés (Montreuil) in the 2010s… A few years and a few furious concerts later and it is now on the Sonoris label that they are releasing their first record.
Guitarist of the pioneering french free noise/no wave band Sister Iodine, Lionel Fernandez uses an out of norm practice of the electric guitar in a group or as solo playing, “a guitar used as a flame thrower thrashed and fiercely held up as machette totem, he chops through darkness with unsane anti-riffs and carved blocs of dirty sounds, where gargle in slow combustion gangreened micro-textures » (Le Non_Jazz)
He also plays in other deviant combos such as Antilles, Cobra Matal, Ibiza Death, Haine, Porsche, Discom, Minitel, Mauser M etc and has collaborated either live or on records with Masaya Nakahara, Meyna’ch/Mütiilation, Andy Bolus/Evil Moisture, Stephen Bessac/Kickback, Hendrik Hegray, Tujiko Noriko etc..
Jérôme Noetinger is a composer, improviser and sound artist who works with electroacoustic devices such as the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder and magnetic tape, analogue synthesisers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, various electronic household/everyday objects and home-made electronica.
From 1987 to 2018, he was the director of Metamkine, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the distribution of improvised and electroacoustic music. Between 1987 and 2014 Jérôme was a member of the editorial committee of the quarterly journal of contemporary sound, poetry and performance, Revue & Corrigée. For ten years from 1989, he was a member and programming co-ordinator of exhibitions, gigs, and experimental cinema at le 102 rue d’Alembert, Grenoble.
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Lionel Fernandez, guitar, electronics
Jérôme Noetinger, Revox B77, electronics
10 tracks, 42 minutes, master by Fred Alstadt at Studio Angström
18,00€
In stock
LP
SUN STABBED
“In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni”
"It has been roughly a decade since this French duo of gnarled guitar enthusiasts last surfaced as Sun Stabbed and I have certainly missed them, though Thierry Monnier and Pierre Faure's similarly excellent La Morte Young project helped fill the void nicely. Aside from the different line-ups, the main difference between the two projects is that this one is kind of a direct homage to some of New Zealand's most iconic purveyors of blacked drones and noisy guitars. While no discussion of that subject would be complete without Campbell Kneale, it is The Dead C and the woefully underheard Surface of the Earth that explicitly provide the most inspiration here. Characteristically, Monnier and Faure are admirably up to the task of continuing that fine tradition, as In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a feast of manipulated feedback, burned-out wreckage, and simmering drones. Occasionally it can be eerily beautiful and haunting, but I also like the parts that resemble an onstage brawl between Skullflower and Sunn O))). This is an instant noise/drone guitar classic."
Brainwashed
16,00€
In stock
LP
James RUSHFORD
“Lake From The Louvers”
James Rushford tops over a decade of solo and collaboratibve work with Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang on this fathoms-deep, psychedelic treat, a next-level arrangement of microtonal drone, decaying concréte fuzz and windswept, somber melancholia recorded for the Shelter Press label.
James Rushford impressed earlier this year with his excellent Black Truffle collab with Will Guthrie “Real Real World”, and he here heads further into the nether-realm on ‘Lakes From The Louvers’, an album that draws its inspiration from the interplay of shadow and light he observed on the surface of the lake and through his window while at an artist residency at La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Rushford’s detailed sound particles and concrète world-building echo the tantalising shimmer of light on water, with amplified movements, synthesized squawks, pings and harp notes rippling across the length of each track. It’s music that accurately represents the landscape but is far from ambient - instead Rushford sculpts soundscapes that demand patient, attentive listening.
The slow-moving, deliberate processes that Rushford has been honing over the last 15 years betray a sensitive ear, swerving pretentious, exclusionary art for arts sake nonsense. This is electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart, designed to trigger thought and self reflection. Just clap yr ears around ‘Hyaline Apples’ as it melts buzzing clouds of synth into jagged harp plucks and woodblock percussion, or standout track ‘The Bise’ and its disquieting haze of microtonal bliss. When the album comes to a satisfying close on ‘Dents Du Midi’, it feels like the finale of a muticolored odyssey, as tangled synth notes fold in on themselves like an MC Escher painting. Futuristic and ancient, ‘Lakes From The Louvers’ is a breathtaking album that unspools with the patience it no doubt took to create.
25,00€
Out of stock
LP
ALTAR OF FLIES
“Bortom Reven”
Cold crushed electronics and tape noise by iDEAL faithful, Altar of Flies, returning to his native Swedish label with a 3rd album of possessed and unsettling tonal abstraction and psychoacoustic isolationism
Known to the reaper as Mattias Gustafsson, Alter of Flies is the Mjölby-based sound artist’s most prolific alias, responsible for dozens of tapes and LPs for Chondritic Sound and White centipede Noise beside his trio of turns for iDEAL since the mid ‘00s. ‘Bortom Reven’ sticks closely to what he does best, conjuring bleakly depressive atmospheres ripe for inhabitation by the harder-to-please followers of North European ambient and industrial musicks, with an alchemic application of field recordings, tape loops, and primitive oscillators that vividly brings his thoughts into the dark light.
‘Bottom Reven’ is perhaps reflective of a certain, ascetic and isolated Swedish characteristic, enacting solitary rituals that better connect Altar of Flies with his environment, or simply entertain him during long, cold, dark nights. With hints of CMvH’s EVP and John Duncan’s searching shortwave radio textures to ‘Hur regn uppstår,’ and more ruptured reception of scrambled ether voices in ‘Terapimusik,’ alongside the title track’s worn-out nub of intrigue, and the damp basement clangour of ‘Under vår livstid’; its not one for those who get shook by the sight of their own shadow, but a real treat for listeners of a lonelier disposition who get off on the sound of the house creaking at night.
19,00€
Out of stock
LP
Jim O’ROURKE
“Too Compliment”
DDS catch enduringly absorbing sonic alchemist Jim O’Rourke at his knottiest and most ingenious in a wormholing suite of amorphous rhythm and psychedelic electronics - a massive RIYL Autechre, Roland Kayn, Bernard Parmegiani, NYZ, Keith Fullerton Whitman.
Playing up to and into DDS’ freeform aesthetics, O’Rourke renders 40 minutes shearing hyaline synth tones and ruptured rhythm generated at his Steamroom facilities in Tokyo, a modular out-zone trawling that harks back to his iconic Mego releases and some of the more recent Steamroom experiments. It’s an ideal addition to the ever expanding DDS cosmos, following Demdike’s recent ‘Drum Machine’ expo with a slice of purist and screwed modular magick that transcends early electronics and modern styles in pursuit of musical sensations that defy stylistic brackets.
‘Too Compliment’ was assembled using a bespoke Hordijk modular system, a rare West Coast-style setup hand made by Dutch engineer Rob Hordijk. O’Rourke focuses on the frequency shifter here, using it to coax out fluxing tone thickets, haphazard frequencies and elongated drone corridors. It’s transportive stuff, harking back to the early days of private press academic synth music but also sitting on edge alongside Autechre’s recent long-form work, as well as O’Rourke’s classic “I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4”
In O’Rourke’s hands, the mass of electronics takes on throbbing, organic dimensions, congealing grey matter and purplish veins of fluid in viscous transitions that glisten and spark with invention as they form new tissue. What comes out is as unearthly as the earliest electronic music, but also blessed with a psychedelc spirit in a way that’s long kept O’Rourke right out on his own, teetering between paradigms yet never settling into any single style. If you’ve always been keen on finding a way into that sprawling soundworld, ‘Too Compliment’ is a perfect entry point into a highly rewarding creative macrocosm.
28,00€
Out of stock
LP
FUJITA
“Komori”
Japanese pipe-organ builder and sound artist Yosuke Fujita provided us with one of the prettiest, weirdest records that passed over our desk last year, essentially a custom-built organ duet with a bat colony, recorded in a cave beneath Mt. Fuji. It’s now been remastsred by Rashad Becker (with whom Fujita will be collaborating on a performance for Issue Project Room next month) and captures a sound somewhere between Sarah Davachi, Eleh, Pauline Oliveros and Kali Malone’s long-form organ dirges, with the bat calls sounding almost like a synthesizer piped thru an echo chamber.
Since 2009, Fujita has been recording almost exclusively with his custom-built pipe organ: a unique instrument made from 11 pipes and a blacksmith’s air pump. All of his recordings are worth hearing, but “KŌMORI” is among the most unusual and rewarding - 40 minutes of alien, pensive organ drone that echoes around the repeating, reverberating squeaks of a colony of bats.
Inspired by the fact that bats were the source of many recent viruses - like Ebola, Nipah and Hendra - Fujita grabbed a Sunken CO-100K microphone that was capable of picking up their ultrasonic echolocation. These sounds, captured in a cave beneath Mt. Fuji, are totally alien, like chattering sine waves or wobbling modular business. It’s the perfect foil for Fujita’s well-worn courtly organ variations that mirror traditional Japanese 7th century gagaku forms.
The rhythmic click of the air pump guides Fujita’s bellowing drones, drowning out the cave’s uneven spaces. Sometimes the bat sounds are reduced to a whisper, at others - such as on the crushing third part - they’re almost deafening. Fujita processes these sounds expertly, occasionally mirroring their fluttering tonalities, at others simply allowing the unusual frequencies to cascade through the empty caverns.
This is properly vital new music - sonically adjacent to Medieval church music, but also austere early electronics, spiked with a brilliantly asymmetric streak all of its own.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Neil LEONARD
“Sonance for the Precession”
Excerpts from a sound installation based on alto saxophone recordings and electronic sound. "Mr. Leonard creates a haunting, rhythmic, chantlike score, secular spiritual music for a New World. After leaving the gallery I kept hearing it, with delight, in my head, on the street, all afternoon." --Holland Cotter, The New York Times.
The electroacoustic composition Sonance for the Precession was commissioned by Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The piece furthers Leonard's practice in large scale sound installation, with recent commissions by documenta, Venice Biennale, and Fujiko Nakaya of Experiments in Art at Technology. The original composition, created for the quad adjacent to WCMA, played from the dome of the historic Hopkins Observatory, the oldest working astronomical observatory in the United States. The durational work explored ancient ideas connecting the precession, or movement, of the equinox with the harmonic series. Each day, the music began just a minute or two earlier than the previous day -- mirroring the disappearing sunlight as day turned to night and autumn shifted to winter. 30 minutes of the composition played daily. The composition provided a context to reflect on how Hindu and Greek theories of astronomy and acoustics developed through intercultural exchange as far back as prehistoric times. Working closely with WCMA and producer/engineer Joe Branciforte, Leonard remixed Sonance for the Precession specially for LP and stereo listening. The result is a stunning long form composition that brings the sense of contemplation, cosmic motion and intimate timbral nuance of the installation to your living room, headphones and/or car stereo.
18,00€