In stock
LP
Doris DENNISON
“Earth Interval”
Edition of 300. First vinyl release for experimental percussion pioneer and feminist icon. Member of John Cage's legendary first percussion ensemble in the 1930s-40s, close associate of Lou Harrison, and longtime accompanist for Anna Halprin's radical dance company. Composed in the mid-1950s for dancer AA Leath, this remarkable work was recently discovered in archives by Tom Welsh. Comprising three movements (Land Form, Air Tide, and Earth Play), it's scored for recorder, drums, gongs, maracas using revolutionary techniques decades ahead of its time - including lowering and raising gongs into water while beating. Gracefully rendered by Chicago's Third Coast Percussion in its first-ever recording. Pantone color vinyl with commissioned liner notes illuminating this groundbreaking composer's life and legacy.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Jürg FREY
“Extended Circular Music”
Edition of 200. Swiss Wandelweiser master reimagined by virtuoso flutist Manuel Zurria in stunning solo interpretations. Frey's String Quartet No. 3 and four Extended Circular Music pieces (originally for various chamber ensembles) are transformed into ethereal soundscapes through Zurria's conceptual approach inspired by Japanese Kintsugi art. Interweaving minimalism with radical experimentalism, these recordings draw startling scope from minimal material means - breath-length utterances dance among complex harmonic clusters, provoking suspensions of time. Zurria aimed not for literal translation but free interpretation, highlighting critical points to make them shine in their uniqueness. Pantone color vinyl with exploratory liner notes by Bradford Bailey.
25,00€
Out of stock
LP
Okkyung LEE
“Just like any other day: background music for your mundane activities”
Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with Just Like Any Other Day: Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives.
For more than two decades, Okkyung Lee has stood at the forefront of the most radical trajectories of experimental music: a virtuosic cellist and improviser, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth. Particularly noteworthy for her range, dexterity, and adaptability, over the last five years Lee’s output has revealed unexpected shifts and developments that move far afield from the realms of free improvisation for which she is most well know. 2020’s Yeo-Neun, a heart-wrenching, ambient chamber work - drawing inspiration from the Korean popular music of her youth - was issued by Shelter Press to great critical response, followed closely by Teum (The Silvery Slit) - one of a series engrossing electroacoustic works created at Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris - on Portraits GRM, and then 나를 (Na-Reul) in 2021, regarded by Lee as a closing statement of more than two decades living in New York, which set the precedent of her allowing her emotions to fully occupy the forefront of the music for the first time. Marking her return to Shelter press, Just Like Any Other Day: Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, encounters Lee upturning the apple cart once again, weaving a profoundly intimate artistic statement on completely unexpected terms.
Like its three aforementioned predecessors, Just Like Any Other Day belongs to broadening shift in Lee’s approach to composing that roughly aligns with her return to her native South Korea, having lived in the United States since her late teens. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to those critical challenges and questions provoked by significant life change. Worked on in isolation, and continuously returned to, over the course of four years, the album’s nine pieces began with a simple recognition that experimental music is not always what we imagine it to be. It is a practice and a pursuit - a music for which, at its inception, the outcome is unknown - rather than an idiom defined by certain syntaxes, approaches, and qualities of structure and sound. From this departure point, Lee began to inquire after the utility of music itself: what is it for, what does it do, and what place does it (or can it) occupy in our lives?
Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) presents a remarkable form of ambient music - organisations of sound that become their own environment, to be occupied - intended, as the album’s subheading infers, as Background Music For Your Mundane Activities. An expansion of the creative pathways opened by the Korean pop imbued compositions of Yeo-Neun, aspects of electronic process explored by Teum (The Silvery Slit), and the emotive foregrounding of 나를 (Na-Reul), each of the pieces presented across the two sides of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) implies something far greater than the limits of its own temporarily: a mood, provocations of memory and place, mirrors for the solitude within which it was made, and palpable emotion lingering just out of grasp. For Lee, each of the album’s compositions could be continued or looped for an indeterminate duration: straddling a ground between the minimal and the baroque, enveloping the listener in endless cycles of appreciating, repetitive and rhythmical notes, flirting with the melodic and implying a disembodied imagism that borders on the profound.
27,00€
In stock
LP
Eiko ISHIBASHI – Jim O’ROURKE
“Pareidolia”
For this collaborative release, Eiko & Jim edited and remixed material captured at shows they played during a lovely two week tour through France, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland in April 2023. Pareidolia shapes an ideal collage from the best resonances and relationships from those nights. A dynamic medley of color and shape to pulse through earbuds, speaker cones and the air around you, appealing to your suggestibility, wherever you find it.
Recorded in Paris and Padova 2023. Mixed at Steamroom 2024.
Without Whom: François Bonnet, Jean-Baptiste Garcia, Jules Negrier, Louis Réal, Emmanuel Richier, Alexandre Bazin, Phillipe Dao, and everyone at Ina-Grm, Nicola Negri, Veniero Rizzardi, Monica Salvadori, Stefano Merighi, Matteo Polato and everyone from Centro D'Arte, Franco Cappuccio, Roger Ziegler, David Connaughton, Paolo-Francesco Visci, and everyone at Drag City.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Oren AMBARCHI – Johan BERTHLING – Andreas WERLIIN
“Ghosted III”
Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin are back, a little looser and wilder than before. Their ability to lock in and focus on the smallest of details is enhanced here by a sense of increased immediacy. Great news for fans of stimulating variations of tone and mood within a potentially infinite universe of rhythm and sound! The more you listen to Ghosted III, the better your hearing becomes. Or maybe it’s just that you hear more every time you play it.
28,00€
In stock
LP
THE SHADOW RING
“Wax-Work Echoes”
Originally conceived as a compilation of outtakes and live recordings from The Shadow Ring’s 1995 stateside tour, Wax-Work Echoes takes its name from the first line of “Put the Music in Its Coffin,” the title track of the group’s breakthrough release. Lambkin abandons the bits-and-bobs approach, advancing the Shadow Ring concept with entirely original material that builds on the unit’s self-mythologizing lyrics, celebrates the clicking of horse hooves, ponders on the sociability of rats and mice, and warns of the dangers of poultry. The first Shadow Ring album to officially include Tim Goss in the main lineup, Wax-Work Echoes reveals the group in its final and lasting form, awash in the outer bounds of atmospheric exploration, with Lambkin’s familiar wry and morbid lyricism and the stripped-down angularity of amateurishly detuned guitars fully intact. While Klaus Canterbury and Tony Clark seem all but forgotten, and the shrugged off S. Fritz is listed on the liner notes as performing only “when required,” Lambkin did solicit contributions from outside the inner circle. A bit of “Mambo Twist,” lifted from a tape of unreleased Vitamin B12 material sent to Lambkin by Alasdair Willis, found its way into “V.E.R.M.I.N.,” while an extended epistle contribution from Richard Youngs (and, technically, Brian Lavelle) would be employed in the second half of “Catching Sight/Of Passing Things.”
Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell’s newly minted Corpus Hermeticum, Wax-Work Echoes was recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, in anticipation of the forthcoming “Rose Watson Tour,” and was supported by a celebratory fanzine media blitz. The album seemingly absorbs the frenetic excess of the band’s transatlantic travels; Wax-Work Echoes channels the trio’s wilder instincts into an unresolved catharsis, not yet free of frustration or restlessness. Out of print for almost three decades and available here for the first time ever on long-playing disc, Wax-Work Echoes is a classic from the outer eddies of The Shadow Ring’s sound, a must-have for any aficionado’s collection: “A window slides, glass slips from frame / And canvas carcass breathes again.”
Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.
27,00€
In stock
LP
THE SHADOW RING
“Hold Onto I.D.”
Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, Hold Onto I.D., The Shadow Ring’s fourth album, marks the apogee of the trio’s experimental rock epoch—their last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of City Lights and Put the Music in Its Coffin give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the backdrop of the Coombe House (as pictured on the album’s cover). While Hold Onto I.D. is the group’s most overtly autobiographical release to date, Graham Lambkin’s lyrics obfuscate his expressionist tendencies filtering them through the codes and languages of officialdom, linking the “inner self” with documents of the state—identification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers.
Having moved out of their parents’ homes and into the top floor of the famed Coombe House, Lambkin and Darren Harris set out to rework material drafted over the previous year, aided by Tim Goss, still safely in residence at the “Valebrook Inn.” While the familiar sounds of Harris’s deadpan recitation and Lambkin’s electric guitar, amateurishly strummed, dominate the album, the emotive interludes of Goss’s keyboards populate the record along with of home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrète. Originally released on CD and supported by a US tour with friends Scott Foust and Karla Borecky’s Idea Fire Company, Hold Onto I.D. is perhaps the band’s best-known and most accessible album. (The Shadow Ring’s sole representative on a streaming platform, it was once acknowledged by the Guardian as one of “the 101 strangest records on Spotify.”) Offered here for the first time on vinyl, Hold Onto I.D. is an essential album for both completists and the uninitiated alike.
Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.
27,00€
In stock
LP
Tim BARNES
“Lost Words”
Percussionist Tim Barnes has had a lengthy career flying as close as possible to the sun, notably performing and recording with Jim O’Rourke, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Silver Jews, Tony Conrad, John Zorn, Faust, Tower Recordings, Alan Licht and many others.
Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021, Lost Words is the first of two recordings undertaken after Tim’s diagnosis. These new collabs were coordinated and produced by Ken (Bundy) Brown (Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Pullman) and feature Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, David Daniell, John Dieterich, Darin Gray, Glenn Kotche, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jim O’Rourke and Ken Vandermark among others. Tim’s stalwart rhythmic zeal is the lynchpin and common ground across these tracks that span a wide swath of styles.
29,50€
In stock
LP
Tim BARNES
“Noumena”
Percussionist Tim Barnes has had a lengthy career flying as close as possible to the sun, notably performing and recording with Jim O’Rourke, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Silver Jews, Tony Conrad, John Zorn, Faust, Tower Recordings, Alan Licht and many others.
Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021, Lost Words is the first of two recordings undertaken after Tim’s diagnosis. These new collabs were coordinated and produced by Ken (Bundy) Brown (Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Pullman) and feature Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, David Daniell, John Dieterich, Darin Gray, Glenn Kotche, Rob Mazurek, Doug McCombs, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jim O’Rourke, Britt Walford and Mike Watt among others. Tim’s stalwart rhythmic zeal is the lynchpin and common ground across these tracks that span a wide swath of styles.
29,50€
In stock
LP
AUTOREVERSE (Arnaud Rivière & Nina Garcia)
“Autotunes”
Autoreverse brings together Arnaud Rivière (prepared turntable - we should say damaged or destroyed), a kingpin of the French noise underground as a programmer at Instants Chavirés and Sonic Protest, team player with Otomo Yoshihide, Erik M, and a hundred others, ; and Nina Garcia (guitar & feedback), recently recruited by Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ label after giving the whole of the Paris region a taste for noise guitar solos with her Mariachi project ("Guitar, pedal. That's all’, as his Discogs puts it. What he doesn't say is that it's EVERYTHING - a world, a cosmos in itself) – culminating in a self-titled album and instant classic (Mariachi, No Lagos, 2018), and various collaborations (Maria Bertel, Mamiedaragon).
Their music, already been featured in two live cassettes, stems from assiduous concert practice. Autotunes is something like the duo's core in fission. They throw themselves into improvisation with little patience for detours : the position is clean-cut hardcore – less over-the-top clatter and more about finding the cutting edge, with an insistence on fine-tuning the limits of the instruments, attacking the raw and the gritty with maximum precision: the result is an irradiating flow of rare metals and certified toxins.
In one of the record's many climaxes, bleeps extruded from who knows where battle with the strumming of white-hot guitar strings. But there's a whole host of distinct techniques and sonorities at work here: seamless attacks, amplified scrap metal, just-caught feedbacks, provoked chances, melodies that invite themselves in but don't stay for dinner, rhythmic sketches and glimpsed zones of beauty, built-up and cracked materials, expected and unexpected counterpoints. The intensities vary from start to finish: howling, eruptive bursts of harsh noise microswitchs, shapeless feedback whining and growling, but also more meditative harmonics and resonances.
This is reinforced by the didactic and generous structure of the record, which first methodically exposes the takes played in the studio through ‘horizontal’ sequencing (A1), before repeating the same material ‘vertically’ in a meticulous work of hollowing out and elisions. Autotunes manifests a distinctive ability to maintain an astonishing dynamic in the depths of the post-industrial cavern left by Throbbing Gristle (‘Slug Bait’ period), Maurizio Bianchi and all.
With Autoreverse, it's no longer time to marvel at our various abilities and tactics, but to tighten the mesh. In the way it coolly reviews the possibilities, in its peaceful radicalism, in its attitude of less noise, more impact, this record helps us to conceive what a comrade called once ‘an ethic of our violence’.
(Boomkat)
21,00€
In stock
LP
OPERA MORT
“Le Présent”
Èlg & Jo Tanz’s hard-to-classify project Opéra Mort has been in operation since early moves on Jo Tanz’s tanzprocess label paved the way for a 2010 split release with the legendary Smegma, a cult pair of Reines D’Angleterre sides with august outsider Ghédalia Tazartès, and beguiling works for Luke Younger’s Alter label. On their new album ‘Le Présent’ they typically keep everything ambiguously out-of-reach and etheric in forms comparable to experimental ambient musick, electro-acoustic minimalism, and outsider psych-folk, never fully tilting to any of them, preferring a style of shapeshifting that works beautifully well on the back of calm, shut eyelids.
Through a process of improvisation, active listening, and highly attuned intuition, Opéra Mort proceed to induce hypnotic states of mind that encourage the imagination to wander, following a labyrinthine breadcrumb trail of sonic artefacts and fine timbral detail. Their reticence to supply any explicit cues works to the benefit of suspending the listener’s disbelief, reserving the right to surprise and colour the mind with reeling tapestries of phantasmic, fathomless apparitions.
‘Le Monde’ first splashes on the senses with piquant arps and bass drones coaxed into a lush lather that’s pregnant with theatric dread, threaded with alien whispers on ‘Secrets’, and spangled with spring reverb in the eerily naif creep of ‘L’humanite entiere’. Their organic, fractally shifting collage of tape loops and synths in ‘Oeufs’ feels as though we’re combed backwards below the waves on a dreamlike shoreline, where they metamorphose into discordant, howling rave hoovers and caterwaul with ‘La nouvelle fin du mode’, and the deliquescent lounge music ooze of ‘Damien Schultz’, leaving us with no firm grasp of what the hell we’ve just been listening too, but totally enthralled nonetheless.
(Boomkat)
20,00€
In stock
LP
GEINS’T NAÏT
“Archives 3/3”
Rounding off a trilogy initiated in 2019, this final volume of Geins’t Naït’s archives -as seen, compiled & triturated by Vincent Hachet & Thierry Mérigout, the original duo - showcases yet another facet of the composite industrial mashup the band discharged into the late 1980’s Dadaist French underground between 1986 & 1993. Geins’t Naït’s final edit for Éditions Gravats agglomerates bits & pieces picked up from the soil of a muddy barnyard. (Boomkat)
20,00€
In stock
LP
GEINS’T NAÏT
“Archives 2/3”
A second batch of weirdo curveballs from Thierry Mérigout’s cult French duo Geins’t Naït, pumping a bad belly full of french industrial grot and slop recorded between 1986-1993.
More abstract cinematique than the roiling rhythms gathered on the first instalment, this next volume breaks down between passages of atmospheric filmic dialogue and feral no-wave industrial that cuts layers deeper into Geins’t Naït’s uncompromising oeuvre." (Boomkat)
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
Andrzej KARALOW – Jérôme NOETINGER
“L’ivresse transfigurée”
This duo, Andrzej Karalow and Jérôme Noetinger, is the brainchild of Grzegorz Paluch, who had the idea of bringing together the piano, the subtle phrasing and harmonic interplay of the former with the magnetic and electronic tentacles of the latter. The piano metamorphoses in the cogs of the tape recorder, multiplying and playing with its distorted mirror. It's a journey through imaginary landscapes haunted by a ghostly presence.
Andrzej Karałow – piano, Roland space echo.
Jérôme Noetinger – Revox B77, electronics.
Recorded at Andrzej Karałow’s home studio, May 2024.
Recording, mix, and mastering by Igor Szymański.
Andrzej Karałow (b. 1991) is a Polish pianist, composer and improvising artist, laureate of many national and international piano and composition competitions. Although classical music is the main field of his activity, he is also open to experiments in electronic and alternative genre, combining techniques and inspirations from various fields of art into his own, unique musical language.
Jérôme Noetinger (b. 1966) is a composer, improviser and sound artist. Member of Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine, Le Un, Les Sirènes… Ex-director of Metamkine distribution catalog. Ex-member of the editorial committee of the quarterly journal Revue & Corrigée.
21,00€
In stock
LP
Ellen ARKBRO
“Nightclouds”
Ellen Arkbro’s fourth album, Nightclouds, collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe in 2023–24. Nightclouds is more unabashedly Romantic and introspective than her previous efforts, though it remains firmly rooted in the rigor and precision that have come to define Arkbro’s concept. Extending her previous explorations of spatialized harmony, tactility, and texture, Arkbro draws equally on sacred music, ECM–style jazz, and downtown minimalism, conjuring a cool intimacy and tone. Her decelerationist chordal improvisations envelop the listener in dirge-like washes, while her close miking reveals the rough haptic grain of the reeds, bringing the listener both inside and outside the sound. Evoking Kjell Johnsen and Jan Garbarek’s duets, or La Monte Young and Tony Conrad’s take on Euringer and Harmer’s cowboy song “Oh Bury Me Not,” Nightclouds channels spiritual pathos through a rigorously restrained architecture.
Following up on last year’s Sounds While Waiting (W.25TH, 2024), a selection of stereo mixes documenting Arkbro’s spatial organ installations, Nightclouds (her first for Blank Forms and for co-publisher La Becque Editions) shifts direction, focusing on instant composition and improvisation. Elegant, simple chordal scaffolds support rich, ever-shifting textures; listening closely necessitates surrender to sustained irresolution. Bookending a collection of short pieces are two variations on the titular composition, “Nightclouds,” which capture Arkbro performing simultaneously on the Sauer organ and Utopa Baroque organ at Orgelpark in Amsterdam. The composition is a sly nod to British jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth: The first take slows down and stretches out a continuously modulated harmonic progression, while the short closing version simply loops three chords. Situated between these tracks are “Still Life” and “Chordalities,” two short works recorded at the Temple de La-Tour-de-Peilz in Vevey, Switzerland, where Arkbro spent a summer stay and additional recording stints at La Becque | Artist Residency. While the former registers only a few subtle changes against a sustained chord, “Chordalities,” played entirely on the organ stops, unspools in a billowing progression, culminating in a modernist angularity absent from the other compositions. The second half of the album is given to “Morningclouds,” a sprawling work recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin. Whereas the shorter works are harmonic studies, “Morningclouds” foregrounds Arkbro’s attention to form and structure, interweaving two returning themes that are reminiscent of her approach in For Organ and Brass (Subtext, 2017). Arkbro’s concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture evoke a sense of emotional ambivalence, simultaneously uplifting and mournful, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Nightclouds stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive, the album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.
Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. She originally trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, changed paths to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), and ultimately received a degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Her work has been supported by residencies at Somerset House in London, Blank Forms in New York, La Becque Résidence d’artistes in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York, as well as numerous grants, including the ten-year work grant from the Swedish Arts Council. She has presented her site-specific work at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, Silent Green in Berlin, Ina GRM in Paris, and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Hanne LIPPARD – Ellen ARKBRO – Hampus LINDWALL
“How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?”
Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall’s How do I know if my cat likes me? is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday—corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition. By untethering sound from meaning through a pleasurably numbing cycle of repetition, the album satirizes the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life—from hold music to online banking—with a prim, deadpan delivery.
Conceived when Lippard and Arkbro were both in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (and recorded in part on the organs of that same town’s Temple Saint-Théodule), How do I know if my cat likes me? is a long-awaited collaboration from the trio they formed with Lindwall. Throughout, Arkbro and Lindwall’s ascetic organ accompaniment provides a tonal landscape that is both intuitive and enigmatic, while Lippard’s recitation ensnares the listener in a tautological customer-service loop where language shifts from pure function to pure aesthetic. How do I know if my cat likes me? opens with an interpretation of Phil Harmonic’s classic 1978 composition “Timing,” originally written for and performed by “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Harmonic, a Cagian who resisted the authoritarian strictures of notation, wrote a piece that invites the performer to make “subtle and thoughtful changes” based on pre-recorded audio cues—“Change now”—designed to capture his idiosyncratic sense of timing. “The Long Goodbye” imagines an unending dialogue between automated acquaintances who try to politely disengage with the same few parting words, perpetually on the verge of separation. Meanwhile, “Modern Spanking” paronomastically free-associates from sterile conveniences to illicit erotics. Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking,” it sketches a world of perfunctory pleasures whose sadism is more indebted to Jamie Dimon than Marquis de Sade. The album wraps up with a rendition of “At Last I Am Free,” Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco breakup anthem, notably reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt as a world-weary yet triumphant protest song. Amid the monotonous absurdities of How do I know if my cat likes me?, “At Last I Am Free” takes on a haunting irony. With its eternally ambiguous refrain—“I can hardly see in front of me”—the song calls into question the very fact of freedom (perhaps as an antidote to Harmonic’s Cagianism). Existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment.
How do I know if my cat likes me? recalls David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s Daytime Viewing (1979–80) (Unseen Worlds, 2013), a highly stylized, puckish stream of soap-operatic scenes and sales channel segments, punctuated by Humbert’s listless narration and Rosenboom and Willie Winant’s drum machines, claves, and maracas. The album also nods to Paul DeMarinis’s Songs Without Throats (Black Truffle, 2019), a compilation of tracks from the 1970s in which all the lyrics are recited by Speak & Spell machines. Constantly poking at the porous membrane between sound and meaning, poetry and song, or playful irreverence and existentialism, How do I know if my cat likes me? is a portal into a fantastical, unforgettable, organic-synthetic world.
Hanne Lippard is an artist who has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture.
Ellen Arkbro is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. She focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Hampus Lindwall is an artist, organist, and composer. Since 2005, he has been the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Hampus LINDWALL
“Brace for Impact”
An album of contemporary composition for the organ, drawing influence from everything from Xenakis to metal to rave.
For Hampus Lindwall, the pipe organ is a playground. The organist and composer makes music that explores its textures and resonances, using it as both a vehicle for powerful chords and delicate rhythmic lattices. On Brace for Impact, he presents five pieces that highlight his experimental approach to the instrument, foregrounding off-kilter rhythms and tumultuous melodies. His music is eerie and light, ancient and futuristic, in equal measure. By experimenting primarily with the textural aspects of the organ, he showcases the instrument’s remarkable flexibility.
"Though the organ’s origins trace back centuries, it’s a main player in the current contemporary classical and experimental music scene. Many leading composers work with organ drones: take the limitless harmonies of Ellen Arkbro, or the haunted whispers of Sarah Davachi’s endless hums, for example. Lindwall carves his own path on the instrument, asking how he can use it to play dance music rooted in the sound and texture of the organ. ‘90s raves, after all, were how he got started in music. With Brace for Impact, he seeks to show how the organ, too, can embrace the freedom and vibration of the dance floor.
Syncopation is the most distinctive aspect of the five pieces on Brace for Impact, often driving its unconventional structures. No two rhythms feel the same, nor do they loop in step; instead, they’re a little off center, and always running at full speed. They buzz beneath his organ’s longer tones, always ready to pounce, or veer, or transform. This is most evident on tracks like ‘AFK’, a chaotic repeating pulse fit for a late-night rave, and ‘Swerve’, which builds from an uncanny beat that feels like electrified water droplets falling just out of pace.
What makes these patterns stand out is Lindwall’s embrace of dissonance. His ever-evolving vibrations often clash; his melodies and harmonies often foreground dissonant intervals. On ‘À Bruit Secret’, for example, Lindwall alternates between bubbling riffs and imposing chords. These collisions drive the music’s feeling of being just a little bit real and unreal at the same time. And then there’s the title track, which is an anomaly from the rest of the record. Here, Stephen O’Malley’s guitar crashes like lightning into Lindwall’s panting runs. They’re two forces, from outside, or above, or below, in a race to the finish line. It’s like a reminder that the present is past and the future is coming whether you want it or not. Why not let the organ, who has seen it all, be the spaceship that takes you there?"
The Quietus
28,00€
In stock
LP
Stephen O’MALLEY
“But remember what you have had”
With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.
Composed by Stephen O’Malley / Mixed & arranged at GRM studios, Paris, 2022-2024 / Commissioned by INA grm
Electric guitars performed by Stephen O’Malley / Recorded at Applehead Studio, Woodstock by Randall Dunn, September 2022
Winds performed by Hans Teuber (bfl, fl, bcl, cl, tpt) & Stephen Moore (tbn) / Recorded at Studio Litho, Seattle by Floyd Reitsma, September 2022 / Arrangement assistance & conduction by Kali Malone
Premix at La Fugitive, Paris with François-Xavier Gilles & Tristan Mazire, February 2023 / Final stereo mix at GRM studios, Paris with Emmanuel Richier, May & October 2024
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, October 2024 / Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, October 2024
24,50€
In stock
LP
Jim O’ROURKE
“Shutting Down Here”
Shutting Down Here
2019 / 35’13
Recorded at INA GRM and Steamroom
Piano: Eiko Ishibashi // Violin, viola: Atsuko Hatano // Trumpet: Eivind Lonning
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020
Photo by Eiko Ishibashi // Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley
Special thanks to Francois Bonnet and Jean Schwarz for bookending 30 years
Due to the wide dynamic levels, please adjust your volume accordingly
Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like an universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans . This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition.
Released in association with Editions Mego.
Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg
24,00€
In stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Fernweh”
Black Truffle presents a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith. Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke. A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of "Wanderlust," fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls "climates." Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition -- with which Bonnet, as director of the GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar -- the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block. Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous "scenes," with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies. Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.
28,00€
In stock
LP
ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH
“Spilla”
Black Truffle presents Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah, the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (BT 086CD). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie's long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell's "Uncle," performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell's dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal. Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois' drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Salamat Ali KHAN
“Metamusik Festival Berlin ’74”
Carrying on from recent archival releases from masters of Indian classical tradition such as Kamalesh Maitra and the Dagar Brothers, Black Truffle presents a previously unheard recording of a concert by Pakistani vocalist Salamat Ali Khan. Born to a musician family in Hoshiarpur in the northwestern state of Punjab, Khan moved with his family to Lahore in Pakistan after the 1947 partition of India, becoming a child musical prodigy. Khan was a master of the kyhal form of Hindustani classical vocal music, a style integrating influences from Middle Eastern musical traditions that gives the singer a great deal of improvisational freedom. Travelling widely across the globe from the 1960s until his death in 2001, Khan approached ragas performed in the kyhal style as expressive forums for risk-taking improvisation, enlivened by ceaseless ornamental invention. This remarkable recording was captured by Michael Hönig (of krautrock legends Agitation Free) in concert at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie as part of the MetaMusik festival in 1974. Khan, who is also heard accompanying himself on a specially tuned alpine zither (in place of the traditional swarmandal, an Indian style of zither), is joined by Shaukat Hussein Khan on tabla and Hussein Bux Khan on harmonium. The lack of a familiar underlying tanpura drone gives this performance a weightless, floating quality, with all three of the musicians playing masterfully with the interaction between silence and the pulse propelling each section of the raag. Virtuoso tabla interjections at first barely state the tempo, and the interplay between musicians is so spacious that we hear scraps of audience noise and the squeak of the harmonium's mechanism in between the notes. Gradually picking up rhythmic definition and melodic complexity, after around fifteen minutes the music builds dramatically, with Khan letting out emotive yelps and swooping scalar shapes ranging across his full vocal range. Accompanied by stunning black and white concert photographs, the LP also contains a moving and entertaining recollection from acclaimed German musicologist Peter Pannke, looking back on his experience assisting Khan and his musicians in Berlin at the Metamusik festival (including a mouth-watering description of a feast cooked by the maestro himself). As Pannke describes in his account of attending the concert, the beauty and spiritual intensity of this music leaves the listener speechless.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Annea LOCKWOOD
“On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance”
Legendary New Zealand-born experimental composer and sound art pioneer Annea Lockwood returns to Black Truffle with On Fractured Ground/Skin Resonance, her third release for the label. Having recently celebrated her 85th birthday, Lockwood shows no sign of slowing down in her exploration of new sound sources and collaborations with an ever-growing intergenerational pool of performers -- here with Vanessa Tomlinson. Her creative vibrancy is alive as ever on the two recent works presented here, which demonstrate both her engagement with the social dimensions of sound and the deeply reflective, meditative aspect of her art. "On Fractured Ground" derives from material recorded with Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos for the soundtrack of Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon's opera-film, History of the Present (2023). Working together in Belfast, Lockwood, Rebelo and Varoutsos made extensive recordings of the city's "peace lines," the dozens of walls erected since the beginning of the Troubles in the late 1960s to separate Catholic and Protestant areas of the city. Continuing to work in her studio with the material collected for the soundtrack after its completion, Lockwood composed the work presented here, occupying a space somewhere between her own extended-technique percussion music and the Cagean tradition of hyper-amplified small sounds. "Skin Resonance" is a collaboration with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson. Developed through conversations in which the two discussed the idea of "sonic attraction," the piece focuses on Tomlinson's relationship to the bass drum, reflecting on the complex web of connections embodied in this seemingly simply instrument, which is at once "animal, wood, and metal." Approaching the instrument in a suitably elemental fashion, Tomlinson's performance strips away conventional technique to explore the resonance and timbral properties of skin, drum, and metal hardware, producing overlapping waves of texture that at times seem closer to wind swishing through leaves or the ocean than anything usually associated with a drum. Emphasising the symbiotic relationship between performer and instrument, Tomlinson's voice is heard at times, exploring the field of associations and connections the bass drum suggests to her. Accompanied by insightful liner notes on both pieces and photographs documenting the recording of "On Fractured Ground" and a performance of "Skin Resonance," this LP is a moving testament to the engagement, generosity, and openness that sustain Annea Lockwood's work, still finding new directions after more than fifty years of activity.
28,00€
In stock
2x10"
Laszlo UMBREIT, Sirah FOIGHEL BRUTMANN & Eitan EFRAT
“Là”
Là is an immersive, politically charged sound journey – a lament for the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. It is the result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit, and Ot Lemmens. The album combines acoustic instruments like flute and cymbals with processed electronics and mechanical sounds.
The track Ensemble is made from sound recordings of eleven 16mm film projectors, playing simultaneously and in intervals, creating a texture centered around a single pitch – La/A.
The tracks For Her, There, and No are recordings of live sessions played by Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat.
The album also features an extended text by Rose Higham-Stainton titled Strategies for Survival, spread across a 12-page booklet.
"The music is quite lovely as it is, if I am allowed to use that word for such serious matters. The four pieces (three of which are nine minutes, and the last one is six) are spacious and drone-like, but from an acoustic point of view. Maybe stringed instruments mixed with electronics, even if the details aren’t precise. ‘For Her’ contains flute and effects by Efrat and Umbreit plays “NR2X and effects”. Only ‘There’ contains a rhythm, played by Efrat on the wooden temple block and tom, while Umbreit plays “Monomachine and effects”. The four pieces have a rather desolate feeling, which goes with the dessert idea, I guess. ‘Ensemble’ is the most significant piece, in terms of action, with many players, who, I assume, either use their voices to hum or play string instruments. This is also the album’s most contemporary piece, usually not my strong suit, but in combination with the text and the other pieces, something that works well. I doubt if my little review does the music, or rather, the total product, much justice, but hopefully it piqued your curiosity enough to investigate. This is a great record, even if just from a musical point of view." (Vital Weekly)
27,00€
In stock
LP
ANGEL SNAKE – MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS
“Snakinist Sand Form / No Jaw Nite Rights”
Long, long overdue reissue of this gem from the depths of The Skaters dreamweaving dimension, released as a limited tape through Spencer Clark's Pacific City imprint back in 2008. Comprising a period of extreme and vital activity for both Clark as Monopoly Child Star Searchers and Black Joker and his kindred spirit James Ferraro under his own name - 'Marble Surf' or 'Discovery' - and a myriad of identities like Liquid Metal or Edward Flex, this split finds these intrepid explorers on each side of a scrying mirror.
Conjuring the Angel Snake entity as a vessel for unlocking the unconscious, Ferraro takes up the A-side with hypnotic wooden percussion sustaining queasy tape processed keyboard lines that intertwine amidst a growing haze of hiss. About halfway through the digression an announcer boombox voice cuts up the scenery for a serpentine dance around the discarded remnants of civilisations past and future. Clark's Monopoly Child rides a beaming synth and muffled percussion accents on his trademarked keyboard thrills, all ascending and descending runs brimming on the horizon, not quite here, not quite out of reach, fading out to a galloping murk smeared by hallucinatory flute-like sounds and portamento accents that float in harmonic suspension.
Truly visionary and arresting stuff from these true purveyors of the netherworld, due to be rediscovered in these times of poor half-reassessments of the given past. It was never a dream, it was always a dream.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Valentina GONCHAVORA
“Campanelli”
Valentina Goncharova's work encapsulates a unique blend of innovation and tradition, providing audiences with an enthralling exploration of the vast possibilities within musical expression.
Drawing upon her compositional skills honed during her academic studies, Valentina expertly manipulates the violin, seamlessly integrating it with synthesizers and drum machines. The result is a mesmerizing fusion of organic and electronic elements, characterized by slow, pulsating drone soundscapes.
Written, performed and produced by Valentin Goncharova. Recorded in 2023-2024 in Tallinn, Estonia.
29,00€
In stock
LP
Ilpo VAÏSÄNEN
“Asuma”
Editions Mego reissue the 2001 release Asuma by Finnish artist Ilpo Väisänen. Originally released on CD this is the first ever vinyl issue, remastered by Rashad Becker. 2001 is a landmark year for the artist following a wave of success from the notable outfit Väisänen formed alongside Mika Vanio, Pan Sonic (as they were now known then). Following a string of highly acclaimed and influential releases such as “Vakio”, “Kulma”, “A’ and “Aaltopiiri” Pan Sonic had toured the globe extensively leaving a trail of blown expectations and rumours of all manner of objects in venues cracking or falling apart due to the immense sound the duo concocted with their unique instruments.
Taking a break from the ecstatic cacophony of Pan Sonic, Väisänen retreated to work on a solo release which conjured the spirits of the former outfit whilst simultaneously carving out a more personal take on these new electronic forms.
Asuma is a precise study of drones, rhythms, clicks, ambience and gentle confusion. Whilst inhabiting a zone of abstraction the results also move in a natural field as Väisänen’s native Finland permeates these recordings as much as the idea of experimentation itself.
Autioitu 1 opens the album as delicate pinball rhythms bounce across the spectrum as a hairy drone hovers underneath. The mood is both intriguing and unsettling. Tukahduttaja is a delightfully disorientating sound sculpture that is hard to pinpoint what it actually is. Klikki is comparable to a microscopic version of Pink Floyd’s “Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict”. Asumaton is a foreboding miniature acting like a segway to Vallitseva which embraces the icy clicks that punctuates much of the Pan Sonic output. Arvioimaton Ongelma is an audio riddle whilst Jaettu jitters around a dancefloor crawl. Autioitu closes proceedings as a gentle ambient thumper. Asuma is awash with contradiction and mystery. This is time wrapped in twisted turns and rewards a neat payoff for those interested in the absolute fringes of electronic ‘dance’ music.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Abul MOGARD
“Quiet Pieces”
'Quiet Pieces' initiates Abul Mogard’s personal imprint Soft Echoes with a definitive self-portrait of calm, contemplative, and discreet inner landscapes made audible. It is the first solo album on vinyl in four years. RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker.
While sifting through archived material left idle from earlier projects, a chance encounter with a late uncle’s trove of beloved 78rpm classical and opera records prompted the reworking and completion of what would eventually become the album. Spinning dusty records at 33 and 45rpm, Abul Mogard recombined their enduring spectres with unfinished sketches from his archive. The resulting soundscape blurs distinctions between his memories and those of another, exquisitely short-circuiting the senses with its waking, dream-like lucidity.
This was a process I hadn’t explored in my earlier works. I began sampling brief moments from these records, altering them with studio effects and playing them at slower speeds. In many cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how the original music sounded. These fragments, once further processed, became a source of inspiration for my new compositions. Over time, I realised that the old pieces from the archive and the new material derived from the samples naturally complemented each other.”
The resulting pieces hover over a threshold, a liminal space that harmonises the old and older material. Voluminous waves of quiet and loud undulate between consonance and dissonance, conjuring imagery of a decaying grandeur that humanity’s decadence has surrendered to the elements. Abul Mogard’s seemingly abandoned yet vast landscapes are nevertheless intimate with timbral frissons of red-lined distortion. Elusive, yet as tangible as sea spray or smog, they affect the olfactory senses with a rarified, synesthetic quality that modestly engages one’s emotional register – a hypnotic, distinguishing feature long hailed as one of the hallmarks of his work. A fidelity to memory and dream recall is sensitively probed in the journey from the stately symphonic stasis of 'Following a dream' to the almost industrial, untethered brutality evoked by a looming silhouette that’s never fully visible in 'Constantly slipping away', culminating in the foreboding coda of 'Like a bird'. Those pieces appear to shield the album’s sentimental core, where the tempestuous play of light and shadow of 'In a studded procession' escalates to breathtaking, panoramic climax, while 'Through whispers' evokes an out-of-body-like experience encountered with visceral poignancy.
Looking back, Mogard notes an unexpected influence: “I realise being inspired by Phill Niblock, whose work I had barely known at the time but explored after his passing in 2024. His album 'Boston Tenor Index' changed the way I approached dissonance. It encouraged me to push my sound further, to the edge of a space where I began to feel uncomfortable.”
The album artwork, created by longtime collaborator Marja de Sanctis, features a photograph taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, an archaeological site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Captured with an iPhone, the image traces the residual presence of construction techniques and architectural forms of the Romans, where material history is transcribed through contemporary tools. The convergence of ancient and modern technology aims to reverberate the site’s lasting spiritual presence – an echo persisting in what is now perceived as a quiet, emptied space. The spiral gestures towards infinity and light. Past and present dissolve into one another, reflecting 'Quiet Pieces' meditation on sound, memory, and time.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Robert MILLIS
“Interior Music”
After a collage tape collab with Bardo Todol back in 2022 (SUC52, Magnetic Road to Hell) Robert Millis finally gets his Discrepant debut proper, a much overdue entryin our random catalogue of lost musical oddities.
The not so self explanatory title Interior Music explores Millis obsession with hidden sounds and its anomalies. An hermetic rearrangement of emptiness could be another more big headed title. But I leave the man to talk about his thing:
‘’The phrase interior music occurred to me a few years ago as a way to describe some recent work. It’s about the resonances inside of hollow wooden chambers (and hollow heads) like gramophones and talking machines, music boxes, instruments, metal containers, and resonant rooms. It’s about exploring tiny audio fragments—single notes, vinyl and shellac surface noise, recording mishaps and anomalies—and arranging them into something meaningful. It is about my own interior mishaps and anomalies and attempts to arrange THEM into something meaningful. It also references “interior design” with the placement of sounds in specific locations, layers or in juxtapositions.
Inspirations include Steve Roden’s lowercase work, Toshiya Tsunoda’s field recordings, Eliane Radique’s slowly shifting ambiances, and the musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer, as well as the dhrupad and kayal traditions of Indian classical music—especially Kesarbai Kerkar and the Dagar family who have a sublime way of stretching out individual notes and exploring their endless permutations, combinations and connotations.’’
Robert Millis is a sound artist known for his work with Climax Golden Twins, the Helen Scarsdale Agency, the soundtrack to cult horror film Session 9, the Victrola Favorites book and cassette series, and many releases on Sublime Frequencies including Indian Talking Machine, Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road, compilations of the earliest music recorded in Korea, Japan and Myanmar, and the documentaries This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope and Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan. Somehow he is a Fulbright scholar (to India 2012-13) and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020). He has or currently does play with AFCGT, Idol Ko Si, and/or Telescoping.
26,00€
In stock
LP
PEOPLE LIKE US
“Copia”
People Like Us, the project of artist Vicki Bennet returns to Discrepant with a special vinyl release of "COPIA". This album marks the first newmusical material since "The Mirror" in 2018, delving into the profound realms of existential collage and sampling, celebrating these forms as expressions of timeless connectivity.
The title "COPIA," meaning 'abundance' and 'copy,' reflects the essence of collage and sampling - art created not in isolation, but as a connective space, linking ideas across generations in a seamless tapestry.
By reconfiguring preexisting sounds and images, Bennet highlights the non-dual nature of creation ― where distinctions between past, present, and future possibilities blur, revealing a shared foundation beneath. The album marks a return to not just solo works but collaborations with notable artists.
Drawing from the new People Like Us live AV performance, "The Library of Babel," sampling and edited sound collage, electronic music, and melodies, "COPIA" weaves and recombines a timeless blend of diverse elements that transcends traditional musical boundaries. This creative process unfolded through the exchange of multitracks across both water and ether. Collaborating with the voices, instruments and editing timelines of Matmos, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, Lotte Bowater, Buttress O’Kneel, Douglas Benford, Irene Moon, Jon Leidecker, and Matt Warwick, the work evolved exquisite corpse-style.
26,00€
In stock
LP
Pierre BASTIEN & Casper Van De VELDE
“On a Tuesday and a Wednesday”
Blickwinkel presents ‘On a Tuesday and a Wednesday’, the first collaboration between Pierre Bastien and Casper Van De Velde. The album captures what the duo has been working on during a 2-day residency at Werkplaats Walter (Brussels), invited by the label. In their improvised sessions, they quickly found a way to merge Bastien's renowned mechanical sound sculptures with the playful and detailed style of percussionist Casper Van De Velde. The result is a blend of intricate rhythms and organic, music that flows effortlessly between the intimate and the expansive.
200 copies.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Panos ALEXIADIS
“Cestrum Nocturnum”
Panos Alexiadis is a sound artist based in Athens, Greece, active in the field of contemporary electro-acoustic music. He founded and co-curated the tape label Thalamos, a home for exploratory sounds, where some of his own works also found their place. Marking a return after a period of (sonic) reflection, Cestrum Nocturnum is an album of remembrance and renewal. Through a lattice of self-sampled piano, fragmented voices, field recordings, and transient digital traces, Alexiadis composes a space of warmth—an electronic tapestry woven from the ephemeral. Across six pieces, sound unfolds like memory: layered, textured, dissolving at the edges yet leaving an imprint. A meditation on the cyclical nature of being and the often unnoticed beauty that quietly persists, even in the darkest hours. Cestrum Nocturnum is both a shelter and a signal.
All music composed, recorded & mixed by Panos Alexiadis
Spoken word on 'But One' & ‘Follower' by Fotini Stamatelopoulou
'The Night Has a Thousand Eyes' poem by Francis William Bourdillon
Mastered by Christophe Albertijn
25,00€