In stock
LP
AMM
“Ammmusic”
2023 repress
Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMM, Ammmusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe’s beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label’s founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMM’s influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track ‘flaming’ on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies Ammmusic’s first side, ‘later during a flaming riviera sunset’).
Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging british jazz avant-garde – Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare – amm quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaf, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe’s prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies.
Evan Parker famously described the improvisational logic of AMM’s music as ‘laminal’, in contrast to the ‘atomistic’ approach more common among the generation of british improvisers (Bailey, Rutherford, Stevens and co.) To which he himself belonged. AMM improvised in layers: layers of sound subtly rising and falling or abruptly starting and stopping without being propelled by the implied pulse of free jazz improvisation. Rather than a pulse, AMM’s music began with the sound of the room in which it was played, the cageian anarchy of silence. By embracing the non-synchronous simultaneity of layered sound, AMM was able to create a musical container into which nearly anything could be incorporated at any moment: on ammmusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew’s purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music (and, on the lp’s second side, an extended fragment of ‘mockingbird’).
AMM’s clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Where improvised music has tended to foster the development of idiosyncratic stylists who move freely from one group to another, AMM, initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on ammmusic the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices. - Francis Plagne
22,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Oren AMBARCHI
“Grapes From The Estate”
2023 repress.
Black Truffle is pleased to make Oren Ambarchi’s Grapes from The Estate available once more on vinyl. Originally released on CD on Touch in 2004 and reissued on Southern Lord as a limited 2 LP in 2006 during Ambarchi’s tenure as a member of Sunn O))), Grapes from the Estate was a landmark release for Ambarchi, seeing him expand his sonic palette beyond the clipped, bass-heavy electric guitar tones he was known for at that point. Incorporating subtle layers of strings, keyboards, percussion over a bedrock of his signature guitar tones, in retrospect this album can be seen as the beginning of a broadening and evolution in Ambarchi’s work that would lead to his acclaimed, densely layered epics for Editions Mego, Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Beginning with the shuddering pure tones of opener ‘Corkscrew’, which looks back to previous guitar-only releases such as Suspension (2001), the album’s next two pieces show a progressive broadening of the instrumental palette and a corresponding move away from textural abstraction and sustained tones towards more traditional notions of musicality. This reached its high point on the album’s third piece, the fifteen-minute long ‘Remedios The Beauty’, where guitars, both acoustic and electric, strings, piano, and bells build from a murmur to an interlockinging web of repeating melodic patterns over gently swinging brushed snare and cymbals. The epic closer, ‘Stars Aligned, Webs Spun’, returns us to a space populated only by the electric guitar, but unlike everything Ambarchi had produced up until this point in his career, the piece has a liquid, psychedelic edge that looks forward to the shimmering harmonics of his more recent work. As Brendan Walls wrote at the time of the original release, this is ‘another outpouring of personal, intimate and enduring music from Oren Ambarchi’. Presented in a stunning gatefold sleeve featuring the original artwork and design by Jon Wozencroft. Redesigned by Stephen O’Malley. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin.
32,00€
In stock
2 LP
Pauline OLIVEROS
“The Well & The Gentle”
The Well & The Gentle, two of the major works of Pauline Oliveros, are presented here in a first time reissue on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes.
If Oliveros had followed a more conventional path she may have, all social obstacles aside, been considered among the major composers of her time. However, Oliveros approached composition in a more egalitarian manner. She wrote music for musicians to interact with or, in the composers words, she wished to create "an inclusive and interdependent and unfolding world of relationships."
Oliveros' propensity towards inclusion is part of what makes this work so remarkably distinctive. The Well & The Gentle is carefully crafted, allowing performers to participate in the creation of the work. Players are asked to collaborate, focus, react and make imaginative choices. Only then can the performers "pass through stages of awakening to the possibilities inherent in making music, working together, leading to the essence of what can shape musical impulses and individual freedom simultaneously."
Unlike most major composers of the era, Oliveros' work focuses on collaboration and improvisation. For Oliveros, the processes involved in making music are as fundamental as the music itself. Oliveros creates, as Arthur Sabatini put it so eloquently in the liner notes, "A world in which sound and the practices entailed in making music merge; become, at once, source and atmosphere, energy and essence, presence and dynamic."
Pauline Oliveros was an electronic music pioneer, accordionist, composer and educator who resided in Kingston, New York. Her instrument was tuned in Just Intonation and she often included it in her meditative improvisational music. Her music is not meditative in the sense that it is intended for listening to while meditating, rather each piece is a form of meditation, such as her aptly titled Sonic Meditations.
A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the U.S. West coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvised with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.
39,00€
In stock
LP
BOSCH & SIMONS
“Three Music Machines”
From 1985, the beginning of their collaboration in Amsterdam, Peter Bosch and Simone Simons have been involved in performances, concerts and theatre productions. Since 1990, however, they have focused in particular on the development of autonomous music machines.
All these machines are dynamic: Sound and movement are constantly evolving. »Krachtgever« is their best-known piece for its Golden Nica, received at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, 1998. The other projects on the LP are »Cantan un Huevo«, commissioned by the Ives Ensemble in 2000 and awarded in 2002 at the 29th edition of the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art, Bourges, France, and one of their first installations, »Was der Wind zum Klingen bringt«, from 1989/90, shown in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1990, as part of the exhibition »Energieën«, and in 1991 at the Multimediale 2, Z.K.M., Karlsruhe. The LP demonstrates that sound produced by the Bosch & Simons music machines can also be listened to as autonomous »music«.
20,50€
In stock
LP
Jens BRAND
“Motors / Ratchets”
Jens Brand has created a large number of installations, musical performances and interactive media works. He uses the concepts of parallel activities rather then ideas of fusion. The pieces presented on this recording focus on sonic events related to electronic music (such as intense volumes and dynamics, white noise, square or sine waves) but stay entirely acoustic.
On a live performance of »Ratchets«, the sounds are generated with the idea of a physical, sculptural, yet invisible presence. It might happen that the body of a person moving around in the audience has more impact on the sound then the variations produced by instruments themselves.
"I was always interested in the idea of making acoustic music that has the quality of electronic music," muses Dortmund based musician and visual artist Jens Brand. "Electronic music is fantastic, but I don't like speakers very much."
Take his performance entitled »Motors And Styrofoam«. Pieces of glistening white styrofoam fitted with small motors hang from the ceiling above the audience's heads, squatting balefully in mid-air like lopsided clouds. Acting as a resonator, the styrofoam amplifies the whirr of the motors, which builds up into a loud, persistent drone overlaid with overtones.
Equally uncompromising is »Ratchets«, which deploys a number of football rattles, those small wooden devices originally used by hunters. The ratchets are set in motion by motors whose speed and direction are controlled by a computer: they click busily away, producing a dense, enveloping sound reminiscent of heavy rainfall. In performance, the sound of the ratchets is spellbinding in its rawness and intensity, attaining impressive volumes as it interacts with the features of the space.
20,50€
In stock
LP
JEUGDBRAND
“Siamese Dream (Team)”
Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music.
Inside the multiverse that is Dennis Tyfus’ oeuvre there exists this body of detailed pencil drawings of various sizes. In these drawings the artist puts himself in many tragic situations. Like vomiting on his way home after a long night at the bar. Boiling right wing idiots. Telling sweet little lies on your Tinder profile. Or, you know, taking out the garbage on a Sunday evening. The horror. These seemingly hermetic pencil drawings show a deceivingly simple world. But you’re often stuck with a bitter aftertaste when you understand a bit more what is actually happening behind the colorful masque.
When it comes to his music - and in contrast to aforementioned drawings - Dennis pencils a more piecemeal picture. His recordings and performances often feel like spliced excerpts. Strange sentences and funny remarks waiver by and interconnect. Musical symbols are casually thrown on the table. Instead of a clear picture, we now have the feeling of looking at a bunch of different doodles. Like… sometimes I have the feeling compared to how focussed Dennis works on his drawings, how unfocussed and sketchy he treats his music. We are simply thrown from emotion to emotion. From laughter to tears. It’s a bumpy ride.
I’d like to imagine that Dennis constantly notates all the shards of conversation he picks up during his regular walks in the centre of Antwerp - a wormhole congested with characters, the one more tragic than the other. In a kind of R. Murray Schafer way, Dennis takes in every sentence very un-arbitrary… and that’s the soundscape. Dramatic, normal, boasted, silly, urgent…
Enter Jeroen Stevens. Antwerp’s number one percussionist. If I would have to list all the bands he performs in this text, well, we would be truly wasting data and printers. Jeroen is the grand gift of the wellschooled session musician. But thank the heavens of white improv, he is also sweet and creative. Jeugdbrand is his second entry in the Edições CN catalogue, after taking care of some of the percussive fragments on the “KAGIROI" LP with Sugai Ken (2021). Recently Jeroen has been performing very lengthy - thus correct - performances of Satie’s Vexations for midi instrumentation; Christmas music; and his famed De Stoeltjes project, where he covers Stooges songs on a camping chair. Apparently much to the confusion of Iggy himself. This might all feel like a big joke to you, but when you dare to listen, you will have to admit that Steven’s adventurous music is very rewarding. Special stuff.
The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this album does it a bit short. Most important, this is music how it could be: incomprehensible, hilarious, serious, ludicrous, well crafted, sloppy, non-genre. With a strong sense of personality. You know, a fragmented beam for your own overstimulated temple. To shake things up a little … “They told us, they told her. I told everybody.”The albums comes with a drawing by German artist Albert Oehlen and with a text by Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records, Boston.
22,00€
In stock
LP
Gavin BRYARS
“The Sinking of the Titanic”
Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
"The Sinking of the Titanic", Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage. Bryars eloquently reconstructs the passengers' experience – at once forlorn and eerily calming – through assemblages of understated strings and indeterminate elements. A core principle of the piece is that the ship's band continued to play as the vessel went down. One of the most sublime works in the modern classical canon, Titanic remains Bryars' magnum opus.
"Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", the album's second sidelong track, is based on a tape loop of a London street singer captured in the early 1970s. Featuring Derek Bailey, Michael Nyman and John White, Bryars' composition gradually builds around the cripplingly poignant voice until its emotional force is almost too much to bare. It's no surprise that Jesus' Blood is known as Tom Waits' all-time favorite piece of music.
Produced by Brian Eno in 1975 as the inaugural release on Obscure, "The Sinking of the Titanic" draws the listener in to a majestic world. While these exquisite, hymn-like recordings have not changed in nearly 50 years, their deeply personal nature and the audience's attention to their subtlety have only strengthened over time.
32,00€
In stock
CD
Gavin BRYARS
“The Sinking of the Titanic”
Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
"The Sinking of the Titanic", Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage. Bryars eloquently reconstructs the passengers' experience – at once forlorn and eerily calming – through assemblages of understated strings and indeterminate elements. A core principle of the piece is that the ship's band continued to play as the vessel went down. One of the most sublime works in the modern classical canon, Titanic remains Bryars' magnum opus.
"Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", the album's second sidelong track, is based on a tape loop of a London street singer captured in the early 1970s. Featuring Derek Bailey, Michael Nyman and John White, Bryars' composition gradually builds around the cripplingly poignant voice until its emotional force is almost too much to bare. It's no surprise that Jesus' Blood is known as Tom Waits' all-time favorite piece of music.
Produced by Brian Eno in 1975 as the inaugural release on Obscure, "The Sinking of the Titanic" draws the listener in to a majestic world. While these exquisite, hymn-like recordings have not changed in nearly 50 years, their deeply personal nature and the audience's attention to their subtlety have only strengthened over time.
20,50€
In stock
2 CD
Michèle BOKANOWSKI
“Musique de courts métrages, Music of Patrick Bokanowski’s short films”
*2023 repress*
This double CD edition collects, for the first time, all the original music composed by Michele Bokanowski for the short films of her husband, Patrick Bokanowski.
Covering a time spectrum of almost 50 years, from "La Femme Qui Se Poudre" dated 1972 to "Vers Syracuse" of 2019.
Michele Bokanowski's sounds are visionary, sometimes disturbing and grotesque, sometimes ecstatic.
Some compositions are suites of grim musique concrete, an obscure ambient perhaps like never heard before, others are liquid abstractions of "expanded" music where it is easy to lose the ordinary awareness of one's senses, and find oneself experimenting with new ways of approaching listening as in the best tradition of experimental music .
The work of Michele Bokanowski and Patrick Bokanowski is essential for all avant-garde and visionary art lovers.
La Femme Qui Se Poudre (1972) 15:28
Déjeuner Du Matin (1974) 12:03
La Plage (1991) 12:12
Au Bord Du Lac (1993) 05:11
Flammes (1998) 03:35
Le Canard à L’orange (2002) 07:37
Battements Solaires (2008) 17:43
L’envol (2016) 07:26
L’indomptable (2017) 03:48
Vers Syracuse (2019) 05:40
18,00€
In stock
CD
Eliane RADIGUE
“Hepta I – Occam XX”
In Eliane Radigue's work, one distinguishes or contrasts the electronic works (composed until the early 2000s) with those written for acoustic instruments. From 2002 onwards, the artist began a series of compositions, the Occams, in which, in her own words, she fully realised what she had always sought to achieve in her electronic works.
The disc devoted to her here brings together two pieces written at the same time; one for an instrumental ensemble (Dedalus) and the other for analogue synthesizer (Ryoko Akama). If the means seem to be opposed, this concordance of time lets us glimpse the deep unity that brings them together.
12,00€
Out of stock
3 CD box
Angus MACLISE
“Tapes”
Angus MacLise, the first drummer for the Velvet Underground, was a poet, composer, and a member of The Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young.
The "Tapes" 3CD Box is the first-ever reissue of a 3-cassette compilation that Pleasure Editions originally released in 2015, limited to only 100 copies. The 3CD box set comes with a miniature poster and track lists, and each CD has a paper sleeve that reproduces the original cassette card artwork. This comprehensive 3CD box set is over three hours in length and includes session recordings with Tony Conrad and William Breeze (of Coil, Current 93, and Psychic TV), mystical recordings from the filming of Ira Cohen's "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" (1968), shortwave experiments, and sounds of Tibetan Buddhist monks recorded by MacLise.
The "Tapes" compilation features excerpts from the archives of the Angus MacLise Papers, which are held at Columbia University Library. The archives contain over 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings of live improvised music, theatrical performances, and sound experiments created by MacLise and his associates during the 1960s and 1970s. MacLise produced the original recordings in his own unique style, characterized by rough and peculiar editing.
The release is curated and sequenced by Will Cameron and Mark Iosifescu.
Jim O'Rourke completed a new sound restoration and mastering of the recordings in 2023.
The 3CD box comes with a miniature poster, a sheet of track list, and each CD comes with a paper sleeve which reproduces the original cassette sleeve artwork.
40,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Shifted in Dreams”
Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with his new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Over the years, Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press on different projects, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), a theorist (The Music To Come) or as Director of parisian institution INA GRM (SPECTRES, Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM). The common axis of all these actions is the exploration of the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances.
Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research but takes a somewhat deviated path. If we use the metaphor of music as a paradoxical mountain — an unreachable "Mont Analogue", then this record tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler and marked out by the distinct presence of familiar harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear: its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. We grope our way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. We leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce.
Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro-editing and asynchronous looping. Mixing the electronic waves of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with resonances of a Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sounds produced by complex modular synthesis patches, among other things, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation.
21,00€
In stock
LP
Colin Andrew SHEFFIELD
“Don’t Ever Let Me Know”
About "Don't Ever Let Me Know"
Don't Ever Let Me Know is Sheffield's first solo release since 2018's Repair Me Now (Glistening Examples) and is a work in a similar mode to that album in that it comprises two lengthy pieces of multiple movements and moods. For this new work, and as a kind of ode to his late father, Sheffield has employed samples entirely taken from (or inspired by) the city in which both men were born. In this way, the sounds have been utilized as a kind of shorthand for the specific subjects at hand. The two audio assembla ges, meanwhile, mirror the ways in which loss and memory are processed - with both melancholy and wonder in equal measure: at once beautiful and confounding.
The audio has been mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin. The LP has been released in an edition of 200 copies and comes in a lovely jacket featuring photography by the late Allen W. Sheffield and extensive spot gloss printing.
About Colin Andrew Sheffield
Colin Andrew Sheffield (b. 1976, El Paso TX) is a composer whose work is focused on the recontextualization of samples derived from various commercially available recordings - generally those taken from his own expansive collection of records, tapes, and compact discs. Conceptually his output is akin to plunderphonics-style sound collage, though aesthetically it is seemingly closer to soundscapes of ambient drone. Since his earliest recordings from the 1990s, his work has developed into a kind of hybrid of the aforementioned approaches.
19,00€
Out of stock
CD
Ralf WEHOWSKY – Richard FRANCIS
“R”
On a trip from Auckland over Worpswede to Eggenstein Richard Francis visited Ralf Wehowsky on the weekend of September 28th and 29th, 2013. For the recording sessions taking place during these two days Richard used his analogue synth and electronics, while Ralf had a desktop and a laptop for producing digital electronic sounds at hand. For bridging the anatgonistic sound worlds the input of one sound system was fed with the output of the other and vice versa. For this release two of the tracks (Piece 1, Untitled 1) are presented as they were recorded, with only slight pan and volume adjustments. The third track (Piece 3) is composed of fragments of a longer improvisation, time-shifting the contributions of the two artists against each other to constitute a system of non-simultaneity.
RLW/Ralf Wehowsky
Ralf Wehowsky is a german experimental composer, active since the 80s (with the group p16.d4 then). his work is split between solo releases (under the moniker rlw) and collaborations, exploring all fields between media exchange and realtime presence recordings. collaboration partners include among others Lionel Marchetti, Merzbow, Jim O´Rourke, Bruce Russell, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, Anla Courtis, Contrastate, Kohei Matsunaga, Annette Krebs - and Richard Francis.
Richard Francis
Richard Francis is a sound artist from New Zealand working with electronics and found recordings. He's released solo and collaborative albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Glistening Examples, Korm Plastics and Aufabwegen. Recent collaborators include Ralf Wehowsky, Frans De Waard, Anla Courtis, Bruce Russell, Mattin, Jason Kahn and Francisco Lopez.
14,00€
In stock
LP
STRAFE F.R.
“Octagon Sphere”
The new album Octagon Sphere by Duesseldorf duo Strafe F.R. comprises of four pieces recorded in 2020 and 2021 at the group's own studio. The work features heavily treated female vocals and includes rhythmic patterns and electronic sounds contributed by Detlef Klepsch (of the group keit). The overall atmosphere is tense and moody, both dark and uplifting at the same time. Octagon Sphere was mastered by Kai Blankenberg at Skyline Tonfabrik.
Octagon Sphere is the sister release to last year's CD Soundless Sphere – both albums are tied together by rhythmic alchemy and sound manipulation in highest detail.
19,00€
In stock
CD
Thanos CHRYSAKIS
“Manifold Vista”
Manifold Vista is the new album by composer/producer Thanos Chrysakis. Rarely can something so meticulously assembled together sound so fluid. A distinct, disciplined sense for composition emerges from each of these works, displaying formal integrity while at the same time, they are also effervescent, forceful, fiercely idiosyncratic and beautifully shaped and transformed. The album discloses an expanded and detailed vista of sound’s interiority forming a strangely pleasurable, not to mention engaging, experience.
12,00€
In stock
LP
KALLABRIS
“Red Circle”
On “Red Circle”:
Though severely cut, Red Circle doesn't exactly sweep along. It has a deliberate pace as Kallabris sets up the score of thirteen chance acquaintances who plan and carry out the sacking of our acoustic consciousness... Understatement is the method of these compositions for a small modular synthesizer. If there ever was something like heist music, this here surely is. (Vincent Canby, with a few minor changes and adaptions).
Biography:
Kallabris is a musical project that was begun in the mid 1980ies out of the scene around Coitra's Clan. Since ist inception Kallabris has persistently neglected any usage of advanced recording technology. Ever since not technical or compositonal innovation is at the core of the group’s work but, the active engagement with the limitations and the objects of every day life. This sound positivism can result in stylistically varied outputs ranging from chanson or country blues to musique concrète – while all musics live by their surfaces. Save the surface and you save all.
19,00€
In stock
CD
Terry FOX
“Labyrinth of the inner ear”
About Terry Fox: Labyrinth of the inner ear
For the exhibition “Sonambiente", I will produce a new audio work for compact disc. The title of this work will be “Labyrinth of the inner ear" and it will be recorded in Berlin on the 14th and 15th of April, 2006. The compact disc will be produced directly after the recording process and presented, during Sonambiente, in a room of the former Polish Embassy.
This will be a kind of “drone" work consisting of the repetitive tapping of a sightless person (the artist, Siegfried Saerberg) navigating his way through an urban environment and finally returning to the place where the walk began. The sound of the cane, either tapping or sweeping back and forth, would be a constant in this composition. It would cease only when Siegfried stops walking for some reason, for
example: an interesting acoustical space, a ride in a public transport, etc.
Location interpretations could be ascertained by the sounds surrounding the steady central position of the cane; an alley, a busy shopping district, the relative quietness of a back street a park, and so forth. This walk would, itself, finally return to its place of origin.
Terry Fox, Köln 2006
About Terry Fox
Terry Fox (b. 1943 Seattle – d. 2008 Cologne) was one of the leading pioneers of American Body Art and Conceptual art. He became famous in the Seventies with performances in which he used his own body as a medium for exploring often extreme physical and psychological experiences. In numerous installations, actions and street events he directed a heightened attention to everyday phenomena and aspects of social interactions. Fox researched both unknown and little regarded aspects of energy in substances, and the transformative qualities of materials. And from the 1980s on, language, as both substance and meaning, would play an increasingly important role in his space related works and objects.
With his lifelong, innovative exploration of sound and space, Terry Fox is also one of the seminal figures in contemporary Sound Art. He became known worldwide in the 1970s for performances with meters-long piano wires stretched in rooms, often fastened from one wall to an opposite wall. With his understanding of sound as a sculptural material, he has created an impressive body of work located between Visual art and Acoustic Sound art. In his later years quiet sounds at the limit of audibility and silence became more and more prominent.
The ephemeral, the invisible, time, space, the body, words, letters, sound -throughout his entire work Terry Fox used the elemental forms of human existence to explore the possibilities of sculpture and extend its limits..
Fold out embossed DVD sleeve with liner notes and photographs documenting the piece
15,00€
In stock
CD
Dirk SERRIES + Asmus TIETCHENS
“Die Höfner Akten”
“Die Höfner Akten”
Dirk Serries and I have long been colleagues and friends. Since the 1990ies we have exchanged sound materials to be reworked and published on an on and off basis. "Die Höfner Akten" are something new and special to in so far as the source material with its basic structure has been improvised exclusively on an acoustic guitar (of the 'Höfner' brand). Dirk and I had agreed upon the following: I would rework the provided sound material in such a way that the character of his improvisations would remain intact while at the same same time expanding the sound palette through further manipulations. In doing so we hoped the results would sound equally like Serries or Tietchens, or - even better - like none of us. We on our part are happy with the results. It is upon the listener of the "Die Höfner Akten" to decide whether we succeeded in our endeavours.
Asmus Tietchens
14,00€
Out of stock
CD
REYNOLS
“Fire Music Reloaded”
Fire Music was composed by Reynols in 2002 with fire recordings made at Tigre (Río Capitán) and different locations in Buenos Aires city and around. With some of this material, a CD EP appeared in Japan in 2002 through the Digital Narcis label, however the complete version of this piece remained unreleased for decades. In a recent research the masters of the whole work were found and rescued from the group's archives. So twenty years later, finally the full version of this piece is now ready to see the light on a brand new CD album carefully released by German label Aufabwegen. Fire Music Reloaded stands on the most conceptual side of Reynols' catalogue, along with works such as: 10.000 Chickens Symphony, Whistling Kettle Quartet, Computer Music, Gordura Vegetal Hidrogenada or Blank Tapes. In its four parts journey, the group explores a wide range of frequencies coming from fire as the only sound source. A release which pays tribute to the igneous aurality. Let your ears get on fire!
14,00€
Out of stock
4 CD box
Michèle BOKANOWSKI
“Musiques de concert”
This 4 CD box edition collects all concert musics by Michèle Bokanowski, a composer of electroacoustic music living in Paris, France.
Passionate about music from childhood, it wasn’t until later, at the age of 22, after reading À la recherche d’une musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer, that she decided to study composition. After classical training in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a pupil of René Leibowitz, who taught her writing and analysis upon Schönberg Theory. In 1970, she began a two-year internship at the Research Department of the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Between 1973 and 1975, she took part in a research group on sound synthesis, studied computer music at the University of Vincennes as well as electronic music with Éliane Radigue. She mainly composes for concert and for cinema (music for Patrick Bokanowski’s short films and for his feature films L’Ange and Un Rêve solaire). She has also composed for television, theatre and dance.
In her music, often infused with a mysterious atmosphere, she uses evocative and poetic concrete sounds, with a mastery of looping and feedback techniques and with an art of cinematic editing.
“Why musique concrète is so attractive to me, as opposed to written music… To write music implies that an idea or a thought is at the origins of the composition and that the final thing is the sound rendering of this thought. The sound is at the end of the line, in other words. Musique concrète is the exact reverse of this process: you start from sounds… sounds that will perhaps lead you to a constructive thought. Here, it’s the material that induces the thought, or the writing. The possibilities of finding or inventing new sounds and, therefore, new forms are tremendous, infinite… Moreover you can use chance to a much greater extent.”
(Excerpt of an interview with Michael Karman for Asymmetry Music Magazine 2007)
CD1 :
Pour un pianiste (1974)
Trois chambres d’inquiétude (1976)
Tabou (1984)
CD2 :
Phone variations (1988)
Cirque (1994)
CD3 :
L’étoile absinthe (2000)
Chant d’ombre (2004)
Enfance (2011)
CD4 :
Rhapsodia (2018)
Cadence (2019)*
Elsewhere (2020)*
* unreleased
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
35,00€
In stock
LP
La Monte YOUNG – Marian ZAZEELA
“31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM”
La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.
Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.
Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.
Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.
“La Monte Young is the daddy of us all.” — Brian Eno
32,00€
Out of stock
CD
La Monte YOUNG – Marian ZAZEELA
“31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM”
La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.
Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.
Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.
Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.
“La Monte Young is the daddy of us all.” — Brian Eno
21,00€
In stock
LP
David CUNNINGHAM
“Grey Scale”
David Cunningham was born in Ireland in 1954. His work ranges from pop music to gallery installations including several collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single "Money," an international hit in 1979.
Originally released in 1976, Cunningham's first solo album Grey Scale has become a landmark statement of DIY minimalist composition – continuing in the vein of the wild explosion of arthouse experimentation from the early '70s. Cunningham, then a student at the Maidstone College of Art in Kent, drafted fellow student non-musicians and (using whatever instruments available) crafted an endlessly shifting sonic palette with an improvisor's keen sensitivity to space, texture and tone.
As Cunningham states in the liner notes, his approach was to "pursue something (which may appear trivial or meaningless) so rigorously or relentlessly to the point that it reveals something new."
Cunningham was influenced by live performances he was attending at the time by English composers Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman as well as free improvisors Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, David Toop and Paul Burwell.
The inaugural release on Cunningham's own Piano label, Grey Scale was indeed "something new" in 1976. The artist quickly integrated his experimental sensibilities to produce art-rock pioneers This Heat, whose debut appeared on Piano in 1979. His popular success performing as The Flying Lizards (with two electro-punk albums on Virgin during the New Wave era) was presaged by this seminal work of fascinating sound collage and tonal freedom. First-time reissue.
26,00€
In stock
CD
David CUNNINGHAM
“Grey Scale”
David Cunningham was born in Ireland in 1954. His work ranges from pop music to gallery installations including several collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single "Money," an international hit in 1979.
Originally released in 1976, Cunningham's first solo album Grey Scale has become a landmark statement of DIY minimalist composition – continuing in the vein of the wild explosion of arthouse experimentation from the early '70s. Cunningham, then a student at the Maidstone College of Art in Kent, drafted fellow student non-musicians and (using whatever instruments available) crafted an endlessly shifting sonic palette with an improvisor's keen sensitivity to space, texture and tone.
As Cunningham states in the liner notes, his approach was to "pursue something (which may appear trivial or meaningless) so rigorously or relentlessly to the point that it reveals something new."
Cunningham was influenced by live performances he was attending at the time by English composers Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman as well as free improvisors Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, David Toop and Paul Burwell.
The inaugural release on Cunningham's own Piano label, Grey Scale was indeed "something new" in 1976. The artist quickly integrated his experimental sensibilities to produce art-rock pioneers This Heat, whose debut appeared on Piano in 1979. His popular success performing as The Flying Lizards (with two electro-punk albums on Virgin during the New Wave era) was presaged by this seminal work of fascinating sound collage and tonal freedom. First-time reissue.
19,00€
In stock
LP
Nikolaus UTERMÖHLEN
“Karlsbad”
Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais.
Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.
25,50€
Out of stock
LP
ELODIE
“Clarté Déserte”
New 10 track studio album by Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, recorded 2020-2021 at Impression Lointaine and Kulta Saha.
24,50€
In stock
LP
Timo van LUIJK & Kris VANDERSTRAETEN
“Autour du Lac d’Asselt”
"Playing with Kris always reminds me of doing expeditions in a lake. Some kind of under water sound fiction observing sonic creatures. This album is a live recording (28-01-2012, Kunstencentrum Belgie, Hasselt, Belgium) which to me always felt like one of the best concerts we did. As with our previous album Arrêt au Lac Chimère Vincent de Roguin put his heart in editing and mixing the recordings, extending the dimensions of exploration to the deep bottom of the lake." Timo van LUIJK
300 copies
23,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kali MALONE
“Living Torch”
2023 repress.
Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire.
Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre.
Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist.
Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities.
GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch.
The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.
Composed & Produced by Kali Malone at INA GRM 2020-2021
Trombone & Bass Clarinet recorded at EMS Elektronmusikstudion 2020
Pre-mastered by Emmanuel Richier at INA GRM
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin.
Photograph by Estelle Hanania
Painting by Ross Caliendo
Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley
Trombone: Mats Äleklint
Bass Clarinet: Isak Hedtjärn
ARP 2500, Modular Synthesis, Pura Data & Boîte à Bourdons: Kali Malone
21,50€
In stock
2 LP
PITA / FRIEDL
“Pita / Friedl”
Electronic music legend and head of Editions Mego, Peter Rehberg, teams up with zeitkratzer mastermind Reinhold Friedl. 3 side-long pieces melting electronic / contemporary avantgarde. Uncompromising.
When Peter "Pita" Rehberg and Reinhold Friedl first met each other, they did not like each other "at all," as Friedl emphasises with a hearty laugh. The two would however eventually bond over the years thanks to a mutual respect for each other's music. In the summer of 2021, they entered the studio together for the first time. Their joint album for Berlin's Karlrecords is a faithful document—no editing, no overdubs—of their improvisations during two recording sessions shortly before Rehberg's sudden and untimely passing on July 22nd of that year. The three pieces see Rehberg working with electronics and Friedl with his inside piano, proving that they had indeed managed to find a common ground—up to a point where it at times becomes hard to tell who plays what on this record.
27,00€
In stock
LP
ZEITKRATZER
“James Tenney”
By zkr director Reinhold Friedl’s personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: Zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney.
James Tenney (1934 - 2006) was a composer, music theorist and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositonal work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charlemagne Palestine, Carl Stone Or Catherine Lamb, and a close friend with Eliane Radigue.
This album by Zeitkratzer presents three compostions by Tenney whose music has been part of zeitkratzer’s repertoire since their beginning:
- « Critical Band » – Tenney’s late classic – with maximum clarity and precision of bearing tone rhythms and microtonal tuning as light effect.
- the first recording of « Harmonium #2 ».
Both works demonstrate the remarkable power and resplendent sharpness which Tenney achieved with his microtonal settings.
Zeitkratzer’s approach to Tenney’s music as a sensual sound adventure, finally available on vinyl.
20,50€
In stock
2 CD
Eliane RADIGUE
“11 Dec 1980”
11 Dec 80 is a two CD set containing Eliane Radigue's live performance of Chry-Ptus (1971), her first work for modular synthesizer, and the world premier of parts one and three of Triptych (1978). Triptych part 2 is also performed. Upon hearing these performances for the first time in many years Radigue declared them to be the best versions she'd ever heard.
Radigue's sublime renderings of these major pieces are full of illusory stasis, slow change and dense, slow motion drone that has characterized her pioneering electronic work. These pieces move like a river with currents shifting beneath the surface. While you can't quite distinguish the individual components you get a clear feeling of motion and change.
23,00€