In stock
2 LP
Robert TURMAN
“Flux”
"Flux" is the 1981 debut solo outing of Robert Turman, an American multi-instrumentalist and avant-garde composer. Until recently, Turman was perhaps best known for his contributions to the ballistic NON project with Boyd Rice, as well as other obscured U.S. industrial acts such as Z.O. Voider.
In the summer of 1981 Turman decided he would take a drastic turn from the noisy/electronic/industrial work of his compatriots, and began work on what is now the classic "Flux" cassette. "Flux" was originally self-released in extremely limited numbers. Weary of the noisescapes of old, he set out to create long-form minimalism utilizing kalimba, piano, "Mini-Pops Jr." drum machine, and tape loops to create a complex bed of interweaving micro-stasis'. The results of these new experiments were as beautiful as they were perplexing.
A curious dusty fidelity carries these classic tracks across four sides of vinyl, including all of the original "Flux" content. These compositions glow with a sprawling, slow motion haze that's light years ahead of its time. "Flux" reveals wide spectrums of sound from melancholic kalimba and percussion patterns to slowed down, syrupy Exotica. Turman had complex ideas in his mind yet only the simple technologies of the day were at hand. Hear the click of the stopping and starting Tascam 3340 open-reel tape machine as one hand presses the "record" and "play" buttons and the other plays piano phrases. While there are similarities in style to Classical Minimalism, Turman's sound and vision is his own and is exclusive to his limited discography.
Released in a limited edition 2xLP set, Lovingly remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering from the original c-60 cassette master.
Original cassette artwork and scans provided by Aaron Dilloway.
2022 repress, black vinyl..
23,50€
Out of stock
CD
Kali MALONE
“Living Torch”
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
15,50€
In stock
LP
Thierry MONNIER
“Loose Connection”
Limited edition of 100 copies. Includes 2 postcards.
Work from this French guitarist has been reviewed before, primarily his work with Sun Stabbed and the, quite frankly brilliant named La Morte Young, but also a solo release (Vital Weekly 1095). The previous one was primarily electronic, but he solely uses an electric guitar for this new one. "This LP present tracks recorded at home for the neighbourhood pleasure during lockdown", and unfortunately, no reactions from the said neighbourhood were captured. However, I would not have minded hearing some responses, as Monnier's music isn't altogether easy listening. At times quite noise-based with lots of feedback thrown around, but it is not just about feedback. I believe all this is improvisation, yet none of this is quite regular. Monnier lets his guitar burn and rip, explode, but also the music finds its way through the tall grass, approaching you like a deadly snake. Sometimes the guitar is an object, such as in the opening piece, 'Baryon'. Sometimes there are bunches of stabs and loosely notes or heavy wails of distortion. This makes the album (eight songs in total, one extra as a bonus digitally) quite varied, which I think is a great thing. If these pieces had been too similar, the music would lose some of its raw power, whatever Monnier chose to play. Now, with all the variations, the music held my interest throughout. Monnier delivers a record here that is very unusual; not improvisation, noise, or electro-acoustic music, it is a bit of everything, and that is the beauty of it. - Vital Weekly 1342
21,00€
In stock
LP
Toshi ICHIYANAGI – Michael RANTA – Takehisa KOSUGI
“Improvisation Sep. 1975”
Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi originally got together in the summer of 1975 for an open-air concert in Sapporo. The concert felt like a great success but was unfortunately not recorded. As the desire arose to record together, they managed to arrange a studio session in the NHK Studio in Tokyo, with presence of sound engineers.
What was supposed to be a soundcheck for this session became the session itself: a haunting 50-minute séance of intense avantgarde improvisation using a large instrumentation and live processing (tape echo, ring modulation, phasing). A trident travelogue of the momentum masterfully controlled by the ensemble spirit, transcending the boundaries of psychedelic underground.
Official reissue of this underground classic from 1975, originally released in a tiny edition on the small Japanese Iskra label.
As the original master tapes of these recordings seem to be lost, the master had to be taken from an unplayed original LP copy. It was carefully restored and mastered by Jos Smolders with amazing result.
23,00€
In stock
LP
Johannes FRITSCH
“Kyo Mu / Hochtöner”
First LP release of Johannes Fritsch, long-time member of the Stockhausen Ensemble.
Kyo Mu (1982) – 30:20
For Shakuhachi and Tape
Johannes Fritsch: electronic and concrete sounds
Hitomi Endo: Shakuhachi
Weltmusik-Kongress, Vlotho 11.10.1982 – première recording
Hochtöner (1974) – 18:19
For Flute, Viola, Percussion, Synthesizer and Tape
Johannes Fritsch: Viola
Rolf Gehlhaar: Percussion
David Johnson: Flute, Synthesizer
Composed 1974, recorded 1975 at Feedback Studio Cologne
Johannes Fritsch (1941–2010) was an award-winning composer, musician, publisher, studio owner, author and music teacher.
Following his studies at Cologne University and the Cologne Musikhochschule (musicology, sociology, philosophy; viola, composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann), Fritsch received his viola performance degree. From 1965–70 he taught music theory at the Cologne Conservatory. From 1964 to 1970 he was a member of the Stockhausen Ensemble, participating in numerous musical premieres, concert tours (e.g. the world exposition in Osaka in 1970), radio broadcasts and recordings. From 1971 to 1984 he was head of the composition course and the seminar for New Music at the Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt. From 1984 to 2006 he was Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln.
After returning from Osaka in 1970, Fritsch and two fellow former members of the Stockhausen Ensemble, Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson, established the Feedback Studio Köln. This was followed in 1971 by the founding of the Feedback Studio Verlag – the first publishing house owned by composers in Germany, which Fritsch mainly managed on his own from 1975 to 2010.
Fritsch’s complex musical estate consists of approximately 130 works: it covers electronic music, chamber music, ballet, theatre and film music, organ compositions, an opera and pieces for large orchestras. Although Fritsch’s compositions are varied, all of them convey a strong interest in new sound combinations and sound colours.
KYO MU (Japanese for ‘emptiness and nothingness’) is a composition for the Japanese bamboo flute shakuhachi und audiotape, premiered in 1982 by Hitomi Endō at the Second Weltmusik-Kongress in Vlotho, Germany. The recording on this LP is from the premiere and was made by the Feedback Studio. The version for shakuhachi was performed on numerous occasions in Europe as well as Japan. According to Johannes Fritsch, however, the piece can also be performed by tenor recorders or alto recorders.
The scores of Kyo Mu are accompanied by a passage from the spiritual treatise Hitori Mondo (‘A Solitary Dialogue’) from 1823, in which the mendicant monk and shakuhachi player Hisamatsu Fūyō discusses shakuhachi blowing as a religious discipline to help liberate oneself from the rational mind: 39 pieces are 36 pieces, 36 pieces are 18 pieces, 18 pieces are three pieces, three pieces are one piece, one pieces is no piece, no piece is the breath of the mind [kisoku], the breath of the mind is nothing besides emptiness and nothingness.
HOCHTÖNER, written in 1974 and premiered in the same year at the PRO MUSICA NOVA festival in Bremen, Germany, is a harmonic composition referencing Pythagorean tradition. It was written for and performed by the three Feedback Studio founders: Johannes Fritsch, viola; David Johnson, flute and synthesizer; Rolf Gehlhaar, percussion. The trio and the live electronics make this piece typical of the 1970s work of the Feedback Studio. HOCHTÖNER was performed several times in the 1970s during concert tours; the recording on this LP was made in 1974 at a Feedback Studio Hinterhausmusik concert.
Fritsch described the piece in a text for a CD published by cybele records in 2006:
“Various levels of the composition interpenetrate each other. On the one hand, there is the harmonics theory of the tone systems: there are sounds that are overtonal in nature (natural harmonics, whistle-tones on the flute) and ‘undertones’: a frequency divider built by David Johnson is used to make audible the undertones of a high-pitched fundamental tone, together with naturally tempered spectra. As well as major (arithmetic division of the intervals according to the formula a+b:2), minor (2ab:a+b) and different temperaments (vab), the ring modulation between flute and viola plays an important role. The ring modulator provides the sums and the differences of the frequencies from the two inputs (and the products of the amplitudes) at the start. The summation tones are an octave higher than the arithmetical division of the intervals; the differential tones give the spectra clearly recognisable roots depending on their degree of consonance. Besides this constructive principle underlying the harmonic form, the piece contains self-quotes, quotes, and associations from music history and non-European music. All instrumental sounds are amplified by microphone and blend with the sounds produced by the tape and synthesizer, making it often impossible to tell which sounds have been produced ‘live’ and which are taped. The figures and formations appear as in a dream, fragments in a broad, ever-changing expanse of sound, limited only by the high frequencies.”
Special thanks to Ingrid and Lena Fritsch
26,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“The Continuous Accident / Circumventing Angels”
DISC I - THE CONTINUOUS ACCIDENT
DISC II - CIRCUMVENTING ANGELS (Previously unreleased art project radio broadcast)
19,00€
Out of stock
CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“Deadlined”
Reflections on reading ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’ by Otto Dor Kulka.
15,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“Salt Marie Celeste – Salt”
A welcome re-release, as an expanded version, of one of Nurse With Wound’s most notable albums. Originally recorded in 2002 by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, the piece ‘Salt’ was a limited edition release to accompany an exhibition of Stapleton’s artwork at The Horse Hospital in London. The following year ‘Salt Marie Celeste’ was released as a single 61 minute long piece of droning atmospheric sound that manages to be both minimal and maximal at the same time. A parade of strange, often unlikely, sounds appear and disappear during the voyage from Z to A. Described by many as being one of the most unsettling and/or engaging NWW recordings, it went on to feature in many ‘albums of the year’ lists in 2003.
This new edition comes in a six-panel digipack with stunning all-new artwork by Babs Santini. Remastered by Colin Potter, IC Studio, London 2022.
15,00€
In stock
2 CD
NURSE WITH WOUND
“Spaced Muzak”
Space Musik was officially commissioned by the Melbourne Planetarium 'Science In The Dark' series 2009.
Per the NWW website, this is a remastered version of the original plus three previously unreleased tracks.
17,00€
In stock
Book + 2CD
KRISTOFF K.ROLL – Jean-Michel ESPITALLIER
“World is a blues”
"Immersed in the Calais Jungle to record the refugees' memories of their dreams in all their languages, such as Farsi, Sudanese Arabic, Foor, Pashto, Eritrean, Tigrinya, we sensed these dream stories drifting to life stories, reality's violence penetrating the dream. Thereafter, we surveyed other territories, attentive to the refugees' testimonies, and were struck by the epic and tragedy they summoned. We then invited authors Jean-Michel Espitallier and Anne Kawala to translate them into their poetic language."
20,00€
In stock
LP
RG ROUGH
“70”
A musical jigsaw made out of sounds from the 70s, ripped to shreds, reshaped, reassembled and coerced into fitting.
This long piece in 10 parts (70 to 79) takes you on a journey through a decade which may have existed in a parallel universe...
For fans of electronic German music of the 70's and beyond...
18,00€
In stock
2 CD
BASS COMMUNION / Jonathan COLECLOUGH / Colin POTTER
s/t
Another re-release, on the Aquarellist label, of this double collaborative CD, which has long been out of print, becoming a collectors item. The new issue is housed in a high-quality gatefold sleeve.
Here's what Lucas Schleicher said about it on Brainwashed. "Jonathan Coleclough, Steven Wilson, and Colin Potter are all gurus of the meditative and sublime, crafting from seemingly thin air the most delicate and shattering of sounds. Every track has a heaviness or a weight that can feel paranoid or transcendental. ‘Pethidine’ is a twenty-eight minute pause, frozen perfectly in space and time. It develops and unfolds slowly, revealing each of its particularities only to show that they are indeed one entity turning inside out. Being surrounded physically by this sound has literally kept me warm at night. ‘Epidural’ manages to erase all memory, all sensation, and leave only the truth of intuition in its wake. Its immediacy, weight, and thrust is unequalled in much of the music I know."
17,00€
In stock
CD
Darren TATE & Paul BRADLEY
“DroneReworks 4”
Back in 2004 Paul Bradley started a sub-label to his Twenty Hertz imprint called Drone Works. The principle was that he would ask ‘fellow travellers’ to make a piece of around 20 minutes, each of which would be released as a simple CDR. Fourth in the series was the surprisingly titled ‘Drone Works 4’ by Darren Tate,a piece that I was particularly fond of. Fast forward 17 years and Darren decided to do a limited art edition re-release, a copy of which he sent to me. I was surprised to find that it was a double CDR, comprising 2 tracks per disc, all variations of the same theme. When I asked him about this he said that originally he had sent a track of organ improvisations to Paul, who had then made 4 versions using the source recording. Darren chose his favourite, which became the release and the other variations remained unheard until 2021. I listened to both discs many times and enjoyed them very much. I came to the conclusion that they deserved a wider release. With a little editing, I managed to fit all 4 tracks on to a single CD. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.
Colin Potter, London 2022
Darrent Tate : Electric organ, artwork
Paul Bradley : Remixing and re-imagining
Edited & mastered : Colin Potter, IC Studio, London
Design & layout : Jonathan Coleclough
11,50€
In stock
CD
ETANT DONNES
“Ceux qu’on aime – Ce que je hais”
Etant Donnes is a French duo named after Marcel Duchamp's last major work. The group consists of brothers Marc and Eric Hurtado, born in Morocco and working mainly as performance artists and musicians. Their sound can be described as a mix of field recordings, found sounds and sometimes whispered, sometimes violent vocals. They describe their sounds like this: "Through Marc and Eric, it is the volume of each word that becomes an object-sculpture, together with the power of their bodies expressing their voices. Each event is a scream - indeed even the glissando - of the strength of the word that sometimes abruptly becomes a rock, a solid surface, not in the least fluvial, as is the narrative of a tale, novel or poetic epic. With both of them, there is no more trace of ancient prosodies, no more trace of the incomprehensible Sainte-Beuve who could claim: "I have to collect a volume of prose". The word, the voice, the volume take shape with each other, unveiling a theatre that theatre usually ignores, which has given it such things as a Samuel Beckett's Fin de Partie." Over the years Etant Donnes have collaborated with people like Lydia Lunch, Michael Gira, Alan Vega and Genesis P-Orridge.
Ceux Qu'on Aime - Ce Que Je Hais was the band's fourth album, dating back to 1983 and originally issued on French Bain Total label (run by Philippe Fichot of Die Form). For this CD re-issue we have added a long bonus track not on the original album.
13,00€
In stock
CD
HASTINGS OF MALAWI
“Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth”
A classic masterpiece from 1981, never re-released on CD before. Originally 1000 copies pressed on orange/red vinyl. 120 copies were sold through Rough Trade and Virgin Records. 800 copies were bought and later destroyed by the United Dairies label, makin this record even more rare.
Hastings of Malawi were Heman Pathak, David Hodes and John Grieve. They recorded the album in one night in 1981 with no plan and no idea of what they were doing. They played drums, clarinet, synthesiser and piano but also made use of things that they found lying around the studio – old records, cookery books, telephone directories and a telephone. The recordings were played down the phone to randomly dialled numbers and the reactions added to the recording. All three had been involved in the recording of the first Nurse with Wound album Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella and had contributed metal scrapings, piano, effects, clarinet and guitar during the session.
13,00€
In stock
CD
SEMANTICS (ROTHENBERG / SHARP / BENNETT)
“Bone Of Contention”
Semantics was a jazz supergroup consisting of Elliott Sharp, Ned Rothenberg and Samm Bennett.
Elliott Sharp, born in Ohio in 1951, began playing the piano at the age of six and started to perform concerts two years later. He soon gave up the piano, first in favour of the clarinet and later for the guitar. Sharp became intrigued with all types of experimental music, from contemporary classical to free jazz and sophisticated rock. He studied anthropology at Cornell University, where he played in a band and took an electronics class with synthesizer inventor Robert Moog.
Ned Rothenberg is an American multi-instrumentalist who was born in 1956 in Massachusetts. He has been internationally acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble music, presented for the past 33 years on 5 continents. He performs primarily on alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, and the shakuhachi - an endblown Japanese bamboo flute. His solo work utilizes an expanded palette of sonic language, creating a kind of personal idiom all its own.
Samm Bennett was born in 1957 in Alabama. In 1977 he moved to Boston, a town that seemed to offer broader possibilities for a young musician eager to play and grow and try new things. It was there that he was first exposed to African drumming styles, mostly through attending weekly drum ensemble workshops led by Boston underground percussion legend Syd Smart. In late 1980, he went to Nigeria, West Africa. Traveling with a friend who introduced him to a family in Benin City, Nigeria, he remained there as their guest for six months, making daily trips to the home of drum master Idemudia Izevbihen. Later Bennett lived in Brussels and played many solo shows.
The short lived Semantics were active in the middle of the 1980s and released two albums. The second, Bone of Contention, was released in 1987 on SST Records. This new expanded CD version features three previously unreleased live tracks.
13,00€
In stock
CD
RENALDO & THE LOAF
“Hardly Gurning While The World Is Turning”
Renaldo and the Loaf is an English musical duo active since the late 1970s, consisting of a pathologist (David Janssen or Ted the Loaf) and an architect (Brian Poole or Renaldo Malpractice). By their own assertion, they achieved their unique sound in part by striving to get unnatural synthesizer-like sounds using only what instruments they had available (acoustic ones). To that end they routinely used muffled and de-tuned instruments, and, often to striking effect, tape loops and manipulation.
In 2018 they played their first ever live show at Klang 25 in Vienna, documented on the album Long Time Coming. In 2016 the group recorded a brand new album entitled Gurdy Hurding. When it was released on vinyl in 2019, it came with a fourth side of a new piece, Hardly Gurning While The World Is Turning. This has never been available on CD - until now.
Here's what the band says: "Hardly Gurning itself is part remix, part new recording, part re-imagining...to complement this we decided to ask some of our friends if they might create a remix/re-imagination of the Gurdy Hurding tracks. In a strange way, the lockdowns of 2020 have benefitted this project as, in most cases, it afforded our contributors some time to work on it, which otherwise they may not have able to. We’ve certainly been excited by what has emerged – almost the whole of Gurdy Hurding has been revisited."
13,00€
In stock
CD
Annie LEWANDOWSKI & Fred FRITH
“Long As In Short, Walk As In Run”
Fred Frith is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improvisor. Probably best known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. He was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, Cosa Brava and the FF Guitar Quartet. He has collaborated with many prominent musicians, including Lotte Anker, Robert Wyatt, Derek Bailey, Brian Eno, The Residents, Bill Laswell, Lars Hollmer, Iva Bittová, Jad Fair and John Zorn.
Annie Lewandowski is a composer and performer who works in song and improvisation. As an improviser on piano, accordion, and electronics, she has performed and recorded with musicians like Fred Frith, the London Improvisers Orchestra or Caroline Kraabel. As a singer, guitarist, and keyboardist, she has recorded with bands and ensembles including Emma Zunz, Xiu Xiu, The Curtains, Former Ghosts, and Yarn/Wire. Her own band Powerdove has released ten recordings.
Long As In Short, Walk As In Run was originally released in 2011 on Danish Ninth World Music label and has been out of print for years. It's a piano and guitar album. For this re-edition we have added a previously unreleased 11 minute bonus track.
13,00€
In stock
LP
Brunhild FERRARI & Christoph HEEMANN
“Stürmische Ruhe”
After her stunning collaboration with Jim O’Rourke (Le Piano Englouti, BT055), Brunhild Ferrari returns to Black Truffle with Stürmische Ruhe, her first duo with Christoph Heemann. A legendary figure in underground music, Heemann has quietly produced a unique body of work since his beginnings with the absurdist cutups of H.N.A.S. in the mid-1980, including collaborations with Merzbow, Organum and Nurse With Wound, the eerie psychedelia of Mirror (with Andrew Chalk), In Camera (with Timo van Lujik) and Plastic Palace People (with Jim O’Rourke), and the precise cinema pour l’oreille constructions of his solo works. Created together in Ferrari’s Parisian studio (once shared with Luc) between 2011 and 2014, Stürmische Ruhe is a single half-hour piece that folds rain and storm recordings into a intricately woven fabric of haunted electronics, unexpected edits and disorienting processing. Banging with the jarring thump of a slamming door (an element that will reappear periodically throughout the piece as a kind of punctuation mark), it is immediately obvious that concrete sound is used here in a free, poetic way outside of the strict confines of documentary field recording. The wind captured by Ferrari’s microphone roars and whistles, accompanied by thick clusters of wavering tones whose unpredictable rises and falls in volumes are synchronised with the bumping and thudding of windows and doors. At some points the microphone sound melts into a wavering low-bit digital smear before fanning out into broad, atmospheric depths. The cinema for the ear constructed here suggests not linear narrative or documentary, but an organic flow of cross-fades, double-exposures and abrupt cuts, a free-associative dream in which wind and water take on mythical characteristics. Throughout the piece's second half, layers of synthetic floating tones and pinging upward glissandi negotiate a constantly shifting balance with wind-borne whispers and rustles, at times dropping to silence, at others rising up with elemental force. As Ferrari explains in her liner notes, Stürmische Ruhe is a meeting of ‘completely opposite sound worlds’ in which ‘almost-violence’ is joined with a ‘reconciling harmony’. Reaffirming the infinite possibilities of the musique concrète tradition while avoiding its academic tropes, Stürmische Ruhe is accompanied by tri-lingual liner notes from Brunhild Ferrari and arrives in a sleeve graced with the beautiful art informel paintings of her father, Wolfgang Meyer Tomin. Cut at 45rpm for maximum fidelity.
28,50€
Out of stock
LP
Toshiya TSUNODA
“Landscape and Voice”
Black Truffle is pleased to present Landscape and Voice, a radical new work (and rare vinyl release) from major Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Undoubtedly one of the most influential artists working with location recordings since the 1990s, Tsunoda’s work possesses a rigorously searching quality that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Tsunoda is known to many listeners for the subtle atmospheric poetry of his early Extract from Field Recording Archive series, which focussed on vibrations recorded in various indoor and outdoor environments in his native Miura Peninsula, often inside pipes, bottles and other vessels. In more recent years, his work has explored the implications of his claim that field recording should be seen as ‘depiction’ rather than ‘documentation’. He has explored disorienting editing and processing in his works with Taku Unami, and, perhaps most radically, represented Maguchi Bay as a kind of kinetic sculpture for shaking speakers by removing all but the inaudible low frequencies from a field recording (Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay).
One of the recurrent concerns of Tsunoda’s recent work, as he explains in the crystalline liner notes accompanying this release, is ‘exploring how I can establish a subjective relationship with an environment, rather than seeing it merely as an object to be recorded’. This has taken various forms, from documenting simultaneously an outdoor environment and the blood flowing through the listener/recorder’s body (captured with a stethoscope) on The Temple Recordings, to representing his own experience of the landscape as made up of ‘grains of space and time’ by inserting looped fragments into field recordings in Grains of Spring.
On Landscape and Voice, this meeting between subject and object becomes an almost mystical union between the natural and the human. As with all of Tsunoda’s work, a relatively simple concept leads to compelling, thought-provoking results. Landscape and Voice combines vowel sounds spoken by six voices with short, looped fragments of field recordings, their noise character suggesting consonants: voice and landscape thus join together in something like words. The record consists of three pieces, each using a different, richly evocative field recording, which periodically freezes, catching on a looped fragment to which is synchronised an abruptly looped spoken vowel sound. The lengths between these interruptions vary, as do the tempi of the loops. The interruption of these lushly immersive recordings of the world – bristling with bird song, rushing water, distant traffic, and clinking metal – only serves to intensify them, as if the depicted environment itself had been returned to the listener each time it abruptly reappears. At the same time, the constant interruption creates an uncannily frozen effect, as if the recorded environment were an object rather than a stretch of recorded time. When combined with the bare human presence of the vowel sounds, the result is both austere and magical. Pressed on 45RPM for maximum fidelity, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Lasse Marhaug with liner notes from the composer, Landscape and Voice is a radical proposition from one of the deepest thinkers in contemporary sound.
25,00€
In stock
LP
Julia REIDY
“World in World”
Black Truffle is pleased to announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases – brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) – focussed on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy’s propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their approach while simultaneously pushing into challenging new areas. Comprising nine pieces ranging between two and seven minutes in length, the album’s opening title track promptly introduces the distinctive palette of just-intoned electric guitars, subtle electronic processing, and voice that is rigorously explored throughout. Where much of Reidy’s guitar work on previous recordings explored rapidly pulsed cycling figures, here notes often hang in the air in a more spacious, lyrical fashion. The elasticity of rhythm and non-linear repetition of pitches initially suggests improvisation until the listener becomes aware of the precise arrangements of spatialised lines. At times, World in World suggests classic bedroom electric guitar works of the 1990s such as Loren Connors’ Airs or Roy Montgomery’s Scenes from the South Island; like those works, Reidy’s possesses a wonderfully live ambience, with frequent pedal clicks adding to the music’s powerful sense of intimacy. In Reidy’s case, however, the yearning, melancholic mood of Connors or Montgomery is tempered by the unorthodox guitar tuning, which at points produces a unique and uncomfortable effect somewhere between the hyper-precision of Harry Partch or Lou Harrison and Jandek’s slack-stringed descent into the void. While World in World plots out its terrain with a bold single-mindedness that allows some pieces to appear almost as variations on a common theme, subtle changes in emphasis distinguish each track. Tactile percussive interjections skitter across the tremolo tones of ‘Paradise in Unrecognisable Colours’, while ‘Ajar’ ramps up the role played by the electronics, with glitching pitch-shifted and back-masked textures threaded through the guitars and thickly harmonised vocal layers. Ranging from autotuned melodic lines to buried murmurs, Reidy’s voice is a frequent presence throughout these nine pieces, at times creating the impression that a more conventional series of songs lurks underneath the chiming microtonal guitars. On the stunning ‘Poised’, whispers and distant, ghostly wails surround the layers of guitars, at times suggesting the foggiest outer reaches of Liz Harris’ Grouper. Both rigorously experimental and emotive, World in World is undoubtedly Julia Reidy’s finest work yet.
25,00€
In stock
LP
Oren AMBARCHI
“Live Hubris”
Black Truffle is pleased to announce Live Hubris, documenting the hypnotic and electrifying live performance of Oren Ambarchi’s 2016 LP Hubris by a fifteen-strong band at London’s Café Oto. Over three days in May 2019, Oto toasted Oren Ambarchi at 50/Black Truffle at 10 with Ambarchi and a large group of close friends and collaborators in a series of performances that interspersed existing projects with new collective endeavours, culminating with this: fourteen members of the extended Black Truffle family together on stage, joined by one special virtual guest, to translate the intricately studio-constructed layers of Hubris into a muscular live band workout.
Operating with only the bare minimum of pre-gig preparation after the planned afternoon rehearsal had to be wrapped up prematurely due to noise complaints, the gargantuan group lurches into motion with a 21-minute rendition of ‘Hubris Part 1’, powered by the pulsating electronics of Konrad Sprenger (the ‘ringmaster’ at the ensemble’s core) and no less than seven electric guitars spinning a web of intricately interlocking palm-muted polyrhythms. The layers of closely related but metrically distinct lines create ripples of shifting accents, flickering changes in emphasis that ricochet along the endless central pulse. Gradually building in density, this motorik continuum becomes the backdrop for the haunting tones of Eiko Ishibashi’s processed flute and an extended feature from long-distance guest Jim O’Rourke on guitar synth.
After the brief interlude of the second part, where Albert Marcoeur-esque guitar arpeggios accompany a halting attempt at phone conversation, the full ensemble gears up for the epic side-long rendition of ‘Hubris Part 3’. Now joined by the astonishing triple drum line-up of Joe Talia, Will Guthrie and Andreas Werliin, the layered pulse of the opening piece becomes a burning funk-fusion groove. Beginning on a medium simmer, the ensemble initially stick to its pulsating one-note mantra, over which Ambarchi unfurls a beautiful example of his signature shimmering Leslie-toned guitar harmonics, eventually joined by Ishibashi’s flute and some brooding, distorted dissonance from Julia Reidy’s guitar. Building steadily for the first nine minutes, the heat then rises dramatically with a first, gloriously loose chord change: with the all drummers now rolling and tumbling like a twice-cloned Jack DeJohnette circa 1970, Mats Gustafsson enters on baritone, his tortured roars and shrieks driving the band to peaks of insane intensity. Finally, the exhausted ensemble drops out, leaving only the jagged, skittering fuzz of Ambarchi’s guitar, brought to an abrupt conclusion at the command of crys cole. Arriving on hot pink vinyl with artwork by Lasse Marhaug and an extensive selection of live photos by Ivan Weiss and Fabio Lugaro, Live Hubris brings this ambitious and outrageous evening of music to the safety of the home stereo.
23,00€
In stock
LP
Claire ROUSAY
“Everything perfect is already here”
When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form.
Rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding.
“The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is.
These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
21,00€
Out of stock
CD
Claire ROUSAY
“Everything perfect is already here”
When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form.
Rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding.
“The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is.
These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
14,00€
Out of stock
LP
Giancarlo TONIUTTI / Massimo TONIUTTI
“Stratégies Obliques I”
Second part of the "Stratégies Obliques" which this time brings together the two Toniutti brothers on this split LP. The principle is the same as Stratégies Obliques Ø. They both had to create their pieces using Oblique Strategies, an oracular deck of cards by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt intended to be used as a prompt during the creation process. Any cards they used would become the titles of the plays.
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Giancarlo Toniutti
A Tinct Myrrh (discard an axiom, just carry on)
Composed in March 2021. All sounds recorded early 2021.
Studio work from March to April 2021 at la stanza nera, Udine.
Sound sources : eraly percussion, rustler, iron wares, prepared slabs, domestic idiophones.
Massimo Toniutti
The Background Colour of a Paragraph (ask your body, mute and continue)
Recorded and composed : February/April 2021
1. sounds and ideas and experiments (February)
2. the domestic installation (March)
3. composition of the selected material (April)
200 copies, white vinyl.
23,00€
In stock
7 CD box
Akos ROZMANN
“Mass / Mässa”
Ákos Rózmann’s Mass consists of twelve electroacoustic compositions created between 1989 and 2004 in the composer’s studio and at EMS in Stockholm. Like most of Rózmann’s compositions, Mass is a long-form work with a duration of around seven hours.
We can describe Rózmann’s Mass as an enormous fresco of personal observations on the two first parts of the Catholic Mass, Kyrie and Gloria. The intensely subjective perspective on the texts of the Mass is underlined by Rózmann’s freezing images – in his own words – “tropes”, i.e. meditations in Swedish, Hungarian and Latin over particular words in the mass text or connection to it. A few passages have nothing to do with the mass text: Organ piece VI in Gloria I (also performed with the subtitle Nocturne in silver and dance) is a sort of lament based on the phrase “Natten gråter” (the night is crying). We find the composer’s peculiar sense of humour in the intermezzo following Gloria I – a composed version of the intermission common in Swedish concert houses, complete with clashing coffee cups and empty chatter from the bureaucratic music establishment.
The overarching formal structure of Mass is an intricate one, with the various parts functioning simultaneously as independent pieces and as parts of sub-groups within the whole structure of the piece. As independent pieces, some of them go under the name Organ piece. For example, the three pieces included in the first Gloria part of mass form another independent composition named Triptykon, first performed as a separate work in 1996.
In the earlier parts of Mass, a battle fought between Positive forces is represented by the words in the Mass text and Negative forces represented by various challenging sounds, such as scornful laughter, grunts, burps, nauseous choking and vomiting sounds. First, the Negative powers drag down the Positive forces into a “black hole” or in pockets. Then the Positive forces return to dominate the remaining parts of Gloria. This formal narrative is nuanced by the composer, who, in interviews, offer a less dualistic, more complex viewpoint on the conflict central to the Mass:
“It’s presumable that everything in the general sense is about the notion of positive or negative because everything in the world is structured like that. But it’s not that simple in the Triptych [the first three pieces of the Gloria-cycle]. Different forces stand against each other, but their interrelation is more complex than that of good and evil.”
The most prominent sound sources in the work are the organ, a Hungarian zither and human voices. Throughout the whole piece, there is a vocal group from a village church in Corsica, singing the Latin mass texts solo and chorally. Other participants are Schola Gregoriana Holmiae under the direction of Viveca Servatius, a group of German Benedictine monks and – in the role of a sort of master of ceremonies, Thomas Hammar.
Ákos Rózmann was born in 1939 in Budapest, Hungary, where he studied composition at the Bartók Conservatory and the Liszt Academy. In 1971 he received a scholarship to come to Stockholm and completed his compositional studies with Ingvar Lidholm at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and then settled down in Sweden. He was the organist at the Catholic Cathedral in Stockholm for a long time. His early encounter with electroacoustic music gave a new direction to his composing. Except for a few early pieces, Rózmann composed solely electroacoustic music – often preferring a monumental form, usually with the organ and the human voice as the most crucial sound sources in a complex, penetrating musical language loaded with symbols. As a composer, he worked involuntary seclusion, uncompromisingly and with great originality. Rózmann’s music is about the fundamental questions of existence, often on an ethical or religious (Catholic or Buddhist) basis, for example, in the enormous suites Images of the Dream and Death and Twelve Stations, both previously released on Ideologic Organ.
60,00€
In stock
7 CD box
Akos ROZMANN
“12 Stations / Tolv Stationer, For Voices And Piano (1978 – 2001)”
Final pressing of 300 copies.
***
Ákos Rózmann (1939-2005) was born in Budapest where he studied organ and composition at the Liszt Academy. From 1971 to 1974 he studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and from 1978 he was an organist at the catholic cathedral in Stockholm. Throughout his life Rózmann dedicated himself to musique concrète developing one of the largest and most rewarding bodies of work in this, the most alchemical of all musical genres. In the early eighties, Rózmann started to build a private electroacoustic studio which he installed in the basement of the Catholic Cathedral whilst continuing to work in tandem at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS Sweden) where he produced his earlier masterpieces.
With an unwavering commitment to the creation of music Rózmann would often lock himself up in his windowless studio working into the night in order to achieve the results he desired. He did not seek the approval of his peers nor the satisfaction of his audience with the only concern being the perfect articulation of his vision. This combination of vision, passion and stubbornness resulted in one of the most singular catalogues within the field of musique concrete. Commissioned by the Hungarian composer Miklós Maros who requested a five-minute work for piano and voice. Rózmann accepted the offer with the intention of writing a tape piece made from recordings of Miklós’ wife, the soprano singer Ilona Maros’ and his own experiments with prepared piano. The elements recorded here became the source material for Twelve Stations, a work which flew far from the initial five minute brief to land 20 years later as a spirit stretching journey of more than 6 1/2 hours. The compositional process is unique in Rózmann’s output due to the 18 year gap between the initial phase and completion of the final work. The first phase made between 1978-1980 consists of an exploration of traditional musique concrète techniques such as speeding up, slowing down, cutting and splicing tape. The last four stations made between 1998-2001 embrace digital technology where small sections of the original recordings from 1978 were fed through an effects processor and improvised on a sampler keyboard. Despite this gap and the different techniques deployed at each period of creation the monumental result sits as a complete and staggering whole.
Within the set limitations of the source material Rózmann’s skill unfolds in an uncanny ability to coax a vast world of flexible sound from the original piano and voice recordings. The result is a maelstrom of dynamic audio and one of the most daring, challenging and rewarding works of musique concrète from the 20th Century. ‘Property – Room’ parts I and II initiate proceedings with a vast landscape of Sturm und Drang. The original material of piano and voice are dissected and reconstructed as a means of evoking an aggressive otherworldly atmosphere. ‘The Contents and Life of the Black Pit’ shifts further outside with an expansive palate of heavily corrupted voice and frenzied electronics dancing in a most unsettling fashion. ‘The Abandonment of Hell’ leads the listener into a sophisticated and shocking melange of audio disorientation, one with a distinct ‘musical’ quality. One senses a master craftsman quietly whittling away at the individual elements in order to harness the previously unobtainable world within. Part V ‘The Awakening’ implants female forms in the mix as the growling, belching, disturbing voices of the early sequences are replaced with more heavenly voices ascending the malformed matter below. Rózmann was typically ambiguous about the meaning behind his work despite suggesting earlier that the first part of ‘Twelve Stations’ was an interpretation of the ‘Tibetan Wheel of Life’. Alongside his interest in Tibetan Buddhism he maintained his following of the catholic church and as a consequence one may also read this sequence, with its uplifting motifs as an ascent from hell into heaven. Rózmann concludes proceedings with ‘The Celebrators’, which presents itself not as an ending but rather a continuation of sorts. A short musical refrain conjures a prism where refractions of voice and sound appear like a hall of mirrors, spiralling onwards and outwards, without end.
Epic in scale, timbre, technique, mood and movement, Twelve Stations is a unique masterpiece of 20th Century musique concrète and presents itself as an intensely personal and bold realm of sound, an offering as such, a radical mass open to all.
Man meets different difficulties and sufferings through his wandering. These are forces between which a continuous struggle is going on. He cannot control and preside over these forces. He is being tossed up and down, powerless, like snowflakes in the storm: chaotic thoughts and feelings, gladness and suffering, which flow without intermission like a river that has no beginning nor end. All these are the fruits of our own deeds. However, in this life you have the chance to make easier those life wanderings that are to come. - Rózmann (from the programme notes for the 1984 premiere of the first seven stations).
– Mark Harwood
50,00€
In stock
CD
L’OCELLE MARE
“Sans Chemin”
A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again.
A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theatre of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. “I don’t write music, it’s an assemblage of gestural memories”, says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics...
Gestures that are both very skilful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world.
There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. “It’s fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up.
And so the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories.
14,00€
In stock
LP
L’OCELLE MARE
“Sans Chemin”
A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again.
A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theatre of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. “I don’t write music, it’s an assemblage of gestural memories”, says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics...
Gestures that are both very skilful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world.
There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. “It’s fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up.
And so the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories.
21,00€
In stock
LP
Andrew PEKLER & Giuseppe IELASI
“Palimpsests”
Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - collaborators for the better part of a decade - reemerge with 'Palimpsests’, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album’s 2 sides distill 6 years of work into 9 splintered, airy reimaginings of minimalism - each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful - that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète.
Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, ‘Holiday For Sampler’, issued by Planam.
'Palimpsests’, the duo’s second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations - cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza - before culminating, like the album’s title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; “an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”.
With each of the album’s compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, 'Palimpsests’ constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts - traces of memory, image, and action - cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms.
Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album’s two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions - reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality - into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic - reducing their sources to a series of unknowns - recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms.
Shelter Press is thrilled to present 'Palimpsests’, another brilliant outing from the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi. Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, with artworks on printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.
21,00€
In stock
LP
Félicia ATKINSON & Jeffre CANTU-LEDESMA
“Un hiver en plein été”
From its earliest utterances, experimental music has been particularly disposed to transnational and cross-cultural collaboration. Seeking the answer for a fundamental problem - how to transcend the boundaries of difference, distance, and time - it presents a means to find common ground and communicate through the elemental form of sound. Over the last 5 years, this precisely what the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has achieved, intertwining sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle of summer’) - the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space - distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come.
Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them - each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways - prior to their first recorded outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by 2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely - sending files back and forth, fortified by conversations on a vast range of subjects - these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked.
Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 - a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe - its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground.
Atkinson likens the recording of ‘Un hiver en plein été’ to have been akin to “a playground”, each artist “hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard’s Bande à part”, to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had “a mind of its own”, with both “along for the ride”. This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm - a joyous exploration of the unknown - guides the momentum of the album’s evolving arc, as unfolding chasms of ambient space ripple with humanity, life, and fleeting glimpses of the actions that led to its material core.
Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones - laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz - searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.
21,00€
In stock
LP
Jan BRUYNDONCKX
“Rails and Other Tracks”
First ever release of concrete and electronic collage works by Belgian underground sound explorer Jan Bruyndonckx. This album contains autonomous compositions, music for film and documentary; all independently recorded in his private studio between 1958 and 1965.
A small collection of adventurous and mysterious sound evocations with text/poetry (Paul De Vree) recited by Julien Schoenaerts.
21,00€