In stock
3 LP
Limpe FUCHS – Mark FELL
“Dessogia / Queetch / Fauch”
The 2015 edition of Winnipeg's send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle now presents the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters. For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch's phrase, "establish silence." Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don't often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.
46,00€
In stock
LP
Crys COLE
“Making Conversation”
crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings (BT 096LP), Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole's work, presenting three rigorously conceptualized commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an eight-channel sound installation exhibited in 2023 at the Tabakalera Art Center in Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain. The piece uses a multitude of instrumental, vocal, concrete and electronic sounds to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019. In this world of night sounds, she explains, she "observed the complex interplay between amphibian, lizard, bird and insect communication, domestic animals (roosters, dogs), man-made sounds (airplanes, vehicles, conversations and evening activities) and sounds that were difficult to place." Drawing on field recordings as memory aids (but including none in the finished piece), cole's piece uncannily reproduces the spatiality and pacing of environmental sound without attempting strictly to replicate it. While at times it can be difficult to imagine the source of these sounds, at other points they are clearly instrumental or electronic in origin; in its placement and layering, though, the whole assemblage suggests the glorious, unthinking richness of a non-musical sound environment. Suggesting at once the electronic gardens of Rolf Julius and the little instrument expanses of classic AACM, the piece is a brilliant enactment of the Cage-ian drive to "imitate nature in her manner of operation." "Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr? (pt. 1)" began as cole's contribution to an Issue Project Room commission to realize a score from Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's Women's Work, a 1975 collection of text and conceptual scores by women artists and composers. cole's piece begins from Beth Anderson's "Valid for Life," a complex arrangement of the letter R in various typefaces. Accompanied with extensive liner notes, photographic documentation and a download code, Making Conversation is an exciting next step in cole's work, extending her signature concerns in new sonic and conceptual directions.
28,00€
Out of stock
LP
Léo DUPLEIX
“Resonant Trees”
Black Truffle presents Resonant Trees, the first vinyl release from French composer-performer Léo Dupleix. An active member of the international community of younger musicians working with just intonation, Dupleix has composed works for solo instrumentalists and ensembles in Europe and Japan, as well as performing extensively on harpsichord, piano and electronics. His music is distinguished by a formal clarity and elegance of surface, gently shaping pure intervals into delicate melodic patterns and shimmering harmonic planes. Resonant Trees presents two side-long pieces for harpsichord and ensemble, both setting slowly repeating patterns played on harpsichord and guitar within an environment of sustained tones. Dupleix performs on a French double manual harpsichord and Prophet synthesizer, joined by Juliette Adam (bass clarinet), Johanna Bartz (traverso flute), Cyprien Busolini (viola), Fredrik Rasten (6- and 12-string guitars), and Mara Winter (traverso flute). The harpsichord begins "Resonant Tree I" alone, slowly sounding out a series of arpeggiated chords that emphasize the unique (and for unaccustomed listeners, sometimes unsettling) harmonic and timbral qualities of justly tuned intervals. Long tones from synthesizer, bass clarinet, viola and Baroque traverso flutes slowly creep into the spaces between the arpeggiated chords, joined after several minutes by delicate patterns of harmonics played by Rasten on acoustic guitars. On "Resonant Tree II," a similar structure and ensemble (without the flutes) are used with quite different results. Joined again by long tones from the ensemble, here the viola is particularly prominent and its interplay with the harpsichord creates fascinating acoustic effects. In both pieces, repetition gives the music a static, stable quality while, at the same time, the exact shape of the repeating patterns remains difficult to grasp. As Dupleix writes, these pieces dream of music as "space and a sound that one could grasp in one's hand." As the near-static quality of the repetitions and long tones with little incident make these two stretches of musical time feel like spaces for the listener to inhabit, the small variations on a narrow range of related material act like a three-dimensional object whose each facet is examined in turn. At once austere and seductive, Resonant Trees takes its place beside the work of contemporaries like Catherine Lamb, while also calling up the languorous melodic world of Mamoru Fujieda, the dignified melancholy of Satoshi Ashikawa's classic Still Way and the espaliered chamber atmospherics of the Obscure catalogue.
26,50€
Out of stock
LP
Olivia BLOCK
“The Mountains Pass”
Black Truffle announces The Mountains Pass, a major new work from Olivia Block. A key player in Chicago's vibrant experimental music scene since the late 1990s, Block has developed an extensive body of work grounded in a personalized, at times emotive approach to the studio-based practices of the musique concrète tradition, while also encompassing improvisation, orchestral pieces, sound installations, and a sustained engagement with the piano. On The Mountains Pass, recorded by Greg Norman at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio and meticulously edited and constructed over the course of three years, Block pushes into new terrain, introducing her singing voice and drums played by Jon Mueller into flowing assemblages that move seamlessly from ruminative organ tones and fragmented piano airs to explosions of sizzling synths and thundering percussion. Like many of Block's past works, which include, for example, a sculptural installation using the sound of oyster beds, The Mountains Pass draws inspiration from nature and the animal world. Time spent in a particular mountain range in Northern New Mexico informs this suite of pieces, whose lyrics and titles refer particularly to animal life in the area. The music sometimes suggests the great outer-limits works of '70s Italian prog figures like Franco Battiato or Arturo Stalteri in the languorous drift of synthesizer, organ, and piano tones and the meticulous yet organic flow of its construction. Block's crystalline voice and rich piano chords at times call up the restrained chamber songs of Janet Sherbourne, but fragmented and threaded through passages of woozy pitch-bent keyboards, hypnotic distant thuds, tinkling bells, and searing distorted synth tones. On "f2754," the freedom of the roaming wolf surges through dense layers of rapid keyboard attacks and long organ tones over a propulsive drum performance straight out of Animal Magnetism-era Arnold Dreyblatt. This distinctive sound world is then reencountered in a darkened mirror image in the uneasy, metallic shimmer of the closing "Ungulates," named in reference to a heard of elk roaming through the mountains. Like Battiato's Clic or Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife, The Mountains Pass inhabits the underexplored terrain where the beauty of song coexists with a radical formal openness, illuminating the deep musicality and warmth that have been present in Block's work all along.
26,50€
Out of stock
3 CD box
Roland KAYN
“Simultan”
Die Schachtel, in collaboration with SZ Sugar, is finally able to make available in CD format (a deluxe 3CD boxed edition with a lavishly illustrated booklet) of the legendary vinyl-only edition of 2017, the first in a series named “K-Kybernetische Musik /Cybernetic Music” that documents the birth of Roland Kayn cybernetic music, remastered from the original analog master tapes.
One of the great pioneers of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for most of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn (1933 - 2011) remained almost entirely unknown, a founding member of the legendary ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, heralded as a singular genius by a small number of figures like Jim O’Rourke, who is currently curating the archive of the artist.
While Kayn might be easily described as a composer of electronic, electro-acoustic, or computer music, most of his career was in fact largely dedicated to the revolutionary sculpting of an entirely new territory of sound - Cybernetic Music, a generative process of composition through programming. Simultan was among the first of the composer’s works to emerge from this process. Cybernetic Music grew from Kayn’s longstanding engagement and fascination with data processing theory, which far outweighed his interest in the work of other composers and the zeitgeists of the day - a fact which contributed to his being declared persona non grata by the avant-garde establishment, and ultimately his lasting obscurity. This territory of creativity was the composer’s attempt to allow sound to be self-self-sufficient, stripping away notions of harmony, melody and rhythm, as much as those of the composer and art, deploying complex networks of electronic devices - early computers, to follow his instructions, taking form through a system of signals and commands.
Created during the period in which Kayn was living in the Netherlands, and recorded with the assistance of electronic music legends Jaap Vink and Leo Küpper, Simultan is a work of astounding beauty – filled with a remarkable sense of humanity and touch – a strange incongruity considering the system through which it was made, doubling as an indication of the inherent power of sound which Kayn spent his life fighting to reveal. For fans of avant-garde electronic music, particularly those drawn to the work coming out of Utrecht and Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM), but who have not encountered Simultan, the work is likely to represent a towering revolution. It stands among the most striking works from the world of sound. Ranging from seductive ambiences, grinding swells of atonally and pure texture, to buried tone clusters, it does everything Kayn set forth in his ambitious project. It is an immersive image of what might be when sound organizes itself, and a metaphor for a way of being – the wonders which happen when we relinquish ego and control.
A stunning journey in sound and work of profound and intoxicating power, Simultan stands among the best of all avant-garde electronic works of its era, yet, like its composer, has never received its rightful due. Die Schachtel’s lovingly produced boxed edition, produced with a booklet with liner notes exploring the composer’s work and ideas at length, takes great strides to rectifying this sin – bringing this seminal work back into print for the first time in CD + digital edition in more than 35 years. Its reemergence has been long awaited by many and should be celebrated by all. Totally essential and not to be missed.
38,00€
Out of stock
4 LP box
Fernand VANDENBOGAERDE
“Les Années 1967-1984”
4LP box
Hardboard linen box with silk screened lettering + 16 page booklet with biography, interview, track info and photos.
Edition of 200 copies, with download code.
Metaphon is thrilled to present this collection of 14 phenomenal electronic and electro-acoustic works by French composer Fernand Vandenbogaerde, realized between 1967 and 1984.
After his science studies Fernand Vandenbogaerde (1946) studied at the Conservatoire de Roubaix and did various classes and courses with a.o. Jean-Etienne Marie, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bruno Maderna.
He wrote analytical essays on mathematic music, in particular the work of Iannis Xenakis.
Vandenbogaerde taught electro-acoustic music at various institutions and was director at the National School of Music and Dance in Blanc-Mesnil, near Paris.
As a composer he wrote works for orchestra, instrumental and chamber ensembles, sometimes in hybrid form including tape and electro-acoustic configurations. He also recorded numerous tape compositions in Bourges, Paris, Ghent and at his home studio. His works have been presented worldwide on various leading festivals and events.
The compositions included in this edition are primarily tape works, meticulously recorded and produced, radical and most of all timbre oriented which makes his compositions focus mainly on sound while other parameters hardly change. In Vandenbogaerde’s own words: “What determines my pieces, at least all the ones in this collection, is that it’s the material that dictates me, that will predetermine the form”. This particular approach distinguishes him quite a bit from many of his contemporaries within the field of electro-acoustic music.
Another interesting aspect in Vandenbogaerde’s work is the integration of micro tonal scales (conceived by Mexican composer Julian Carrillo), on the compositions 'Modifications III' and the intriguing trilogy 'Drei Nachdenken über Hymnen an die Nacht'.
All tracks are previously unreleased except the proto power electronics piece 'Anschlag' which was self-released in 1971 on his own Point Radiant label, as a compilation LP which also included a track by Tristan Murail.
125,00€
In stock
2 LP
Pierre HENRY
“Labyrinthe !”
« Labyrinthe ! » (2003), 56’41
Premiered on March 29th 2003, salle Olivier Messiaen de Radio France, Paris. Commissioned by Radio France.
An expedition in sound in 10 sequences: Enfoncement [Deep Sink], Gouffre circulaire [Circular Abyss], Noyau secret [Secret Core], Apesanteur [Weightlessness], Entrailles [Entrails], Four solaire [Solar Furnace], Fissures [Cracks], Mer intérieure [Inner Sea], Éruption [Eruption], Remontée [Ascension].
Labyrinthe ! is not only a very unique piece in Pierre Henry’s masterful repertoire, but also a remarkable demonstration of his compositional skills and musical singularity. Indeed, for this piece, Pierre Henry was deprived of his own, otherwise essential, sonic material. Here, the sounds, provided by GRM collaborators at the time, carry their own distinct stories, sensitivities and qualities. Yet, despite this discrepancy, Pierre Henry’s voice, the breath and dynamics of his own music, quickly appear. Through this sonic maze, a music arises, utterly focused on sounds, their development and their use, which Pierre Henry applies with extraordinary clarity and determination.
François J. Bonnet, Paris, 2023
33,00€
Out of stock
4 LP
Bernard PARMEGIANI & François BAYLE
“Divine Comédie”
Divine Comedy stands as a magnum opus crafted by two of the foremost composers of their era, boasting a musical ambition akin to Dante’s poem and its visual interpretation by Sandro Botticelli or Gustave Doré. For a long time, this triptych was presented as a two-sided work in which Bernard Parmegiani’s Hell and François Bayle’s Purgatory responded to and extended each other, guided by Michel Hermon’s voice through the listener’s imagination. Because Paradise, a mixed piece co-composed and performed live, had never been released on record before. Indeed, fifty years after its premiere, Paradise is unveiled to our ears, thereby rounding off the very first complete edition of the Divine Comedy.
• 4xLPs
• 60 x 90 cm (24x36 in) foldout poster
• The piece 'Paradis' is exclusive to this new edition
• Embossed gatefold sleeve
47,00€
Out of stock
LP
Flora YIN WONG – Sébastien ROUX
“Trigram for Earth / 50 Frequency and Amplitude Modulated Sine Waves Describing a Landscape”
Flora YIN WONG 'Trigram for Earth'
Trigram for Earth, by Flora Yin Wong, is inspired by traditional eight-sided Pakua mirrors and the trigrams inscribed on each of their edges. The function of the mirrors is to show the nature of reality as being composed of mutually opposing forces and modulate them. Here, energies seem to be manipulated to guide and direct our listening, lost in a maze of sound, diffracted to the point of merging with the artist's own listening, through her memories, her obsessions, the fragments she carries within her. Flora Yin Wong invites us to embark on a multi-faceted investigation of sound, a journey through the meanders of liberated sonic forces, an auscultation of her own listening and a portal, at last, ajar to a fragmented and forever mysterious inner world.
—
Sébastien ROUX '50 frequency and amplitude modulated sine waves describing a landscape'
In his work '50 frequency and amplitude modulated sine waves describing a landscape,' Sébastien Roux applies his approach to algorithmic composition to the observation of the natural world, bringing the sound of the sea and the song of birds into the electronic domain, transmuting them into each other through a slow process of gradual modulation. Exploring the abstract space of pure sounds between two naturalistic tableaux, Sébastien Roux offers us a fascinating meditation on the world of synthesis, revealing, with an economy of means and great formal elegance, the magic of sonic simulacrum and the strange beauty of the artificial, in a gesture that is ultimately as poetic as it is musical.
— François J. Bonnet, 2024
25,00€
In stock
LP
James TENNEY
“Postal Pieces”
The first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney's legendary "Postal Pieces", marking the first ever appearance of five of the suite's works on vinyl, drawing upon recordings made in 2003, by the Amsterdam based ensemble, The Barton Workshop, under the direction of James Fulkerson.
Among the most important and highly regarded efforts in Tenney's canon of compositions, as well as within the history of 20th Century music, these five pieces represent a crucial bridge between Fluxus-oriented conceptualism, minimalism, and the microtonal complexities that would emerge in their wakes. Issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, it includes exact replicas of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, Blume's brand new edition takes great steps to centring Tenney at the eye the storm during some of experimental music's most important years.
"The Postal Pieces" stands among Tenney's well known and celebrated compositions, and illuminates the dualities embraced by the composer, notably his use of sound to develop consciousness in and of others, and his willingness to draw on elements and observations of everyday life; citing his strong dislike of writing letters as being the primary inspiration for their inception. In lieu, he conceived to send his friends—John Bergamo, Alison Knowles, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Harold Budd, Philip Corner, Joel Krosnick, Buell Neidlinger, Susan Allen, Max Neuhaus, and Malcolm Goldstein—short scores on the back of postcards. The suite is composed around three themes: Tenney's concept of swell form (utilizing repetition and progressing through a structurally symmetrical arch), intonation, and the desire to produce "meditative perceptual states".
James Tenney's "Post Pieces" is issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, which includes a exact replicas of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.
25,00€
In stock
LP
Ben VIDA
“Vocal Trio”
Ben Vida first emerged during the mid 1990s within a loose constellation of experimental musicians, centred around a performance series of improvised workshops at the Myopic Bookstore in Chicago, alongside Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm, Chad Taylor, and the other future members of Town and Country - Jim Dorling, Joshua Abrams, and Liz Payne - the band within which he would gain widespread recognition over the following years. Like many other members of that scene, Vida remains a restless product of a fleeting context - Chicago during the 1990s and early 2000s - continuously undermining concrete notions of idiom and signifier within a practice that witnessed him rendering bristling abstractions within Pillow, glacial melodies with Town and Country, the art-rock mayhem of Bird Show Band, and the angular, driving indie rock of Joan of Arc, before becoming immersed in a practice of systems based synthesis, beginning in the 2010s, that guided much of his first decade of output as a solo performer and composer.
As early as 2013, he began to incorporate acoustic sound sources - specifically the human voice - into his work. It was this shift, evolving and refining itself over the last decade, that underscores radically the leap in his practice represented by “Vocal Trio”, a work that encounters Vida composing for the human voice with the ideas that allow for synthesis - transferring the underlying concepts and structures of both subtractive and additive synthesis to the acoustic realm - without using a synthesiser.
During the Spring of 2022 Vida was in Bremen, Germany, collaborating on a dance piece with the choreographer Fay Driscoll, when the production fell into delays. Finding himself with time on his hands, a space at his disposal, and the company of two dancers - Amy Gernux and Lotte Rudhart - who were also singers, the idea for the piece - to utilising the larynx as audio paths (multi-harmonic or harmonically pure) while conceptualising each person’s mouth as a filter to sculpt the timbre and resonance of a given tone - began to take shape in his mind. Considering how typographical scores might be developed into a non-linguistic social framework, Vida drafted a single page of text - what became the score for “Vocal Trio” - accompanied by a set of harmonic suggestion and loose parameters, seeking a core meaning from each word's phonic make-up by each of the three singers (Vida, Gernux and Rudhart) singing as slowly as possible.
At the core of the pulsing vocal drones - intoxicating, harmonically rich long-tones - that make up the duration abstraction of “Vocal Trio”, is Vida’s regard for music as a social space. It is an experiment that seeks liberation through the act of collective music making, by challenging the terms through which the act of composing is perceived and then relinquishing control. The piece’s rehearsals were simply the three performers hanging out, allowing their knowing each other and natural dynamics to contribute to its form as the score, before recording during a single afternoon at the end of a number of days sharing company and space.
Creatively visionary and groundbreaking on numerous terms, as well as being intoxicatingly beautiful and remarkably listenable, Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio” represents a striking step forward for one of the most ambitious and outstanding sonic artists working in the United States today. Issued by Blume in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score, this is hands down one of the most important contemporary records we’re likely to encounter in 2024.
25,00€
In stock
LP
COMPILATION
“New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media”
Unquestionably among the most important collections of experimental music to emerge during the 20th Century, "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" is the original feminist presentation in its context, releasing the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson under its collective banner. Includes newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey.
Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding that already includes the efforts of efforts of Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, and others, Blume delivers their third release in their first suite of releases for 2024, the fist ever vinyl reissue of the seminal "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" compilation, originally issued by Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch Records in 1977. Out of print for decades on vinyl and arguably the most important feminist statement in the history of experimental music, illuminating the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Robert, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson—in a number of cases representing their recording debuts—during a crucial moment in the history of experimental music. Blume's brand new edition—complete with newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey, as well as reproducing Charles Amirkhanian's original accompanying text—radically shifts perceptions of the past and present day with its truly revolutionary sounds.
Issued by Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch Records in 1977, and out of print nearly the entire time since, "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" can be understood within two simple frameworks. On one hand, it is an astounding document of the landscape of experimental music toward the end of the 1970s. On the other, it is a historically significant feminist statement, being the first collection of experimental music entirely dedicated to female composers, a number of whom were grossly under-celebrated at the time, but have since gone on to be regarded as among the most important composers of their generation.
The eight pieces gathered by "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media"—Johanna M. Beyer's "Music of the Spheres", Annea Lockwood's "World Rhythms", Pauline Oliveros' "Bye Bye Butterfly", Laurie Spiegel's "Appalachian Grove I", Megan Roberts' "I Could Sit Here All Day", Ruth Anderson's "Points", and Laurie Anderson's "New York Social Life" and "Time To Go (For Diego)"—might be regarded as the first cohesive vision of alternate proximity or expression of experimental music to what has always been a frustratingly male dominated environment, and to the tropes, temperaments, and sensibilities that have been historically perceived to define it. It is an expanded vision of truth. While the presence of feminine sensibilities and temperaments in experimental music, however they may present themselves, were anything but new in 1977, "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" was the first opportunity, beyond the temporal limitations of live performance, to view them collectively, rather than as individualised expressions within a larger body of similar gestures (as was the case of Oliveros' inclusion in Odyssey's 1967 "New Sounds In Electronic Music" and "Extended Voices" compilations) where they might be confused for something else; to regard and celebrate a radical notion of feminine sonority for its unique characteristics and through its interrelations.
While its historical significance and groundbreaking nature can not be debated in its totality, nearly half a century on "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" remains compelling in both its musicality and the palpable sense of its lasting influence. Every composition across the album's two sides is not only engrossing and deeply compelling—feeling as fresh and relevant as the day it was laid to tape—but clearly tangible in their lasting influence. Viewed in context, the album's eight works feel like breath of fresh air when compared to much of what came before, and laid the groundwork for much of what was to come, introducing a new, often more holistic temperament and more sensitive and inclusive sensibility into the landscape of experimental music.
Particularly in the case of Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson, it's hard to throw ourselves back in time and imagine a moment when these composers rested in a fairly marginalised corner of the creative landscape. Blume's brand new edition of "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media"—complete with newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey, as well as reproducing Charles Amirkhanian's original accompanying text—brings us back to this confounding moment and points us toward a crucial moment of change set forth by these incredible composers and their sounds. Absolutely seminal and not to be missed.
25,00€
Out of stock
LP
Luigi NONO
“Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima”
Edition of 300 copies, gold foil printed sleeve, includes 12-page booklet and two leporello inserts printed on translucent paper
On the centenary of the birth of Luigi Nono, the Maurice Quartet – Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola) and Aline Privitera (cello) – reinterprets the composition for string quartet by the Venetian composer: Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima, dedicated to LaSalle Quartet on the occasion of the thirtieth Beethovenfest in Bonn, in 1980. The driving force of inspiration must have been Beethoven, understood as a radical innovator of the conventions of his time. This same definition was attributed to Nono after composing this work, so much so that the critics of the time spoke of the "turning point work". An extreme chamber music work, at the same time private and political, which Nono himself summarized as follows: "I have not changed at all. Even tenderness, the private, has its collective, political side. Therefore my String Quartet is not the expression of a new retrospective line in me, but rather my current position of experimentation: I want the great, rebellious affirmation with the minimum means".
The edition includes a set of evocative photographs of the Giudecca in Venice – which follow the aesthetics of the fragment – realized by Sophie-Anne Herin and a precious musicological contribution by Francesca Scigliuzzo.
The Maurice Quartet – active for more than twenty years in the field of experimentation between contemporary music, electronics and multimedia – joins the numerous homages that the world of music pays to Nono one hundred years after his birth with a recording work of great philological and interpretative relevance, aimed at capturing the most intimate and feverish side of one of the most significant composers of the last century.
30,00€
In stock
LP
EL TIGER COMICS GROUP
“After – Live”
el TCG is developing sound research around the notion of immersive sound spaces, based on the perception of sounds in motion. The spatialized fragmentation of a continuous sound, for example, gives rise to an auditory experience in which each frequency segment is perceived as coming from distinct directions, enriching the spatial dimension of listening. He works with a modular synthesizer, enabling him to create a unique sound material that can be modulated in real time. The choreographies used in octophony are inspired by nature (celestial or geological movements, fluids or the living world, mechanical movements...) to poetically confront them through changes of scale. This album was recorded in the St Julien church in Caen, during the Interstice festival on May 14, 2023. A publication of Laboratoire Modulaire - ésam Caen/Cherbourg.
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
Aaron DILLOWAY
“Freak-Out Your Friends!”
35 minute live gig recorded at TUSK Festival, Gateshead Old Town Hall, Newcastle, England 2015 by Sam Grant. Very special Thanks to Lee Etherington. This is possibly my favorite set I've ever performed. (Aaron Dilloway)
25,50€
Out of stock
tape
Leila BORDREUIL
“1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire”
The A-side and title track of this cassette is a live document of one the best live concerts I've seen/heard in the past few years. It was recorded during a house party cookout in Leila’s backyard that I was lucky enough to attend. She played along to a video recording her partner’s family had made for their insurance after a garage fire back in 1991. The audio of the video was played through the PA and Leila slowly builds her electronics and cello into a psychotic inferno of wild noise and feedback. At the zenith of the piece it’s like if PAN SONIC (playing at their most raw) decided to play a set with live squealing pigs. It’s insane, raw, disturbing and cleansing. The remaining pieces are lush and haunting tracks made using the audio of the VHS as source material. Full as fuck C-60.
12,00€
In stock
tape
Twig HARPER
“Ha Ha Laughing Record”
James Twig Harper Johnston's tribute to the legendary Okeh laughing record. (if ya don't know...look it up!)
It's funny (pun intended), I get a message from Harper saying he's working on a "Laughing Record" lathe... I'm like.. "Woah, I was just working on some "giggle loops" myself... I'll send em over!", "Perfect!" . A few more giggles from our friend Nora and he's in monkey business! He mixes those w/ some classic canned laugh tracks and sends em thru his new computerized "Anti-System" and gets us all floating in a world of psychedelic laughter.
Originally released on lathe cut in a micro edition of like 10 copies or somethin'. Now available on cassette for us all to laugh along with.
12,00€
Out of stock
tape
Aaron DILLOWAY
“Bhoot Ghar: Sounds Of The Kathmandu Horror House”
Phone recordings from the Haunted House in the Kathmandu Fun Park in Kathmandu, Nepal.
12,00€
Out of stock
tape
Aaron DILLOWAY
“The Absence Of Milk… (Soundtrack)”
Score to the Case Esparros film "The Absence Of Milk In The Mouths Of The Lost" starring Gary Wilson and Hannah Weir.
contains 3 bonus tracks not featured in the movie.
12,00€
In stock
tape
Aaron DILLOWAY
“Door With No Handle”
Originally released on CDr in August 2009 by Chocolate Monk.
Also released on cassette by Hanson Records in October 2009.
Recorded in a hotel in Brighton, UK 2008.
12,00€
Out of stock
tape
Aaron DILLOWAY
“At Wave Farm Plus”
Recorded during a 10 day residency at Wave Farm in Acra, NY, October 2018.
All tracks except the "Plus" tracks were made using old sound fx radio carts that were saved from the garbage and gifted to me by my friend Mitchell Brown.
Thank you to Galen & Tom at Wave Farm, Mitchell, Lavender, Quintron, and Lena.
12,00€
Out of stock
LP
Ilpo VÄISÄNEN – Carl Michael von HAUSSWOLFF
“Edelliset tunnit – The Bell and the Beach in Trouville-sur-mer (for Mika Vainio)”
ILPO VÄISÄNEN
edelliset tunnit
20’34’
CARL MICHAEL VON HAUSSWOLFF
The Bell and the Beach in Trouville-sur-mer
(for Mika Vainio)
20’36’’
15,00€
In stock
LP
CONTUMACE – Z.B. AIDS aka Valerie SMITH
“Freeze – Concert à Caen”
CONTUMACE
Freeze
16’05’’
This is Lionel Fernandez's (Sister Iodine/Antilles/Ibiza Death...) new solo project, post-industrial, minimal, cold and intoxicated. Harsh guitar, static electronics, muddled vocals. Debut album due October 2021 on Tanzprocesz.
Z.B. AIDS A.K.A. VALERIE SMITH
Concert à Caen
20’50’
Hendrik Hegray's solo project. Disrupted rhythms, frequency generators, cassette and audio file residues, guitar protrusions. Between frustrated psychedelia and arranged noise. Circumstantial set-ups.
15,00€
LP
TERRINE – David NEAUD
“HH – Le souffle bricolage”
TERRINE
HH
22’00’’
Claire Gapenne is a musical artist who performs in Terrine and in the duo Me Donner. An arts enthusiast, she has been performing on the experimental scene since 2012, notably in the industrial rock band Headwar, with whom she is discovering other ways of approaching music. At Accueil Froid, she develops new projects and organizes numerous programmed concerts. In 2013, she set up her solo project Terrine, with which she tours and develops spontaneous, immediate music. Between no-wave, no-techno and improvised music, in 2014 she formed Me Donner with Romain Simon. Today on a number of labels including No Lagos, Tanzprocesz, Bruit Direct, Third Type Tape... Terrine advocates free, label-free music. She has also been performing since 2016 with the dance theater company Sociétés Accidentelles in Amiens.
DAVID NEAUD
Le souffle bricolage
21’38’’
David Neaud is essentially interested in audio art, and more specifically in the physical properties and internal instabilities of the sounds he plays with. Based on low-tech technology, his DIY concert devices are sound laboratories reminiscent of archaic mixing desks and primitive synthesizers. The formal vocabulary of his devices ranges from the nomenclature of DIY workshop equipment, evoking a certain proximity to that of the activity of a noisemaker/experimenter. His concerts are largely open to chance and accident.
15,00€
LP
MARIACHI – Kasper T. TOEPLITZ
“Mène (Badi) – Elephant & Cat”
MARIACHI
Mène (Badi)
10’20’’
Nina Garcia solo, experiments halfway between improvised music and noise. The equipment is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal, an unstable amp. The focus is on gesture and research into the instrument, its resonances, its limits, its extensions, its impurities, its audible corners: going with it or against it, containing it or letting it sound, supporting it or violating it. Here you'll find feedbacks, crackles, short circuits, impacts, overflows and near-perfect chords.
KASPER T. TOEPLITZ
Elephant & Cat
21’53’’
Kasper T. Toeplitz composes for others, plays bass solo, loves to cook and believes there are glaring similarities between cooking and composing - the same sense of idea projection and abstraction - and will never trust a musician who doesn't cook. His bass is enhanced by numerous saturations, both analog and digital, and his cooking is without ready-made recipes, and in constant renewal - like his composition. Both can sometimes be too spicy.
15,00€
In stock
CD
Asmus TIETCHENS + Alice FRESHMOUTH
“Lumières”
Asmus Tietchens is a sound artist and composer from Hamburg, Germany. He got interested in Musique Concrete by listening to a German radio programme when he was 10 years old. In 1965, at the age of 18, Asmus started experimenting with tape loops and turned them into musical collages. Soon, the use of synthesizers was added. In 1980 his debut album Nachtstücke was released, produced by Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream. This was soon followed by a series of albums of electronic pop music for the Sky label, home of many Krautrock bands. Tietchens often uses special source materials for his compositions such as water (Seuchengebiete), human voices (Von Mund zu Mund), paper (Papier ist geduldig). He is associated with the Industrial music scene through his collaborations and releases on labels such as United Dairies, Esplendor Geometrico or Dom Records. Tietchens never studied composition, he has no academic background, everything he does is self taught or learnign by doing. Nevertheless, he was professor for sound design in Hamburg in recent years.
Alice Freshmouth is an anagram project by Tom Fleischhauer. Tom plays guitar and bass and has worked as producer, live sound engineer, booker, promoter and composer. Him and Asmus have been friends for over 40 years, they regularly meet in Hamburg, either as musicians or attending concerts. When Tom played Asmus his most recent musical compositions, the two decided that their work was not completely compatible, but shows enough similar approach to start a spontaneous collaboration. Soon afterwards first ideas were exchanged and half a year later an album was born. Both musicians think that there is equal measure of each of them to be heard on this CD.
13,00€
In stock
CD
DISTURBIO (NOETINGER, CASTELLO)
“Les Mauvaises Fréquentations”
Born April 1966, in Marseille, Jérôme Noetinger discovered experimental music under the influence of the Déficit Des Années Antérieures in Caen. He is a composer/improviser/sound artist working with electroacoustic devices. Composing sometimes musique concrete in the studio, and performing improvised music using electroacoustic devices such as: the reel to reel tape recorder Revox B77 and magnetic tape, analogue synthesizers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, various electronic household objects and home-made electronica. Performing both solo and in ensembles, and collaborating often, and touring extensively internationally. Jerome also used to be the director of Metamkine, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the distribution of improvised and electroacoustic music, which has now been changed to Corticalart with a different personnel.
Angélica Castelló was born in Mexico City in 1972. She works as composer and sound artist. Her compositions concentrate on fragility, the dreamworld and the subconscious. Angelica performs continuously solo or in cooperations everywhere between Mexico City and Vienna. Numerous compositions for ensembles, radio works as well as installations that operate at the interface of music, performance and visual arts make up her body of work. She has several releases on labels like Interstellar records, Mikroton recordings or Monotype records.
In February 2023, Disturbio cross France and Switzerland for a series of nine concerts expressing their highly cinematic art of sound. And to spice up the tour, they invite other musician friends to join them on certain dates: Aude Romary, cello, Antoine Läng, voice and jaw harp, Mathias Forge, cello and cassettes, Natacha Muslera, voice. Four personalities, four captivating performances. The duo Disturbio lives as a constellation of samples and loops, radios and field recordings, on cassettes and tapes, with magical, diaphanous voices hidden away, not forgetting the tremors of a flute on magnetic captures.
Flute, Tapes, Electronics, Artwork – Angélica Castelló
Layout – Lisa Robotka
Mastered By – Taku Unami
Recorded By – Benjamin Ephise, Benjamin Pagier, Emmanuel Lalande
Revox, Tapes, Electronics, Recorded By, Edited By – Jérôme Noetinger
13,00€
In stock
2 CD
RLW
“C.D.”
Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected practitioners of radical music of our day. He was the founding member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and ran the legendary experimental label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today's experimental music scene. Previous releases have seen him collaborate with such well known and diverse artists such as Merzbow, Andrew Chalk, Jim O'Rourke, Achim Wollscheid, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Kouhei Matsunaga and Bruce Russell.
Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect.
After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet's regime of terror, aiding in the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, weapons production, etc. Since the end of the 1980s, there has been a legal reappraisal of the C.D.'s crimes in Chile. Its successor organization makes a living from tourism.
The C.D. project uses, on the one hand, a series of documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses, and on the other, a set of melodic improvisations (MIDI files), improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, tension, claustrophobia and fear associated with the Colonia. CD 2 (Knochenstückchen) directly reflects this atmosphere. CD 1 (Reue?) on the other hand, is characterized by the contradictory breadth of the statements found after the dissolution of the sect: Denial of atrocities to glorification of the C.D. by leaders who returned to Germany against the professed traumas of formerly abused inmates and exploited community workers.
For this purpose, the eyewitness recordings were sound-modified to a considerable extent. The MIDI files were played back with a variety of virtual instruments (piano, guitar, sax, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ, synths, etc.) in a multitude of modifications (speed, pitches, loops, harmonic and tonal variations), so that the 11 pieces from CD 1 and the 16 pieces from CD 2 each represent a closely interwoven overall composition.
17,00€
In stock
LP
Anthony MOORE
“Mare’s Tail”
In 1969 both Anthony and David were at the start of their respective careers and both were inspired by the ideas of the avant garde and the new technologies becoming available to them. David experimented with the various techniques being explored in the medium of film making and Anthony tested the limits of what could be done with tape recorders. It was an open and co-operative exploration. The results of their first collaboration was the film Mare’s Tail - an unusually long 2:30 hour film of non linear multi layered audio visual collage filmed in a wide variety of locations interspersed with texts coming from readings and talks, Kabalistic texts, recorded phone calls, loops, children’s voices and other found material. The musical dimension is mainly supplied by various struck objects/noise/feedback/field recordings and samples. There are instruments too and we even get treated to a small section of what was to become a Slapp Happy tune. The blurry dreamscape/nightmare that slowly unfolds is laden with late 60s delirium. The original master tapes are long gone and all that remains is the audio track on existing copies of the film and various bits of the make up tapes, most of which were used (but some not), in the final cut. The low grade 16mm audio track (a degraded source to begin with), is further worn with age, subsequent duplication and repeated screenings. It all adds to the haze - a quality that David would have most likely approved. Edition of 500 numbered copies.
27,00€
In stock
LP
Sholto DOBIE
“23”
Sholto Dobie puts forth ‘23’ on Infant Tree, his debut solo LP. A wildly accomplished document of practice. After many years spent working with pipes and air, ‘23’ offers us his current developments. Recorded in a year in which the artist worked in Lithuania, Vietnam and Sweden, the record distills a broad approach to sound, using a wide net to gather recordings from performances, gatherings, walks and personal life. Sholto carefully leads the listener between distinct environments and the intimately documented network of compressed air, tubes, reeds, flutes and timers which he works with. In these recordings, life is welcomed in, interiors are heard and felt, obscured voices, insects, forests drift in and out of focus, as we are transported through an unfamiliar landscape.
Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius, he performs with self-constructed wind instruments, using a frankenstein-like set up which has evolved over many years. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources - organs, bagpipes and khene - which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones. ‘23’ captures the rich world of pulses, beatings and breaths that have emerged from Sholto’s performance settings, whilst weaving them into a distinct and unique audio work.
For anyone more familiar with Sholto’s work you will no doubt be warmed by recognisably delicate and evocative styles reminiscent of previous solo recordings such as ‘Nevery’ and ‘The Ringer’ as well as influences from friends and collaborators such as Judith Hamann, Malvern Brume, Ahti & Ahti, Rie Nakajima and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan.
The 12” LP comes with beautifully matched artwork by Zoë Annesley and printed on reverse board, pressed by Monotype Pressing. Limited to 300 copies.
27,00€
In stock
LP
Vasco ALVES
“Estrada Longa”
Feedback Moves returns with the reissue of Estrada Longa by Vasco Alves, originally released in 2021 on Cafe Oto’s digital label, Takuroku.
Built in the 1940s, Estrada Nacional 2 is 720km long and spans the length of Portugal, from Chaves in the north to Faro on the southern Atlantic coast. Vasco Alves cycled the route in summer 2020, across 8 days and documented the names of each town and village by recording them on his phone. The tracks are named in accordance with the distance travelled each day and the town name presented in chronological order.
These words are set against a utilitarian set up of synthesis and rhythm. We hear a familiar set of sounds across each track, though Alves has a way of adding, subtracting and layering them, to create new spaces and situations for each composition. The music clicks and stutters, like the sound of a bicycle changing gears. The tracks are awash with bass tone and static texture, which recall his earlier, radio focussed work. It’s hard to draw comparisons with this music, moments from of Mika Vainio’s Ø project and Muslimgauze’s ‘Azzazzin’ come to mind, though Alves has conjured a unique world of absorbing sound which exudes a sense of focus and introspection.
Vasco Alves is a musician from Lisbon, Portugal. His work explores the physicality of sound through the use of electronic and acoustic processes, including synthesis and amplification techniques, and the gaita de fole (Portuguese bagpipes). He is a member of VA AA LR with Adam Asnan and Louie Rice, known for their electroacoustic works and radical performance - live shows have included the use of distress flares and wheeling the PA through the audience. His solo music has been released by We Can Elude Control and After Action Review, who in 2020 released Gaita Contra Computador - a set of works for gaita de fole and computer. For this album Alves pares back his tools, using synthesiser and voice across 8 pieces, which act as an imaginary audio diary to his cycle journey along the Estrada Longa.
"Part experimental audio diary, part road movie and part psychogeographic meditation, Estrada Longa is an absorbing work of chiselled, enveloping sound and haunting textual exploration" - Fielding Hope, Cafe Oto
27,00€