Out of stock
4 CD box
Joshua BONNETTA
“The Pines”
4xCDs housed in oversized digisleeves.
Hardcover slipcase.
12pp booklet with original text by Robert Macfarlane and foreward by jake moore
Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording? His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, released on February 28, 2025 via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator jake moore, who suggests the forest knows when it is being listened to.
Macfarlane’s luminous essay proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around – entangling it in the surrounding environment, to ask what sort of noise it and other plants and animals make when there is no human listener; asking what sounds come to the fore when we step out of the frame, and in what ways a microphone might alter the way we listen in the environment.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree’s trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, each of which captured events in and around the tree’s branches and immediate environment. We hear weather and wildlife; coyotes and owls; the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans; a time lapse of the audible world around the circumference of a single tree. The microphones used, and the methods of editing, are tech borrowed from conservation bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring, which offered Bonnetta a way to engage much more deeply than any standard field recording would.
The Pines I-IV is not bombastic sonic work, but is subtle, often contemplative and sometimes soothing, as when rushes of rain sweep over the landscape, or a flock of geese pass overhead. It is not about exotic renderings of place or or mythically veiled field recording, but about accessing a new way of listening to something familiar, by removing a human presence and extending the listening window beyond usual human capacities. Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew, and which he had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. "For over a decade I taught in Ithaca" he says "and spent a lot of time exploring southern central New York, but never made any projects there. We decided to relocate to Munich a couple years back and before I left I wanted to document the sounds of this environment that I spent so much time in and had come to love. This technology afforded me the opportunity to be able to keep a record across a year and when I started to listen back I was surprised with results and began to devise a system to edit the work. There are several great bioacoustics applications which can analyze and interpret the data but I wanted to manually browse and edit the materials so that I could collect sounds outside of what the applications might traditionally identify: mainly weather and the sounds of the tree itself. The Dim Coast saw the potential in the work as an installation and publication and helped me realize that there might be a project outside of it just being a personal document."
He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum. He spent time listening to re-familiarize himself with the soundscape and then scanned the visual data for ‘events’ in the files, a method of analysis more typically used by scientists mapping bird and wildlife populations.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape: “I grew up in a rural area in Ontario, and I have a very early memory of two brothers from our small school who had said they had made a recording of wolves, which were only rumoured to be as far south as we were. The previous evening they had taken their portable cassette recorder to the edge of their lane, which backed on to a large forest preserve, and claimed to have recorded wolves howling. They played it back at school the next day and I remember that the sound was primarily noise and hiss, but we were all listening intently and straining to hear something as they kept playing back the tape. Whether they were really there or this was just the collective imagination of a group of children, we started to hear wolves – or more likely coyotes. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience”.
45,00€
Out of stock
4 CD box
Michèle BOKANOWSKI
“Musiques de concert”
This 4 CD box edition collects all concert musics by Michèle Bokanowski, a composer of electroacoustic music living in Paris, France.
Passionate about music from childhood, it wasn’t until later, at the age of 22, after reading À la recherche d’une musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer, that she decided to study composition. After classical training in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a pupil of René Leibowitz, who taught her writing and analysis upon Schönberg Theory. In 1970, she began a two-year internship at the Research Department of the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Between 1973 and 1975, she took part in a research group on sound synthesis, studied computer music at the University of Vincennes as well as electronic music with Éliane Radigue. She mainly composes for concert and for cinema (music for Patrick Bokanowski’s short films and for his feature films L’Ange and Un Rêve solaire). She has also composed for television, theatre and dance.
In her music, often infused with a mysterious atmosphere, she uses evocative and poetic concrete sounds, with a mastery of looping and feedback techniques and with an art of cinematic editing.
“Why musique concrète is so attractive to me, as opposed to written music… To write music implies that an idea or a thought is at the origins of the composition and that the final thing is the sound rendering of this thought. The sound is at the end of the line, in other words. Musique concrète is the exact reverse of this process: you start from sounds… sounds that will perhaps lead you to a constructive thought. Here, it’s the material that induces the thought, or the writing. The possibilities of finding or inventing new sounds and, therefore, new forms are tremendous, infinite… Moreover you can use chance to a much greater extent.”
(Excerpt of an interview with Michael Karman for Asymmetry Music Magazine 2007)
CD1 :
Pour un pianiste (1974)
Trois chambres d’inquiétude (1976)
Tabou (1984)
CD2 :
Phone variations (1988)
Cirque (1994)
CD3 :
L’étoile absinthe (2000)
Chant d’ombre (2004)
Enfance (2011)
CD4 :
Rhapsodia (2018)
Cadence (2019)*
Elsewhere (2020)*
* unreleased
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
35,00€
Out of stock
4 CD box
TONGUES OF MOUNT MERU
“Naga Mountain”
Lasse Marhaug and Jon Wesseltoft have collaborated in a variety of projects over the years, but started the Tongues of Mount Meru duo back in 2008 as a collaboration to pursue their shared interest in sustained and closely calibrated sounds, and the phenomenological impact they have on the act of listening. They started recording a session each year from 2008 to 2011 in Oslo utilising harmoniums, organs, shruti boxes, oscillators, and computers and accumulated a large pool of material. Some of that material wound up on tapes and vinyls over the years, but they kept the hour-long pieces with an intended major future release in mind. These pieces are now collected in this monumental 4 disc box set.
Clocking in at the total of over 4 hours, with over 10 years in the making, this music was crafted with a clear intent to influence its listeners sense of time and mental colour analogous to the music's stringently, and at times claustrophobic, unfolding narrative. Slowly blooming clusters of wave interference kaleidoscopic blending together with lower frequency binaural pulse patterns. It is as if light has been pitched down, and its oscillating and shimmering coating of gradually shifting overtone cycles opens up and crashes down again into the ocean of waves continually churning around its own time axis.
Drawing upon their joint interest in minimalism and long-form music, raga theory and electro-acoustics, Marhaug and Wesseltoft conjures up a focused power of both beauty and unease to deeply establish a state of hypnotic attentiveness. The result is a hallucinatory and intense set of finely tuned and tectonic long-form pieces, and is a must for anyone even remotely interested in any form of sustained sounds, and its impact on the mind.
200 copies, black cardboard box set with embossed gold print
35,00€
In stock
4 CD box
Alessandro CORTINI
“Forse”
Alessandro Cortini's acclaimed Forse series is available for the first time on CD including an exclusive disc of Forse performed live. Composed using only an original Buchla Music Easel, an incredibly rare electronic music instrument designed by Don Buchla, the Forse series features long, romantic compositions full of voluminous, bombastic tones and dripping with thick timbre.
2021 digital master by Stephan Mathieu. Packaged in matte-coated digipacks, housed in a heavy-duty tip-on style outer box.
45,00€
Out of stock
4 CD box
Adam PACIONE
“Any Way, Shape, or Form”
Adam Pacione's finely crafted, deeply affecting drone work has found its place in the upper echelon of modern ambient artistry. Once heard, the gorgeous fluidity of his music is instantly recognizable.
Now, an absolutely crucial addition to Pacione's relatively slim oeuvre is here, offering more than four hours of aural color and visual sound from a master of the medium. "Any Way, Shape, or Form," a stunning 4CD box set, compiles all the material from Pacione’s "Still Life" series of 3" CDRs, originally offered via monthly subscription throughout 2009 and now long out of print. The late night ambient/drone sessions in this set were pulled from recordings made from 1999-2009, many of which originally served as soundtracks to Pacione’s photography exhibitions in galleries throughout Texas. These recordings have been meticulously remastered and two previously unreleased tracks from this period have been added, resulting in an absolute must-have for aficionados of haunting, textural, electronic music.
Pacione’s work largely centers around early Portastudio tape loop experiments, synthesizers, samples, and processed field recordings that gradually decompress to form a hypnotic serenade of becalmed tones. After years of experimentation, his first releases appeared in 2004, leading up to his proper debut album, "Sisyphus," a year later. By this time, Pacione's name was becoming synonymous with lush, atmospheric sonances of the highest caliber. His reputation strengthened even more with his next full-length, 2007's masterful "From Stills to Motion," which fully delivered on the promise of his earlier efforts. Since then, Pacione has stayed active with performances and recordings (see 2020's excellent digital-only "Mâché"). His physical output has been sparse over the last decade or so, however, and copies of the earlier releases are now quite scarce. "Any Way, Shape, or Form" then is particularly essential in making this vital section of Pacione's discography widely available for the first time.
The sixteen tracks included here are mostly long-form pieces: contemplative soundscapes evolving at a deliberate pace. There is an inherent spaciousness in these works; sounds are free to move and breathe as they shift between tension and tranquility. These extended audial ruminations allow Pacione to examine and subtly emphasize the details of each arrangement. And these details have been brought into sharp focus by the rigorous mastering job executed by renowned sound artist Alex Keller: a drifting haze sharply underscored by a biting frost.
In addition to the peerless audio in this set is a 20-page booklet reproducing all of Pacione's photography from the original CDRs as well as several previously unpublished images. These truly are the visual equivalents of his recordings: otherworldly snapshots of a stylized vision of nature, neither artificial nor entirely organic but a harmonious amalgamation. These rich photographs are somehow both crisply intricate and dreamily impressionistic: the ideal accompaniment for Pacione's evocative sound, perfectly rounding out his world-building.
This beautiful artefact is simply a rare pleasure for the senses. And a welcome reintroduction to Adam Pacione's singular aesthetic. A treasure not to be missed.
32,00€
Out of stock
4 CD box
Robert TURMAN
“Chapter Eleven (1976-1987)”
2021 repress.
"Debuting in 1988 as a self-released 8xCassette boxset, Chapter Eleven collects the solo recordings (1976 - 1987) from one of the earliest members of the US Industrial Noise scene, coalescing a wide swath of influences and culling experimental techniques into inventive new terrain. Carefully remastered from the original tapes, this deluxe reissue is a long-awaited rescue from obscurity. 4xCDs -- Over 4 hours of music. Remastered by John Wiese. Co-Released by Hanson Records and Helicopter."
"Turman seemed to have taken over where the last of the great synth based kraut artists left off in the 70's, infusing the spiritual meditation music with his own brand of loop hypnosis, slowly moving drones, industrial patterns, guitar fuzz, and even some in-your-face 80's style synth work" --IMPOSE Magazine.
45,00€
4 CD box
Jim O’ROURKE
“to magnetize money and catch a roving eye”
A 4-hour work recorded at Steamroom (composer’s studio) between 2017 and 2018.
Detailed and delicate electronic layers, processed instruments, and ambiguous field recordings come together in a slow-moving, fascinating kaleidoscope with multiple reflections and wrong turns, always in constant state of flux. The finely crafted art of subterfuge.
“To magnetize money and catch a roving eye”, four CD’s – a hypnotic, multi-faceted, labyrinthine piece which flows as slowly as a river while speeding back through memory, and shows all the talent of Jim O'Rourke.
Composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, born in Chicago in 1969, Jim O’ Rourke is a veritable chameleon, working at the frontiers of very diverse musical genres.
30,00€