News & Events
From Here to Eternity is the first full length album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn since his 2014 long play, Infinite Sadness.
The use of processed guitar and his passion for cinematic swells reaches new realms that are markedly more ominous and dense than his previous long play. Kyle Bobby Dunn also recruited prominent ambient composers and a handful of his favorite musicians to arrange their own instrumentation for several works on this release that add multiple layers of mystery and intrigue of the human mind and heart. Artists that contributed to this effort are: Benoît Pioulard, Simon Scott, Loscil, Pan-American, Wayne Robert Thomas, Isaac Helsen, Mark Nelson, Robert Donne, Maryam Sirvan, and Michael Vincent Waller.
Kyle Bobby Dunn wanted this album to be very much about the eternal conflict with all human emotions and life circumstances and to somehow go even further than the concepts left behind on Infinite Sadness. The moods and sounds range from angelic choral elements to motion picture soundtrack epics; permeating the skeletal system of the listener with a sense of boundaries and mortality. There are also moments that capture the dynamics of the artist performing in the live setting perfectly and were engineered meticulously by Matt Rogalsky and Kyle Bobby Dunn himself. Truly a difficult album of unending loss, confusion, pain, identity, disease and even death, but also some of the most reflective and warm moments of his career to date.
Releases May 3, 2019 on Past Inside the Present.
Akira Rabelais’ years-in-the-making new album CXVI features collaborations with Harold Budd, Ben Frost, Biosphere, Kassel Jaeger and Stephan Mathieu, among others. It unfurls a quietly breathtaking, dreamlike sequence of events where early music meets a prism of shoegaze, ASMR, classical and textural sound design - huge recommemdation if yr into Felicia Atkinson, the GRM, Morton Feldman, Stephan Mathieu, Deathprod, Harold Budd...
Set to be received as Rabelais' magnum opus, CXVI finds the Hollywood-based composer challenging his usual working methods, pushing himself to refresh binds with longterm collaborators such as Harold Budd and Stephan Mathieu and forge new relationships with like-minded craftsmen such as Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), while also finding a new vocal muse in Karen Vogt of Heligoland, and also coaxing the recorded debuts of his friend Mélanie Skribiane, and filmmaker/photographer Bogdan D. Smith. The result of their time-lapsed endeavours is a record of divine subtlety and poignant patience, rendered with a mirage-like appeal.
Opener "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds," beautifully segues from a prickly bouquet of keys and lovebite-distortion penned with Ben Frost to a reverberant, spine-freezing piano coda from Harold Budd, before "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds" smokily gives way to the sylvan shadowplay of the album's masterful centerpiece, "Star to Every Wandring Worth's Unknown," where Mélanie Skribiane reads from Max Ernst's "la femme 100 têtes" against an exquisite veil of strings and keys realized by Akira with the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger a.k.a. François Bonnet.
The 3rd part of the album only becomes more sparse and isolationist, as Karen Vogt's plainsong gives way to the tremulous, icy timbres of Akira's processed guitar strokes, originally written for Cedrick Corliolis' Tokyo Platform soundtrack, before the final side of "If Error and Upon Me Proved" finds Akira pushing Geir Jenssen’s (Biosphere) synths into the red, emphasizing a romantic soreness that turns into crushing noise, before Bogdan Smith's whispered vocal melts into an ancient, arcane air inscribed to 78rpm vinyl by Stephan Mathieu and then sweetened, re-incorporated by Akira as the album's stunning closing passage.
Riddled with bedevilling detail and utterly timeless in its scope, CXVI is a disorientating opus you’ll want to undergo over and again, for our money one of the great quiet albums of recent years.
More information can be found here.
It took more than just some time and imagination to believe that Carte Blanche, this piece of astonishing contemporary music by some of the most talented and able musicians of the international avant-circuit, could be realized. Karkhana, a highly explosive mostly Middle Eastern/Mediterranean ensemble -- Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Shalabi Effect, Dwarfs Of East Agouza), Sharif Sehnaoui ("A" Trio), Michael Zerang (Peter Brötzmann, Hamid Drake, Jaap Blonk, Vandermark, etc.), Mazen Kerbaj ("A" Trio), Maurice Louca (Dwarfs Of East Agouza), Tony Elieh, Umut Caglar (Konstrukt) -- is weaving a tapestry of sound for Egyptian songstress Nadah El Shazly's voice to slide deep into. On the other side, two grand seigneurs of underground, ex-Sun City Girls and Rangda guitar whirlwind Richard Bishop and W. David Oliphant (Maybe Mental) play it loud. Far Eastern post-industrial. Very heavy, sharp, and crystal clear. Ripe. Carte Blanche will be released as a one-time pressing. It is released as a part of Unrock's Saraswati Series. Vinyl cut by Peter Koerfer at Ivory Tower. Extra-heavy deluxe cover, printed cardboard insert. 140 gram vinyl.
Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remixed [Touch, 2014] and Bécs [Editions Mego, 2014]. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first, but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand."
Agora will be released March 29, 2019 on Touch.
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Phill Niblock's Music For Cello collects three pieces from the '70s and early '80s, performed by cellist David Gibson.
This CD includes a 16-page unpublished interview with Phill Niblock.
Since the late sixties, Phill Niblock has been composing long-form acoustic drones with a focus on the rhythms and overtones that rise from closely tuned instruments. His highly original and influential music is an exploration of timbre, microtonality, stability, duration and psychoacoustic phenomenon.
"'3 to 7 - 196' is very direct, aggressive, and gritty. The overtone patterns that are produced by the proximal pitches become more prominent with louder volume. So please, play this piece very loud. This was the first piece of mine in which the musician was precisely tuned, in which I chose exact pitches in hertz. We used a sine wave oscillator and frequency counter for the tuning.
'Descent Plus' has four cello tones descending one octave over twenty-two minutes, from 300 hertz to 150 hertz. David Gibson played these tones without lifting his bow from the strings, constantly retuning. I made four different scores, manually changing an oscillator to which he was tuning, for each track's recording. For the revision, we added six more tracks, with David playing long tones which were not descending. The second part of the recording was made nearly twenty years later.
'Summing II' (one of four parts) is mellow and sonorous. David plays two strings simultaneously, one of which is retuned for each successive recording of that pair of tones. This is a mix of an eight track tape. It's better played loud also."
- Phill Niblock from liner notes
More information can be found here.
Plastic Anniversary
Due out March 15th, 2019
Watch the trailer:
https://youtu.be/tKs57sl4_fA
Plastic Anniversary features music crafted entirely out of sounds sourced from plastic objects
Matmos will tour Plastic Anniversary worldwide
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Pre-order Matmos' Plastic Anniversary:
https://thrilljockey.com/products/plastic-anniversary
Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as minuscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order.
It's a long player.
More information can be found here.
Black To Comm is the solo project of German sound artist Marc Richter. Through his output both as an artist and through his eclectic Dekorder label, Richter has established himself as a singular voice of new music. Operating at the fringes of drone and ambient genres, his music is darkly magical and deeply atmospheric, underpinned by a signature surrealism. A relentless sonic explorer, Richter approaches the studio as his instrument, using sampling, analogue production and digital manipulation to offer an almost infinite choice of tones and textures. Audio fragments are liberated from their original context and sculpted into surprising new shapes, creating work that transcends time or genre. Seven Horses For Seven Kings sees Richter reaching out again into the limitless field of sound, summoning forth his darkest and most visceral work to date.
Seven Horses For Seven Kings was completed during a particularly prolific period for Richter. Working on a broad range of commissions since his last album - from writing for film and theatre works to composing for art installations, apps and sleep music - generated a flurry of new ideas and influences. Site-specific residencies in particular let Richter shift his focus from melody and song architecture to more abstract sound art. Extensive touring would equally come to inform a key shift in Richter's music, simulating the raw, unpredictable energy of live performances on record. Rather than ironing out mistakes in samples or his own playing, he exploits or even forces such imperfections. While rhythm has been largely absent from previous Black To Comm releases, here the music seems totally bound to it, from the fractured techno breaks of "Fly on You," to the pounding war drums of "Rameses II" and pulsing Mellotron sounds of “Angel Investor." The album's breath-taking pace drives Richter's music to new levels of intensity.
Richter's creative practice is informed as much by careful, attentive listening as it is studio experimentation. Pieces often begin life as a single sound that catches his ear, be it a record from his extensive collection, or something in the natural environment. Samples and instrumentation are sometimes presented authentically, a deliberate reference to an era, place or player, and at other times are twisted beyond recognition. Samples from contemporary artists like Nils Frahm are bent and compounded with fragments of early recorded music and medieval song. Richter blurs the lines between organic instrumentation and digital production to the extent that the two become inseparable. Being able to separate sound from context gives Richter complete command of the emotional impact of his music, imbuing pieces with meaning or stripping it back as he sees fit.
While Richter questions whether instrumental music needs to have deeper meaning beyond its sonic qualities, he accepts that the wider world inevitably bleeds into his art. Reflecting the violence and unreality of modern life, Seven Horses For Seven Kings is unashamedly dark, undeniably angry. But rather than be consumed by such emotions, Richter employs them as ecstatic release. Through his mastery of sound, he achieves transcendence through noise, beauty through intensity.
More information can be found here.
TUTTI
THE NEW SOLO ALBUM
by COSEY FANNI TUTTI
available 8th February 2019
Vinyl, CD, Digital, Streaming
released by Conspiracy International on 8th February 2019.
TUTTI is comprised of eight soundscapes: an audio self portrait comprising of manipulated sound recordings from Cosey’s life, music and art: “It’s the only album I’ve made that is an all encompassing statement expressing the totality of my being. A sense of the past in relation to the present and everything in between.”
Available on Blue Vinyl or Gatefold CD the physical releases feature silver blockfoil embossed covers and the vinyl release include printed inner sleeve and download code.
TUTTI RESOURCES PAGE
(headshots, pack shots, press release)
Tutti
Drone
Moe
Sophic Ripple
Split
Heliy
En
Orenda
