from kranky:

Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by "the idea that something is missing or cold," the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as "small texts hanging in space," impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen – fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog.

from Liz Harris:

Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.

Out April 27th.  More information can be found here.

October Language is the debut album by New Orleans-based duo Belong, comprised of Turk Dietrich and Mike Jones.

Since its release in early 2006, Belong's debut masterpiece has accumulated a dedicated cult following, with comparisons to the work of Christian Fennesz and Gas, with some claims that it plays like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless sans the songs. While these comparisons are useful for filing this album into a particular bin in the record shop, time has proven that October Language is a unique album which remains unmatched by its contemporaries.

Despite the warm and welcome accolades of the album's arrival, there was no vinyl pressing until 2009, of which a limited one-time pressing vanished immediately. Spectrum Spools is pleased to present a pristine vinyl cut to go with reimagined album art for the definitive edition of this legendary classic.

More information can be found here.

"Glass offers the sublime results of a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), as performed and recorded at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut during the private opening to Yayoi Kusama's installation marking the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth.

Making sterling use of the landmark architectural work's pellucid dimensions, the pair fixed contact mics to its glass walls, which they effectively played as an "instrument," rubbing it with rubber gong mallets to generate delicate tones which they combined with a sympathetic palette of singing glass bowls, crotales, keyboards and mixers.

The seamless performance of floating, weightless tones and exquisitely quivering timbres is without doubt one of their finest. For the duration we're held static and spellbound by the pair's interplay of microtonal shifts and plasmic chronics, keening the listener thru hazes of digital dust and vortices of angelic harmonics to locate, alchemise and resolve a rarified, deeply mysterious spirit before the piece closes.

As the follow-up to their OST for The Revenant [2015] and the warbling keys of Summvs [2011] before that, the achingly lush tension of Glass is perhaps the purest testament to the clarity of vision and endless minimalist mutability of this highly revered duo."

-via Boomkat

Once you'll touch the sky you will never return to dust is a new 1-hour long instantaneous composition performed with a prepared mini-keyboard, a handmade shortwave receiver and Roberto Opalio’s patented alientronics and wordless vocalizations. It is a masterpiece of modern minimalism, an ecstatic voyage where time and space lose their meaning, thus glorifying the poetic lyricism of the "here and now," that "eternal now" that other visionary artists and vanguards of the past have always dealt with, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Muhal Richard Abrams. "Towards the Sun," headed Arthur Rimbaud. "Space Is The Place," asserted Sun Ra.

Out March 7th on Elliptical Noise.

Eliane Tapes is a new series on Moving Furniture Records. All the music in this series is dedicated and/or inspired by the works of Éliane Radigue.

With her groundbreaking work already in the late '60s and early '70s Éliane Radigue created a path for many other musicians in the field of minimalism and drone music.

To celebrate the amazing work she has done (and still does), we ask musicians to create works that are inspired by her work and as such are a dedication to her.

The first release for Eliane Tapes is by Kassel Jaeger.

For Retroactions, Kassel Jaeger created "studies" trying to extend the gesture Éliane Radigue did with feedbacks, with a different and more "hi-fi" setup than the one she used at the time.

In 4 studies, he experiments with different feedback setups: controlled, non-controlled, processed and non-processed. He worked with 6 microphones and 10 speakers, feedbacks.

Out February 19th on Moving Furniture.

The Sky With Broken Arms is a further step ahead into the realm of the unknown, where the music made of minimal, dreamy guitar chords and eerie wordless vocals over a dense layer of crackling noise comes out of a strong conceptual idea.

As Roberto Opalio’s foreword to the work reads "On a winter day two years ago, I found out that an entire section of my vinyl collection was completely ruined by an inexplicable oxidation process. [..] As a first reaction, I decided not to play those records ever again... and that I did, for a long time. 'Til one night, exhausted, I felt the absolute urgency to listen to one of those LPs whose musical content got buried by the vinyl surface noise. In that moment, the shocking epiphany: [..] slowly, I began to perceive that not only were the old, beloved sounds that I was used to still there, but the layer of ground noise obliged me to even more attentive and active listening; thus I was discovering very subtle sound details now claiming their own being and pretending their own space.  The idea of a new MCIAA album came out of this enlightenment.  A new concept concerning the representation of music on the one hand and its perception on the other.  A music so essential and precious as to be discovered by the listener little by little, because hidden by a blanket of crackling noise, which I obtained from the blank grooves of my damaged vinyls.  Thus, here we are: infinite spaces of disintegration and psycho-existential ecstasy… essentially, spaces of non-limited, non-stoppable Poetry."

Out March 7th on Elliptical Noise.

Northern California producer Fred Welton Warmsley III's solo work as Dedekind Cut (pronounced "dead-da-ken cut") has evolved from fractured industrial design into increasingly subdued and sublime ambient meditations across two years of dedicated activity. His second full-length collection, Tahoe – so named after the mountain lake town he now calls home – swells with widescreen grandeur, evoking vistas both inner and outer. There are echoes of his earlier, more tempestuous mode in tracks like "MMXIX" and "Spiral" but overall the album skews panoramic and pensive, muted synthetic mists contoured with choral melody, field recordings, and radiant drone. His compositional instincts feel alternately classical, contemporary, and conflicted, befitting an artist whose discography spans divergent labels.

Warmsley characterizes Tahoe as a "time peace," sifting through "the past, the present, future, and fantasy."

Out February 23rd on Kranky.

Editions Mego's 250th release continues its ongoing legacy of cross-pollinating and perverting various threads of radical 20th Century music whilst concocting and propelling further ideas into the nebulous region where we currently reside.

With Ex Nihilo, Editions Mego resumes its enduring relationship with long-term collaborator and stalwart representative of the labels aesthetic with a new release from London’s most charming deviant occupant, Mr. Bruce Gilbert (formerly of Wire, Dome etc..).

Gilbert's peculiar approach to sound over four decades has seen him engage with a wide variety of practice and performance always hovering amongst the grey area between his mind and the surrounding architecture. Ex Nihilo is another significant entry into Gilbert’s outre sound-book.

Inhabiting a murky zone between interference and trauma, Ex Nihilo is a daring and dark audio ride through a contemporary ketamine haze, one which haunts identifiable parameters whilst remaining too oblique to be truly quantified.  "Change and Not" teases discomfort, "Black Mirrors" embraces disorder, "Nomad" skirts the unsettling.

Whilst never quite resolving its own logic, Ex Nihilo invites the casual listener to join a devastating, peculiar, and somewhat paranoid fantasy (reality?).

Another effortless Gilbert classic.

More information can be found here.

Dais Records is proud to unveil the new dark pop masterpiece from artist and composer Tor Lundvall. His first vocal album since 2009’s Sleeping and Hiding, and following the release of two instrumental albums and three CD box sets since that time, Tor returns with an album of beautifully intricate sadness and reflection: A Dark Place.

Born in 1968 in Wyckoff, NJ, Tor Lundvall is a painter and ambient composer.  The son of Blue Note Records legend Bruce Lundvall, Tor was exposed to artwork, music, and creativity from a young age, and  began his professional painting and music output in the late '80s.

Widely known for his dark imagery and thoughtful, provocative soundscapes, Tor Lundvall’s artwork is all-encompassing. His music, when paired with his paintings, creates a world within which one could easily disappear.

An intensely private individual, Tor Lundvall eschews the gallery circuit and live performances for his private studio in Eastern Long Island, NY, preferring to show his artwork privately and focus on studio production and writing without the pressures of the audience and all it encompasses.

Dais Records is honored to provide another glimpse into his world through his recordings.  We hope you find it as special and as unforgettable as we do.

More information can be found here.

Air Lows is the debut solo album by Silvia Kastel.

The Italian artist has been a fixture of the underground since her precocious teens, clocking up many miles in Control Unit with Ninni Morgia ("It’s like Catherine Deneuve dumped two cases of post-Repulsion psychiatric notes over Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing, lit the fuse and, ahem, stood well back" – Julian Cope), including collaborations with the likes of Smegma, Factrix, Gary Smith, Aki Onda and Gate (Michael Morley of The Dead C). Through her own label, Ultramarine, she has released music by the likes of Raymond Dijkstra, Blood Stereo and Bene Gesserit.

Both solo and in her work with others, Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock and improvisation. Air Lows – which follows the cassette releases Love Tape (2011), Voice Studies 20 (2015) and The Gap (2016) – is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but assuredly breaks new ground.

Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono’s Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very "human" synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant and Sun Ra: all these things were touchstones for Air Lows' conception and composition. All strains of music addressing – and complicating – the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like?

Though used sparingly, Kastel’s voice remains her key instrument, whether subject to dissociative digital manipulations as on "Bruell," delivering matter-of-fact spoken monologues, or providing splashes of pure tonal colour. Recorded between her expansive Italian studio and a more compact, ersatz set-up in Berlin, Air Lows gradually takes on some of the character of the German capital: you can hear the wide streets and empty spaces, the seepage of never-ending nightlife, the loneliness. Air Lows is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: the glorious technicolour J-pop deconstructons of its first half leading inexorably to the icy noir of "Spiderwebs" and "Concrete Void." These later tracks are reminiscent of 2015’s magnificent 39 12", Kastel in the role of numbed, nihilistic chanteuse stalking dank, murky tunnels of reverb and sub-bass. But there is contradiction and emotional ambiguity to Air Lows from the outset, and throughout: a sense of both infinite space and acute claustrophobia; energy and inertia; fluency and restraint.

Out now on Blackest Ever Black.

Written during what Dimitris Papadatos, aka Jay Glass Dubs, describes as "an adventurous and bold period," and holding material issued on tape by various labels between 2015-2016, the Dubs compilation frames a singular, stripped-down take on classic dub forms, wherein Jay Glass Dubs perceptibly retains the sound’s heavy function and mystic qualities, but subtly updates its palette with a range of nods to a myriad of unexpected, angular styles.

The results form a sort of ghostly, filleted subtraction of classic dub architecture, all plasmic tones and diaphanous, boneless structures buoyed by an often overwhelming, yet somehow intangible bass presence. Beyond the obvious, thematic ligature that connects the material, which was all recorded within a very short period of time, the artist also suggests there is an underlying, encrypted similarity to the material which is "merely apparent to me," and awaits much closer investigation from keen ears.

From Jay's eponymous 2015 debut for Hylé tapes, listeners will encounter the heaving smudge of Definition Dub, the serpentine, Coil-like digital delays of "Grumpy Dub," and a grime drone drill "Depression Dub." Off the II tape for THRHNDRDSVNTNN comes the darkwave synths and militant step of "Magazine Dub" recalling a gauzier Equiknoxx production, next to the bass-less scudder, "Detrimental Dub" and the shoegazing bloom of "Daria Dub," while his III tape tees up some abyssal highlights in the vertiginous "Hilton Dub," the melancholy, Basic Channel-scoped scale of "Sieben Dub," and the HTRK-esque starkness of "Everlasting Dub."

Exclusive to the set is "Perfumed Dub," recorded in 2017 and pointing to vast, layered, atmospheric directions for a timeless project which is only just hitting its stride.

Out now on Ecstatic.

12k is very happy to announce a new LP from long-time label favorite and ever-elusive Shuttle358. With Field, Shuttle358’s Dan Abrams returns to the beautiful roots he layed down with his now-classic Frame (12k1011, 2000) which Alternative Press heralded as "Ranking alongside Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II and Eno's Music for Airports in its evocation of imaginary space.", and which Boomkat (UK) called "Shuttle358's undisputed masterpiece." His distinct human imprint on the highly digital sounds of the microsound and clicks and cuts movement of the time played out across his other releases as well including Optimal LP (12k1005, 1999), Chessa (12k1030, 2004) and Understanding Wildlife (Mille Plateaux, 2002).

It is in this specific space and through splintered memories from the dawn of the 2000s that brings Shuttle358 back to his early explorations with Field. Specifically, those sounds nestled in computers from the late '90s running period software and "graced"by the lo-fi color of early DSP algorithms. Abrams deliberately takes advantage of slow CPU cycles and crashes on old computers to piece together a framework of disjointed rhythms and melodic loops that sound like they're crawling and skittering from a new digital dystopia. This landscape unveils elements that made his early work so powerful by the way he combines the broken with the beautiful. Deep rhythms made from truncated transients provide the foundation for ghostly vocal snippets and the signature musical ambience that defines the Shuttle358 atmosphere.

In a way, Field can be seen as a rebirth of the glitch, a modern take on the captivating microsound movement of the early 2000s and a powerful statement from Abrams who connects the dots and further deepens and expands his sonic story.

Out now on 12k.

We're excited to welcome New York City-based composer and performer Lea Bertucci back to NNA for a brand new full-length LP, Metal Aether.  Lea’s early 2017 cassette release All That Is Solid Melts Into Air focused on her role as a composer, with a hand-picked selection of talented musicians performing her minimal compositions.  Metal Aether instead showcases her role as a performer, revealing four pieces that represent approximately 3 years of ideas and gestures for alto saxophone and magnetic tape.

Much like the recordings of her previous NNA release, Metal Aether continues to explore Lea’s acute interest in the nature of acoustics and the harmonic accumulation of sound, with its four pieces having been recorded in Le Havre, France in a former military base, and in New York City at ISSUE Project Room. With her horn, Lea produces pulsing minimalist patterns, transcendent drones, and upper register squalls that envelop these spaces in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects. Tracks like "Accumulations" explore evocative, ancient-sounding melodic figures, while tracks like "Sustain and Dissolve" relish in the microtonal relationships between overlapping sustained notes. Aside from the saxophone, Bertucci further interacts with physical space by fortifying these pieces with manipulated field recordings from diverse locations, ranging from Mayan pyramids to NYC subways. Other instruments such as prepared piano and vibraphone can be heard on this album, processed through tape to unite melody and texture together as one. Lea displays a firm grasp of the inherent possibilities of sound manipulation to maximize her music’s power through the recording process itself, mixing conflicting fidelities to achieve a deeper, more organic form of expression.

More information can be found here.

Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier.

Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece "I Am Sitting In a Room." He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electronic tones produced by oscillators in combination with single instruments. Demonstrating the restless creative drive of an artist now in his 80s, the two recent works presented here both feature the electric guitar, an instrument Lucier has just recently begun to explore.

In "Criss-Cross," Lucier's first composition for electric guitars, two guitarists using e-bows sweep slowly up and down a single semitone, beginning at opposite ends of the pitch range. The piece exemplifies Lucier's desire not to "compose" in the conventional sense, but rather to eliminate everything that "distracts from the acoustical unfolding of the idea."

In this immaculately controlled performance of "Criss-Cross" by Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom the piece was written in 2013, a seemingly simple idea creates a rich array of sonic effects — not simply beating patterns, which gradually slow down as the two tones reach unison and accelerate as they move further apart, but also the remarkable phenomenon of sound waves spinning in elliptical patterns through space between the two guitar amps.

In the comparatively lush "Hanover," Lucier draws inspiration from the photograph on the cover, an image of the Dartmouth Jazz Band taken in 1918 featuring Lucier's father on violin. Using the instrumentation present in the photograph, Lucier creates an unearthly sound world of sliding tones from violin, alto and tenor saxophones, piano, vibraphone (bowed), and three electric guitars (which take the place of the banjos present in the photograph). Waves of slow glissandi create thick, complex beating patterns, gently punctuated by repeated single notes from the piano. The result is a piece that is simultaneously both unperturbably calm and constantly in motion.

Out now on Black Truffle.

Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears – maybe paracusia?  Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie’s second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist’' grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor… An unsettling and strangely beautiful album – akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting.

Out 3/23/18 on Students of Decay.

"The artist sometimes known as Huerco S. ushers a phase shift of sound to the shoegazing harmonic gauze of Make Me Know You Sweet, his immersive debut proper as Pendant. In this horizontal mode, Brian Leeds relays abstract stories from a headspace beyond the dance, placing his interests in the Romantic landscapes of JMW Turner, Robert Ashley’s avant-garde enigmas, and Indigenous North American philosophy at the service of a more expressive, oneiric sound that sub/consciously avoids the trapfalls of 'chillout' ambient cliché.

Across seven amorphous, texturally detailed tracks he establishes far reaching coordinates for both Pendant and the West Mineral label, which aims to release everything except the commonly accepted, traditional forms of late 20th/early 21st century dance music, while also representing the work of his inner circle of friends, producers, artists. In that that sense there’s a definite feeling of "no place like home" to his new work, but that home appears altered, much in the same way The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby deals with themes of memory and nostalgia.

It’s best described as mid-ground music, as opposed to the putative background purpose of ambient styles, or the upfront physicality of dance music. Rather, the sound billows and unfurls with a paradoxically static chaos, occupying and lurking a space between the eyes and ears in a way that’s not necessarily comforting, and feels to question the nature and relevance of ubiquitous pastoral, new age tropes in the modern era of uncertainty and disingenuity.

The results ponder an impressionistic, romantically ambiguous simulacra of reel life worries and anxiety, feeling at once dense and impending yet without centre. From the keening, 11 minute swell of "VVQ-SSJ" at the album’s prow, to the similar scope of its closer, Pendant presents an absorbing vessel for introspection, modulating the listener’s depth perception and moderating our intimacy with an elemental push and pull between the curdling, bittersweet froth of "BBN-UWZ," the dusky obfuscation of "IBX-BZC" and, in the supremely evocative play of phosphorescing light and seductive darkness in the mottled depths of "KVL-LWQ," which also benefits from additional production by Pontiac Streator.

Make Me Know You Sweet taps into a latent, esoteric vein of American spirituality that’s always been there, yet is only divined by those who remain open-minded to its effect."

–via Boomkat

More cryptic information can be found here.

"Why am I afraid of my own thoughts?"

After a severe mental breakdown, Kyle Bates of Portland OR's Drowse was prescribed a plethora of antipsychotic drugs to subdue his paranoia and suicidal ideation. Several unmedicated years later, Bates’ anxiety began to resurface, and he turned to Klonopin and alcohol to blanket the intrusive thoughts. It was during this time that Bates wrote and recorded Drowse's second full-length album, Cold Air. Marked by fanatical self-exploration and expansive detuned instrumentation, Cold Air is the project's first release for The Flenser.

Drowse is a peek inside the mind of Kyle Bates, the band's only full time member. Cold Air was painstakingly recorded over nine months in Bates’ home. The house itself appears several times on the album in the form of field recordings and background occurrences. Although Bates himself is a secular person, his lyrics were influenced by the religious writings of Anne Carson and Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose ruminations on death correlated with his own. Cold Air is an album that frames big picture ideas within intimate, often shame-ridden experiences: a nose broken while blackout drunk, a seizure followed by feverish hallucinations, a father’s stroke, the death of a close friend. Cold Air is the sound of the uncertainty beneath our lives surfacing.

The shimmering dissonance with hints of slowcore, post-punk, ambient and shoegaze that characterizes Cold Air will appeal to fans of Mount Eerie, Planning for Burial, and Have a Nice Life. Many of these songs feature vocals from the band's creative partner Maya Stoner. Drowse is a complex and layered project set apart by its raw ambition.

More information can be found here.

NPVR is moniker taken on board by Pita (Peter Rehberg) and Factory Floor's Nik Void.

Peter and Nik both share formidable reputations in the post-industrial shape-shifting world of sound and form with a vast range of releases and collaborative endeavors over a number of years. Together, they tie together their collective experience into a vast array of sonic devices unleashing an album of pragmatic imbalance and psychedelic orientation. Blurring the lines of techno, ambient, avant garde, noise, etc.

33 33 positions itself in the nebulous realm of contemporary (dis)comfort presenting itself on the border of music and sound, the social and the private.

More information can be found here.

Deep Frosty bandleader Steve Ruecker is a legend to some, a much loved participant in the California rock scene who often hosts barnburning jams at his house in Encinitas. Enlisting Ben Flashman from Los Angeles and Utrillo Kushner from Oakland (Noel Von Harmonson and Ben Chasny guest) of Comets on Fire, Blues Band could be 2017's great rock record. Guitar progressions undergo a classic Quicksilver treatment, as Ruecker's sincere, Roky-esque vocals make testament to the plight of the indigenous, the horror of modern times, and the hopeless beauty of heartbreak. The band's pure enthusiasm coupled with a distaste for complacency seeps through like blood on fabric, making Blues Band a raw and rocking joy to hear.

More information can be found here.

High Rise exploded onto Tokyo’s underground music scene with the roar and reckless abandon of a motorcycle accelerating headlong into a dead man’s curve. Born from the explosive chemistry of bassist/vocalist Asahito Nanjo and frenetic guitarist Munehiro Narita, the band blazed a wild new stream of psychedelic guitar music. Their second album, High Rise II, is a defining document of the band and unquestionably one of the greatest albums to emerge from 20th century underground Japan and beyond. With Nanjo’s distorted thunder bass and Narita’s wildly narrative lead guitar playing, High Rise II is a non-stop tour de force of improvised rock music. Combining elements of garage rock, punk and no wave, the band pushed all levels fully in-the-red and transcended the limits of rock and psychedelia to create a raw, unique expansion of the music.

Black Editions is proud to present High Rise II, newly mixed and mastered by Asahito Nanjo in what the band states is the definitive version of their most quintessential recording. Housed in heavy Stoughton tip-on jackets this new edition restores the original vinyl version’s textured black and silver artwork. Insert with unreleased band photographs included. Pressed onto high quality vinyl by RTI.

Out January 26, 2018 on Black Editions.