Medical Records presents a hand-picked selection of the early recordings of Germany's Bal Paré.

The band started as Jeanette & das Land Z in 1981 with a 7“ on Konkurrenz Rec./ Phonogram which included two cover versions (a piece from a weird science fiction TV series soundtrack and a sixties Grand Prix Eurovision number one hit). The 7” became an underground hit.

The band then changed their name to Bal Paré and begin recording independently.  The band name was based on the song "Es war beim Bal Pare" from the German chansonette Hildegard Knef, which was a musical influence beside bands like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yazoo, etc.

The first Bal Paré LP, Hamburg-Paris-Catania, was released in 1982 on Konkurrenz Records. Since they had a large fanbase in Sweden, the second release (Metamorphose) came out in Stockholm on the Krautrock label.

Shortly after, the band experienced a major line-up upheaval.  There were many tracks produced during this time that ended up unreleased. Much of the material from this selection of tracks were culled from those unreleased sessions (which were later collected on the “Best of” CD-only release in 1996 on Tatra Records).

The original two LPs are long out-of-print and demand very high prices on the collectors market. This is the first time this collection has been reissued on vinyl.

The opening track "Rien" is a perfect display of what synth pop is modeled after: rich lead synth textures, male/female interplayed vocals, and electronic percussion. Though the entire record flows with ease and captivates the listener from beginning to end, other stand-out tracks include "Palais d’Amour," "Die Idioten," and "Meilleur Du Monde." This collection is absolutely crucial for fans of early new wave such as Deux, Moderne, Performance and other similar acts of the genre.

The tracks have been lovingly restored by Matthias Schuster.

More information can be found here.

Active since 1979, Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian pioneer of noise and industrial music.

Untitled 1980 was originally released in 1980 on cassette in Japan. This release marks the first re-issue of this work and pairs it with a 2013 re-working of the original material into four entirely new compositions.

This work was created using only a single semi-modular, monophonic synthesizer or, as Maurizio says:

"Originally composed in October 1980 simply by using a synthesizer KORG MS20, but with so much imagination.  Dedicated to technological sophistication."

More information can be found here.

Untitled #274 was composed by Francisco Lopez and and performed by Kasper T. Toeplitz at GRM Studios in Paris, France.

Francisco Lopez is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music. For more than thirty years, he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.

Kasper T. Toeplitz has worked with academic research organizations, such as GMEM, GRM, IRCAM, and Radio-France, as well as with experimental musicians, such as Éliane Radigue, Zbigniew Karkowski, Dror Feiler, Tetsuo Furudate, Phill Niblock and Art Zoyd.  Citing Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis as influences, his early work was mostly written for traditional instruments.

More information can be found here.

It is with great pride and pleasure that Glistening Examples announces the newest collaborative efforts of Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet.

Recorded at Tarker Mills in February 2014 then mixed and mastered at Glistening Labs, this 38 minute LP was carved deeply into 150 grams of virgin vinyl via Direct Metal Mastering at GZ Media in the Czech Republic.

More information can be found here.  Also of note, Jason has started a subscription series for his ongoing This Is What I Do project.

Following on from her highly acclaimed Ett LP on Editions Mego, Klara Lewis presents 4 new works which further her signature explorations of field recordings, electronics, rhythm, sound and atmosphere. Here Lewis exemplifies her uncanny ability to harness the world outside in order to reconstruct and re-present this as amorphous musical matter. These 4 new tracks exude a certain ambiguity where standard signposts such as rhythm, ambience, texture, light and dark remain as elusive as they are present. Whilst bypassing passive or photographic representation of the source material these works withhold a strong emotional quality resulting in a confident and at times brutal musical manifestation. As suggested by the title, Msuic resides in a zone at once familiar and slightly off-kilter, a world of Lewis' devising in which the listener is warmly encouraged to enter and explore. Msuic is another superb collection of music as fantastic matter.

More information is available here.

Else Marie Pade's Electronic Works 1958-1995 is a heavy-duty three-LP set which was restored, mastered and cut at Dubplates in Berlin under the watchful ears of curator Jacob Kirkegaard. These monumental works are presented, for the first time, pressed on audiophile grade heavy duty vinyl where they belong. Audiophile grade 3LP is pressed in an edition of 500 copies.

"The sounds outside became concrete music, and in the evening I could imagine that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music." Else Marie Pade

Else Marie Pade (born 1924 in Aarhus, Denmark; currently living in Copenhagen) is a precious golden gem in the world of contemporary electro-acoustic music. She is a true pioneer of Musique Concrete and electronic music recorded on tape. She is Denmark's first lady of electronic music and her piece "Syc Cirkler" (Seven Circles) became Denmark's first electronic piece to be performed on the radio.

EMP's search for sound began in early childhood when she was isolated in her bed for long periods of time due to illness. There she would lie and listen to the sounds around her just as she did years later when she was imprisoned for spying on Nazi compounds in Arhus. Once released from prison she became a piano student at the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen but chose to instead pursue the nuances of her inner sound world after hearing Pierre Schaeffer in 1952. She began studying with him not too soon thereafter. Her first electronic composition premiered in 1955.

More information can be found here.

Gorgeous electronic collaboration between Jacob Kirkegaard and Else Marie Pade. Urgent CD reissue of the sold out LP edition. This CD includes a beautiful 15 minute bonus track not included on the LP release.

Else Marie Pade (born December 2, 1924 in Aarhus) is a Danish composer who pioneered electronic and concrete music in Denmark beginning in 1954. Pade was active in the resistance movement during the Second World War, and was interned at the Frøslev prison camp from 1944 till the end of the war. An archival collection of Else Marie Pade's electronic work is now available on Important Records.

Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard's works are focused on scientific and aesthetic aspects of sonic perception. He explores acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible to the immediate ear. Kirkegaard's installations, compositions & photographs are created from within a variety of environments such as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, a rotating TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.

Based in Berlin, Germany, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne. Since 1995, Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, venues & conferences throughout the world. His sound works are primarily released by the British record label Touch and he is a member of the sound art collective freq_out.

"For all the scientific rigour to Kirkegaard's research into the sonic possibilities of various materials, his work reveals an underlying fascination for the mysteries and myths embedded in them. His work channels an access to an inner world." Anne Hilde Neset, The Wire, 07/09

Despite an age difference of 51 years, Else Marie Pade and Jacob Kirkegaard speak a similar musical language and are prominent listeners and communicators of sounds that we tend to overhear. For the first time these two pioneers are collaborating on a new work: SVÆVNINGER investigates the variations that one can hear when sound waves collide. Both artists have previously worked on this phenomenon; Jacob Kirkegaard in his work Labyrinthitis (2007) and Else Marie Pade in her work "Faust Suite" (1962). For their new joint piece SVÆVINGER, they remixed some of Pade's early (and hitherto unreleased) sound experiments with some of Kirkegaard's recordings from his own ear, thus leading the audience straight into the undiscovered labyrinths of their own hearing.

More information can be found here.

White Lights of Divine Darkness (for Sir John Tavener) 7:34

"By chance I composed this for my brother-in-law the day he passed away. In recent years he had seen the white lights of heavens gate, but returned, and became fascinated by what he called God’s divine darkness in this lifetime."

Unfolding Honey 6:06

"A track from my exhibition soundtrack 'Future Beauty, 30 years of Japanese fashion' held at The Barbican Gallery, London. The exhibition featured some amazing folded garments by Issey Miyake, that inspired the unfurling fabric feeling of the composition."

Luxury 3:00

"An orchestral drone piece featuring an old French lady singing to her cats with an extra celestial chorus."

Skyline Ascending 3:28

"A Carpenters LP piano loop is layered again and again over a high sky recording, which was recorded using a helium balloon floating in the clouds over the city, with raindrops."

Coda (for Sir John Dankworth) 5:00

"In my early teens, I used to attend week long music camps, in tents, within the grounds of Sir John Dankworth's home with Cleo Laine. I used to know them, and composed this piece with one of their vinyls on the day I heard he died. The installation premiered at the Sydney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury, broadcasting a 3-channel version to six '50s radios."

The City of Dreams 8:28

"Theme tune for the opening of 'The Mill: City of Dreams' a site-specific theatre production in a deserted mill in Bradford. Piano motif recorded live with my twin-arm turntable, additional overlays recorded with Mark Robinson on his old family piano."

Beyond 6:30

"The Carpenters return, sliding piano loops through recordings made in Grand Central Station at closing time when the vast hall was deserted, and the full majesty of the acoustic space could be appreciated. Stilettos pass by forming polyrhythms, as the last train announces its departure..."

More information can be found here.

Inner Space Memorial [for J.G.Ballard] 20:57

"Over the years, I have produced a number of works in praise of the ideas of J.G Ballard. He lived just over the river from my home. While reading his autobiography in 2009, I was wandering how to go and say hello, but found out I was too late. I produced a monument in honour of him called the 'Inner Space Memorial,' part of my Retrospective at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. A pair of speaker cones were turned around to play back into the void of their cabinets. An epitaph for a great mind."

Wonderland 20:00

"'Wonderland' is the finale of my exhibition soundtrack to "Asleep at the wheel...". A work that questions where our culture is heading further down the highway ahead. A single majestic daydream that drives you forwards as reality undertakes you. Location recordings were made in the middle of the night on a footbridge over the M3, at the end of Ballard's street. I was fascinated to work out that while he was writing Crash and Concrete Island, the six lane motorway was being built right past the front of his home. Ideal music for when you need to stay awake on the road!"

More information can be found here.

Hamburg's Marc Richter has been busy since his last Type appearance (2009's genre-bending and critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968).  Aside from helming the prolific Dekorder imprint, he's put out a number of musical curios, including 2012's excellent film soundtrack EARTH.  Now Richter is back with Alphabet 1968's proper followup, a sprawling double album pieced together with crumbling samples, vocal snippets and an arsenal of noise generators and filters.

Richter's material has always been characterized by an air of surrealism, but it's never been more obvious than on the pulsing, chattering opener "Human Gidrah" or in the delirious fractured pop of "Hands."  There are real songs in hidden somewhere, but disintegrated by Richter's sound manipulation techniques and dissolved into soupy extended drone marathons. The centerpiece is undoubtedly "Is Nowhere," which builds slowly over 20 minutes with rumbling organ sounds and buzzing filters, never budging your attention for a second.

Black To Comm is a deeper, more challenging record than its predecessor, but one which repays the patient listener. Richter's dusty, unique sound has never sounded more well-honed and pointed, and it's a patchwork of ideas and fragments that only improves over time.

More information can be found here.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

A modern-day revenge tragedy in six parts. Symmetrical, finespun, almost courtly; but quick-tempered with it, and far from blood-shy.

A picture emerges: domestic disturbances, pissing on the compost heap, noise complaints from hateful neighbours. Sulking, pouting, goading – a hierarchy of needs. Cold leaves and Christmas. Body-clocks betrayed. Staying up late to collect bottles to smash in the carpark across the road. Marijuana and make-believe. Cracking this thin ice with deft stomping aplomb.

Due out December 15, 2014, in an edition of 300. Recommended if you carry a torch for AC Marias, Brenda Ray, General Strike, The Poems, Robert Storey or other such angels of shut-in dub dysfunction.

More information can be found here.

Faith In Strangers was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year.  Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.

The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away’"featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe, and last track "Missing," a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore, who also appeared on 2012's Luxury Problems.  Between these two points, Faith In Strangers heads off from the sparse and infected "Violence" to the broken, downcast pop of "On Oath" and the motorik, driving melancholy of "Science & Industry" – three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity.  Things take a sharp turn with "No Surrender"- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while "How It Was" refracts sweaty Warehouse signatures and "Damage" finds the sweet spot between RZA's classic Ghost Dog and Terror Danjah at his most brutal.  Faith in Strangers is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here: its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott's mixing desk.  It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott's career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

More information can be found here.

Sea Island is a collection of new material composed and recorded over the past two years. While many of these compositions were performed live extensively prior to recording, others were constructed in the studio and are being heard for the first time here.  Musically, the album represents a range of compositional approaches.  Murky, densely textured depths of sound are explored with subtle pulses and pings woven within, contrasted with composed or improvised moments of acoustic instrumentation making a move into the foreground.  Certain tracks on Sea Island such as album opener "Ahull" make rhythm their focus by exploring subtle polyrhythms and investigating colliding moments of repetition and variation.

Though staunchly electronic at its core, instruments such as vibraphone and piano make appearances, and layers of live musicality, improvisation and detail appear in the looped and layered beds of manipulated sound recordings.  A varied cast of players appear in the loscil ensemble, some familiar collaborators from the past such as Jason Zumpano on rhodes and Josh Lindstrom on vibraphone, and others new to the mix such as Fieldhead's Elaine Reynolds who provides layered violin on "Catalina 1943," and Ashley Pitre contributing vocals on Bleeding Ink.  Seattle pianist Kelly Wyse, who collaborated with loscil on his 2013 edition of piano-centric reworks Intervalo, performs on the tracks "Sea Island Murders" and "En Masse."

More information can be found here.

Vinyl reissue of Carter's 2008 "standards" album.

"Masque Femine should be regarded as a total work - much like a film, a ballet, a building, or, an altarpiece - rather than as an album of individual songs. And, its fundamental subject should not be understood to be romantic love."

Cut and mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M.

More information is available here.

Since his first live performances in 2002, Sean McBride, aka Martial Canterel (who also performs as half of the duo Xeno & Oaklander), has crafted his electronic sound in a peculiar intersection between avant-garde and pop. Merging the influences of the first wave of relatively unknown minimal electronic bands in northern Europe, and seminal industrial noise bands such as Throbbing Gristle and SPK, with the smoothly stylish songcraft of early British New Wave, Martial Canterel records and performs using analogue synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines exclusively, molding electricity to fix the action of music creation in substance. The mastery of his composition technique, a second nature of harmonic complexity, along with a unique talent for melodies, enables him to manufacture gems of extreme noise pop, making use of all its unexpected ingredients.

Gyors, Lassù marks an important milestone in the evolution of Martial Canterel's music, progressing far beyond the cages of "minimal synth" and embracing the noisier qualities of its sound with a renewed urgency, a kind of thickness embodied in multiple layers using only eurorack, Serge and Roland 100 modular systems at his disposal and flushing out the entire session in one take. Sine waves are rendered into walls of guitar-like noise on songs like "And I Thought," while the stretching out and liquifaction of what were once very precise pointillistic staccato synth arpeggios are marshaled into layers of violent bliss on "Gyors/Lassù." The analogue labor and the density of sound highlight the character of continuous performance of the music, where the intertwining of the artist and his work is profoundly material in its quality. As in a modern embodiment of the potter’s wheel…the hands, the texture of clay, with ceramic material. Translated lyrically and conceptually, music performance is for time what travel represents in space, and Gyors, Lassù is the sonic rendering of McBride's wanderings between Hungary ("Bulvàr," "Budapest II") and the South of Italy ("Teano"), between vibrant rhythmic structures and melancholic instrumentals, balancing its bodily intensity with abstract experimentation against the regression of the modern listener.

More information can be found here.

Starting as an imprint solely for Perc's own productions, Perc Trax has grown in recognition and confidence each year since its first release in 2004. This year Perc Trax celebrates its tenth year of existence, during which time it has released over seventy vinyl singles and six albums, hosted showcases as far away as New York and Tokyo and recently spawned the Submit and Perc Trax Ltd. sublabels.

To celebrate a decade of releasing music, Perc Trax looks to the future, releasing eleven brand new tracks from a mix of Perc Trax regulars including Truss, Forward Strategy Group, Sawf and Perc himself and names new to the label such as Clouds, Happa, Kareem, Drvg Cvltvre and Martyn Hare. These new tracks will be released as three separate vinyl EPs and will also form part of a 2xCD album. The first disc containing the new tracks, whilst the second disc is home to Perc's first commercially available DJ mix.

More information can be found here.

Mysterious techno operative makes shock return with debut album Butterfly Effect.

Demdike Stare have released the debut album from Shinichi Atobe on their DDS label.

Atobe only has one previous record to his name: Ship-Scope, a dubby and emotive techno 12-inch that came out on the Basic Channel sublabel Chain Reaction in 2001 (that one remains highly sought-after online and was one of FACT's "25 Best Dub Techno Tracks of All Time").  He hasn't been heard from since, but some sleuthing by UK duo Demdike Stare has unearthed a full album's worth of new and archival material from the Japan-based producer.

The album is limited to 600 vinyl copies. The vinyl, CD editions, and digital version are out now.

(via Resident Advisor and FACT)

Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello are creators of mythology.  Their mythology renders a series of acoustic spaces, haunted by narrative and hinting at happenings unseen, but certainly heard.

With Fable, we are presented with their second duet. It chronicles three years of intermittent audio communications in search of new collaborative approaches. The results focus on the pair's joint interests in modular synthesis, field recordings and the blurry boundaries between acoustic instrumentation and electronics. The album's multiplicity of sources creates a weaving and at times overwhelming collage of materials that coalesce with considered intent. Its palette, whilst diverse remains focused and as the album progresses themes of arrhythmic percussion, electronic-like field recording, prepared piano and vintage synthesis begin to take form.

Like the photography of the cover, these musical pieces bare witness to time, they exist in the moment, but are formed outside of a sense of singularity. Their textured qualities and intricate variations are evidence of an iterative production methodology that invites a depth of listening. A pondering and the intended goal that one may hear or even see their own internal spaces, haunted by a cast of sonic characters.

More information can be found here.

Synapse-scorching occult-industrial-prog-noise-folk from the strings of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies.

Churning mantras and drukpa elegies for two erased darkside tree limbs: that of the Draconian in Khem, and of Drax Priory in West Yorkshire, which together with Bhutan are the Dragon Lands. The twilight language of flowers is spoken and wolves are raised, finally, Kali dances. For fans of Bathory and Popul Vuh.

Comes in a deluxe 6-panel outsized double-digipak with a 16-page booklet.

More information is available here.

"Ruins was made in Aljezur, Portugal in 2011 on a residency set up by Galeria Zé dos Bois. I recorded everything there except the last song, which I did at mother's house in 2004. I'm still surprised by what I wound up with. It was the first time I'd sat still for a few years; processed a lot of political anger and emotional garbage. Recorded pretty simply, with a portable 4-track, a Sony stereo mic and an upright piano. When I wasn't recording songs I was hiking several miles to the beach. The path wound through the ruins of several old estates and a small village.

The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love. I left the songs the way they came (microwave beep from when power went out after a storm); I hope that the album bears some resemblance to the place that I was in."

More information is available here.