 |
|
A new work by David Jackman (Organum), Herbstsonne consists of a single 47 min. long track which is the result of recording sessions at RMS Studios South London in 2018.
Using the sounds of Tanpura, Piano, Organ and Bells the music perfectly captures the title of the piece which translates to Autumn Sun.
Precision editing by Alan Jones. Excellent artwork by Jonathan Coleclough.
CD edition of 300 copies, in Digisleeve packaging.
Visit Die Stadt or contact the label via e-mail at
Cover art by Babs Santini.
Back cover art... could be Worse.
A complete new studio album on United Dairies (UD913).
More information can be found here.
"Co-habitant treads on most sensitive melodic nerves in their exquisite debut and sole release for Chained Library.
The eponymous Co-habitant release trades in a distinct style of filigree, pealing, high-register electronic minimalism that uses sparse ingredients to absorbingly meditative effect.
The A-side’s swaying figure in "a.003" is a particular highlight that we could easily listen to on loop for hours, while the B-side has us utterly rapt with the transition from mechanical rhythmelody and fascinating reverberant overtones in "b.002" thru the isolationist SAW II tingles of "b.003" and the sallow ripples of "b.004.""
-via Boomkat
Additional information can arguably be found here.
The city of Belém, in the Northern state of Pará in Brazil, has long been a hotbed of culture and musical innovation. Enveloped by the mystical wonder of the Amazonian forest and overlooking the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, Belém consists of a diverse culture as vibrant and broad as the Amazon itself. Amerindians, Europeans, Africans - and the myriad combinations between these people - would mingle, and ingeniously pioneer musical genres such as Carimbó, Samba-De-Cacete, Siriá, Bois-Bumbás and bambiá. Although left in the margins of history, these exotic and mysteriously different sounds would thrive in a parallel universe of their own.
I didn't even know of the existence of that universe until an Australian DJ and producer by the name of Carlo Xavier dragged me deep into this whole new musical world. Ant it all began in Belém do Pará. Perched on a peninsula between the Bay of Guajará and the Guamá river, sculpted by water into ports, small deltas and peripheral areas, Belém had connected city dwellers with those deeper within the forest providing fertile ground for the development of a popular culture mirroring the mighty waters surrounding it. Through the continuous flow of culture, language and tradition, various rhythms were gathered here and transformed into new musical forms that were simultaneously traditional and modern.
Historically marginalized African religions like Umbanda, Candomblé and the Tambor de Mina, which had reached this side of the Atlantic through slaves from West Africa – especially from the Kingdom of Dahomey, currently the Republic of Benin – left an indelible stamp on the identity of Pará's music. They would give birth to Lundun, Banguê and Carimbó, styles later modernised by Verequete, Orlando Pereira, Mestre Cupijó and Pinduca to great effect. The success of these pioneers would create a solid foundation for a myriad of modern bands in urban areas.
Known as the "Caribbean Port," Belem had been receiving signal from radio stations from Colombia, Surinam, Guyana and the Caribbean islands - notably Cuba and the Dominican republic - since the 1940s. By the early 1960s, Disc jockeys breathlessly exchanged Caribbean records to add these frenetic, island sounds to liven up revelers. The competition was fierce as to who would be the first to bring unheard hits from these countries. The craze eventually reached local bands' repertoires, and Belém's suburbs got overtaken by merengue, leading to the creation of modern sounds such as Lambada and Guitarrada.
To reach a larger audience, the music needed to be broadcast. Radios began targeting the taste of mainstream audiences and played music known as "music for masses". As the demand for this music grew, it led to the establishment of recording companies. Belém's infant recording industry began when Rauland Belém Som Ltd was founded in the 1970s. It boosted a radio station, a recording studio, a music label and had a deep roster of popular artists across the carimbó, siriá, bolero and Brega genres.
Another important aspect in understanding how the musical tradition spread in Belém, are the aparelhagem sonora: the sound system culture of Pará. Beginning as simple gramophones connected to loudspeakers tied to light posts or trees, these sound systems livened up neighbourhood parties and family gatherings. The equipment evolved from amateur models into sophisticated versions, perfected over time through the wisdom of handymen. Today's aparelhagens draw immense crowds, packing clubs with thousands of revelers in Belém's peripheral neighbourhoods or inland towns in Pará.
The history of Jambú e Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia is the history of an entire city in its full glory. With bustling nightclubs providing the best sound systems and erotic live shows, gossip about the whereabouts of legendary bands, singers turned into movie stars, supreme craftiness, and the creativity of a class of musicians that didn't hesitate to take a gamble, Jambú is an exhilarating, cinematic ride into the beauty and heart of what makes Pará's little corner of the Amazon tick. The hip swaying, frantic percussion and big band brass of the mixture of carimbó with siriá, the mystical melodies of Amazonian drums, the hypnotizing cadence of the choirs, and the deep, musical reverence to Afro-Brazilian religions, provided the soundtrack for sweltering nights in the city's club district.
The music and tales found in Jambú are stories of resilience, triumph against all odds, and, most importantly, of a city in the borders of the Amazon who has always known how to throw a damn good party.
More information can be found here.
Debut release by the new ANTIGRAVITATIONAL imprint, the record label & multimedia platform created and curated by My Cat Is An Alien (MCIAA), set up with gallerist and publisher Marco Contini.
"MCIAA PHASE THREE — WE BAPTIZE THE SPIRITUAL NOISE" reads Roberto Opalio’s aesthetics Manifesto: SPIRITUAL NOISE opens the third decade of activity by iconoclastic instantaneous composers, musicians, performers and visual artists Maurizio and Roberto Opalio.
Fully focused on MCIAA’s "aliencentric" vision, Antigravitational’s main purpose is to offer the experience of the deepest immersion in the sound and visual matter of each work of intermedia art by the brothers–as duo, as soloists, as well as in collaborations with some of the most talented artists of our time.
Pursuing their ongoing fight against the digital-only fruition of concepts and contents of today, MCIAA privilege the thingness of physical mediums to fix their art, aiming to survive the non-permanence over time.
Designed following principles of seriality and of installation art, each release takes the shape of a multimedia object which displays a proper artbook mounted on the LP cover jacket, and gives access to cinematic poetry films and extra contents as further investigations. Various combinations of objects and formats are intended to provide an ever-expanding universe of multistratified references and meanings.
More information can be found here.
Sarah and Ariel blend their strong individual personalities in a single trip on the edge of time. Their kosmiche music is pure, magnificent and elegant, an intergalactic hypnosis that seems to tell of distant times, a millenary vortex of a lost Era. In the first phase of departure, the mysterious song of the sax winds in archaic echoes, supported by the electronic inlays of the synth (Arp Odissey). Flowing between space rumbles and astral progressions, we sight high celestial bodies. When the infinite drones of the tampura start, we take part in the night ceremonial, surrounded by the deep harmonium and the Tibetan bell chimes. This music releases a sort of mythological warmth, secret codes of a lost purity, which lets us dwell in the labyrinths of a pyramid or in the sacred space of a cosmic pagoda.
More information can be found here.
Following a limited vinyl edition in 2018, Oliver Coates’ arrangement of Pulitzer Prize-winning US composer John Luther Adams' 2007 piece Canticles of the Sky appears for the first time across all formats.
In March 2017, Coates conducted 32 cellists in the UK premiere of the composition, displaying its intimacies after deeply communing with the trajectories of Adams' fictional suns and moons, the guiding characters and carriers of the piece.
This recorded interpretation, performed by Coates for multi-layered solo cello, takes Canticles of the Sky to wondrous, dizzying new heights, envisaging Adams' parallel dimension as an idealized construction. Marrying extra-musical studio techniques and meticulous arrangements to Coates' fascination with early electronic synthesis (especially the work of Laurie Spiegel), the result offers an ultra-sensory take on classical string instrumentation.
Coates has released a handful of solo records under his own name, including the acclaimed 2016 album Upstepping, 2017’s Remain Calm, a collaboration with Mica Levi, and most recently, 2018’s Shelley’s On Zenn-La, his debut album for RVNG. As an artist and performer, he is frequently commissioned by world-renowned orchestras, choreographers and visual artists to compose or curate integral new works.
More information can be found here.
French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms – how even the quietest creative act ripples outward in unforeseen ways, a whisper with no fixed meaning. Her latest work pursues this notion in a more literal and lasting fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour, in impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody."
In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower & The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s "L'enfant et les sortilèges" ("a scary opera for kids"), Debussy’s "La Mer" (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s "Gymnopédies" (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and "melody with doubt"). There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.
Although much of Atkinson’s past discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, The Flower & The Vessel ventures farther into silence, absence, and voiceless wilderness. Among her sources of inspiration were "women who wonder, dream, and create vacant spaces in their art," as well as Ikebana flower arrangements, which reflect her own relationship with listening: "structure combined with everyday noises, selecting them to make a sparse music bouquet." Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene.
Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album’s few pieces tracked in a proper studio (Music Unit in Montreuil, France) but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower & The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Atkinson’s voice flickers like a flame, framed by slabs of shadowy feedback. Her process may be personal is but its impact ripples to the edges of existence: "How does the act of creation connect us, not only to history, but to the cosmic? It’s a process of taking, and then giving back. It makes us belong to the world."
More information can be found here.
Craig Leon revisits the extraterrestrial origins of civilization on Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon. Picking up where the pioneering electronic albums Nommos and Visiting (Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1) left off, The Canon traces the imparted knowledge of alien visitors as it spread from Africa across the ancient world. Co-produced and featuring vocals by Cassell Webb, the pair engage a sonic pallet familiar from Vol. 1, updated with ecstatic contemporary sound and synthesis, creating a propulsive, exploratory album of cosmic lore and speculative anthropology.
More information can be found here.
Teleplasmiste's first release for Golden Ratio Frequencies, SCIENCE RELIGION is two side-long abstractions, recorded in London, Somerset and Wiltshire between 2017 and 2018, assembled from jams, experiments and accidents that occurred during recording sessions and rehearsals.
More information can be found here.
Via Boomkat:
"The one you were waiting for: some of Chris Carter's earliest home studio productions appear on Archival Recordings 1973-1977, which was previously part of the Miscellany boxed set, and now available as stand-alone vinyl release.
For fans of Carter, his CTI and Chris & Cosey duo with Cosey Fanni Tutti, or indeed his crucial role in Throbbing Gristle, these recordings scan the relatively serene roots of what would become Industrial Music, and a seismic shift in underground experimental musicks.
Predating both his work in COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, and his zinging debt LP The Spaces Between, the Archival Recordings disc is perhaps of greatest interest, historically and artistically, to long-term fans of Carter’s musick. Spanning 1973-77, it covers the years just before, and after, Throbbing Gristle’s conception, when Carter was clearly in thrall to kosmische and psychedelia, but not beholden to them. Across 13 parts, Carter's take on space music and pulsing early electronics is definitely less whimsical, much darker than other music of that period, progressing chronologically over the LP to reveal a full embrace of electronic music’s dark allure by the time we get to the hellish miasma of "See Sick" [1977]."
More information will eventually be available at Mute.
Transcendental tape loops and bedroom ambient dream states from the teenage mind of Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive. All The Mirrors In The House is the first of three projected releases of very early works by the Detroit-based savant, prior to signing to 4AD in the late-1980s.
With help transferring aging cassettes and annotating the results from Shelley Salant of Tyvek, the unearthed results are revelatory - a gorgeous sequence of gently decaying tone float made with an incredibly primitive DIY set-up.
As Defever recounts in the liner notes: "By age ten, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother's LP collection played at the wrong speeds. As a teenager, I got deep into all kinds of music - punk, new age, blues - and played bass in the high school jazz band, as well as studying Bach chorale harmonization and counterpoint. My first album consists of rhythm tracks made of loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway with echoey guitars and vocals with lyrics about ghosts."
Inner sleeve essay and interview by Mike McGonigal, the founder of Chemical Balance magazine and YETI publishing, and the author of acclaimed books on My Bloody Valentine and Galaxie 500.
More information can be found here.
The first release from The Bug’s PRESSURE label in 2019 is an absolute sound system crusher from JK Flesh (aka Justin Broadrick Godflesh/Jesu/Zonal etc…). Three tracks of the slowest, heaviest, dread techno you are ever likely to hear. Plus a remix from The Bug himself, in full doom riff mode.
Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) is quoted as saying "I'm as proud of dropping this epic 12" as i was of being the person to release Godflesh's Love is a Dog from Hell, many moons ago on my old label Pathological Records. This time around, Justin again redefines absolute heaviness, but in a club format, as he gets sociopathic with his homicidal riffs and deep space explorations. Absolute malevolence, a complete body slaughter. I virtually begged Justin to let me release In Your Pit! Haha. And I'm very happy he agreed and additionally passed me two more tracks of utter dirt."
More information can be found here.
Shawnee, Ohio, the first album by sonic ethnographer Brian Harnetty on Karl, is an intriguing blend of archive recordings of interviews with residents of that small town and melancholic chamber-folk.
Brian Harnetty (b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary artist working between music composition, sound, and socially engaged art. Rooted in sound archives and the communities connected to them, his body of work contends that the simple act of listening –– to people, places, and their pasts –– can transform our futures.
Both a 2018 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Contemplative Practice and a recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital Performing Arts Award, Harnetty is deeply involved with local issues of Appalachia and the Midwest. He connects sound archives with performance, ecology, and place - an approach for which he was labelled a "sonic ethnographer." Many of his pieces transform archival material –– including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings –– into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For more than a decade, this has led to projects with archives such as the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, the Sun Ra / El Saturn Archives in Chicago, and the Anne Grimes Collection in the Library of Congress. Harnetty has released four internationally acclaimed albums: American Winter (2007), Silent City (2009), The Star-Faced One (2013, MOJO Magazine's Underground Album of the Year!), and Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015).
In the words of Brian Harnetty himself:
Shawnee, Ohio is a sonic portrait––past and present, real and imagined––of a small Appalachian town in the United States.
Shawnee emerged as a coal mining town in the 1870s. A century of decline forced businesses and people to leave, and today local residents fight to hold their buildings and community up amid a new “fracking” boom. Despite an uncertain future, these residents continue to work for environmental, economic, and cultural enrichment. Since 2010, I have been visiting and working in Shawnee. I have also been retracing the footsteps of my family, who immigrated there as Welsh coal miners in the nineteenth century.
Shawnee, Ohio focuses on eleven portraits of local residents recounting their lives, work, friendships, and deeds. They talk and sing of mining, disasters, underground fires, social life, protest, and hope. They include women and men, are black and white, and are across generations and centuries. Working directly with community members, I use archival samples of their voices and weave them together with my own ensemble. Past and present are tangled together in a haunting world of music, stories, and images."
More information can be found here.
Danielle de Picciotto was born a nomad on the US Army base at Ft. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington. Thus her journey started, moving from one base to another for years.
In 1987 she moved from NYC to Berlin to initiate the Berlin Love Parade together with her then boyfriend Dr. Motte, to create the Ocean Club with Gudrun Gut, one of her longest standing collaborators, to be engaged to the late Roland Wolf of the Bad Seeds, to become the renowned singer of the Berlin band Space Cowboys, to exhibit her art and films internationally in multiple museums, and from 2001 to start collaborating with Alexander Hacke, founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten.
They married in 2006 and with him her travels continue! The artist couple gave up their home in Berlin 2010, and have been touring the world since.
Danielle de Picciotto’s new album Deliverance speaks of these travels and the state of our world from an eagle’s perspective. Despair and hope lie side by side, mirroring the dark shadows and beauty she has experienced on her journey. Her music is a mixture of spoken word, electronic soundscapes, melancholic violin harmonies, and surreal choirs, moving back and forth from experimental sounds to beautiful melodies managing thus to blend hope and despair into a cosmos of constant flux.
Imagine Laurie Anderson dancing with This Mortal Coil in a strange wasteland of dreams and sounds, that is Danielle's universe. It is one that faces reality and its challenges with mystical, dreamlike wisdom, discovering solutions in unexpected alcoves, offering hope and wonder as an alternative.
The album, a limited edition of just 150 pressed on black vinyl presented case bound with 24 pages of the art she has created during her years of traveling including a hand-numbered and signed screen print.
Her black and white ink sketches that also overlay colourful backgrounds, reveal her personal state of mind and emotions in a college of images and textures that expand her musical visions into a fascinating three dimensional experience.
More information can be found here.
The new Meat Beat Manifesto album Opaque Couché will be released on May 10th 2019 on CD, vinyl and digital formats. The double vinyl will come in two flavors – regular black vinyl and a limited-edition opaque couché (brown) picture disc (300 copies worldwide) in association with the UK's Electronic Sound magazine.
Jack says of the album: “Opaque Couché”* continues the search for the most imperfect pop song, with sixteen opaque tracks it can be seen as a companion to Impossible Star.”
* Opaque Couché is known as the world’s ugliest color," used on cigarette packets to discourage smoking.
More information can be found here.
Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt go way back. And although they regularly work together in the quartet Piiptsjilling, their last effort as a duo stems from 2008, the album Drawn (on Foxy Digitalis/Morc).
But now Eau is here. Eau (pronounced "oh") means "water" in French, and that's how it sounds; like gently rocking waves of sound, or like a babbling sonic stream of fractured audio debris. It also sounds a bit like the equivalent of sunlight dancing on the ripples of a lake's surface.
Eau is not really a song, or a composition. Well, technically it is, but it functions more like an atmosphere that fills the space. Just let it play (on repeat…) and let the sounds hang in the room - let them co-exist with any other sound that's there. Open a window if you wish! Or, experience the trip on headphones, let these soft tones, gentle voices, buzzes and crackles tickle the inside of your skull.
Eau was mastered by the one and only Stephan Mathieu, who made this carefully crafted audio patchwork shine even more.
More information can be found here.
Passageways is John Daniel's most personal work to date. An ode to his childhood home - a secluded apartment complex in Cleveland that his parents managed - Passageways refer to the various connecting hallways running between rooms as much as it refers to the way the passing of time overtakes our perception of spaces that seemed to be endless corridors into discovery and imagination. Passageways is full of submerged melodies, gentle pulls of surging tonal shifts that arc, shimmer and fade into the dark purple hue of the album's shifting overtones. The album rides the line of decaying drones that recall the best of Basinksi or Belong's October Language.
From John:
Passageways is a record about my childhood home.
The "passageways", in this case, are partially referring to hallways.
I grew up in a unique environment - a quiet and secluded 3-story apartment building in the west suburbs of Cleveland. My parents managed the building so our family had two apartments, eventually right next to each other. As a young kid I would adventure around the apartment building and its surrounding property, thick woods and greenery were behind the building and felt like an endless backyard. I attribute much of my early imagination and creativity to this place.
My folks will be moving away in the next few years as my Dad plans to retire, so I'm planning on leaving a copy of the record with the building, hidden somewhere. I had lived in that building since I was 4 years old - the idea of your home no longer being there is strange, but change is necessary. This home was simply a "passageway" into the life that I live now- I believe it was instrumental in becoming an artist.
This is my folk record in a way. It is not musically obvious, but more in terms of how I approached the writing: A sense of sentimentality about home, about a place and time.
My first instrument (outside of the drums) was an acoustic guitar, and that's how I started out making solo music. I eventually learned that I wasn't a guitarist and sought more minimal, simple ways of making sounds. But that's really where things started, so I've always felt a connection to that type of music, even in these days of electronic music. I also think there's an idea about electronic music being a bit evasive or emotionally inaccessible at times, or lacking personal transparency. I wanted to challenge expectations of an ambient record by framing it how I would have 10 years ago. This is a development in a side of Forest Management that I've only recently begun to feel, and am doing my best to roll with it.
More information can be found here.
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio, Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: DOME (July 1980), DOME 2 (October 1980) and DOME 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, WILL YOU SPEAK THIS WORD: DOME IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.
These albums represent some of the most beautifully stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.
Previously issued in the out of print DOME 1-4+5 box set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card.
Out May 31st on Editions Mego.
Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present this collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier.
"For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that’s at the onset of every piano sound leaving only the sinusoidal pure after-sound. It’s as if he invented electronic music with the piano." Alvin Lucier from liner notes.
"Lucier manages to hear a layer of acoustical physics in Feldman’s music that perhaps no one else would hear. He’s hearing something in Feldman that is actually coming from his own musical world; in a way, hearing his own music in Feldman’s, and drawing inspiration from that."
More information can be found here.
