 |
|
Live trio collaboration:
Dirk Serries - guitar
Eric Quach - guitar
Tom Malmendier - drums
This is an improvisational set by three musicians who came together at Christuskirche Bochum. The result is a 41-minute-long track with an epic structure of drone, noise, ambient, experimental sounds and freejazz elements.
More information can be found here.
Reynols started in 1993 in Buenos Aires and is famous amongst many things for its unique Down's syndrome drummer/vocalist Miguel Tomasín, who is the band's spiritual architect. Reynols is also known for its musical diversity, which spans everything from cosmic free-rock and lo-fi drone electronic music, to conceptual sound art and social/political/esoteric observations. The world of Reynols is a universe completely of its own, and inhabits so much that even an extensive box like this only scratches the surface.
Although Reynols have worked with an open-process DIY philosophy and been the subject of multiple documentaries, the band has still managed to sustain an element of mystery, so the release of Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018 marks the first time the band has allowed an extensive overview of their work to be made. Fans of the band will also be happy to learn that most of the material is previously unreleased, including two albums from the early 2000s that were completed but never issued; the earliest recordings from 1993; collaborations with artists Acid Mother's Temple and Pauline Oliveros; conceptual pieces; and more. There's also a DVD with 90 minutes of videos.
This boxed set shows the full range of Reynols. It has been six years in the making and is the most extensive boxed set project ever to be released by Pica Disk.
Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher’s 1991 piece "Petra" marks her first commercially available instrumental work.
"Petra" was originally commissioned for the ISCM World Music Days in Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. "Petra" is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher's impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear's short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.
This solemn interpretation of "Petra" was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre.
Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.
Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher's and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.
More information can be found here.
Michael Morley has long been acclaimed for his electric guitar and electronic forays in New Zealand’s legendary The Dead C and Gate. On Heavens Idleness Awaits, he strips his music to its most elemental state. Recorded at home and using only a single tracked 12-string acoustic guitar, Morley creates an intimate and intensely meditative work. Over four side-long tracks, he weaves hypnotic melodic figures that slowly unfurl to reveal a minimalist masterwork and one of his most powerful statements to date.
More information can be found here.
A 105-minute smoky tinted imprinted professionally duplicated cassette tape, housed in a clear case with full-color artwork printed on shimmer paper. Art by Grant Evans and inspired by Sarah Colombo's debut novel Subterranean. Also available in digital format.
"... struck by the despair of objects."
More information can be found here.
Today, we're glad to present our last winter's release by øjeRum who comes back for the second time on eilean rec. with Nattesne (eilean 85).
øjeRum is Copenhagen-based musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski. Since 2014 he has put out releases on various labels such as A Giant Fern, Cabin Floor Esoterica, eilean rec., Phinery, Scissor Tail Editions, and Vaald.
øjeRum is all about the attempt to capture and convey emotions, moods and memories.
Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilizing everything from pipe and reed organs to analog synthesizers, this prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for a radiant work of quiet minimalism and poetic rumination.
Recorded at Berkeley, California's famed Fantasy Studios, Pale Bloom is comprised of two delicately-arranged sides. The first – a three-part suite where Davachi's piano acts as conjurer, beckoning Hammond organ and stirring countertenor into a patiently unfolding congress – recalls Eduard Artemiev's majestic soundtrack for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. "Perfumes I-III" employs the harmonically rich music of Bach as a springboard for abstract, solemn pieces that sound as haunted as they are dreamlike.
While the first half of Pale Bloom showcases Davachi's latent Romanticism, the sidelong "If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery" reveals the Mills College graduate's affinity for the work of avant-garde composers La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue. Softly vibrating strings rise and fall like complementary exhalations of breath. As the fluctuating pitches create overtones that pitter and pulse, the piece slowly and subtly evolves – suggesting a well-tempered stillness, yet without stasis.
More information can be found here.
A deconstruction of Ska, Rocksteady and Skinhead Reggae from the '50s, '60s and '70s. Rather a passionate deconstruction of a genre than compositions or remixes per se, this incantatory tribute favors abstraction using loops, distortion, compression, variations of speed and height, and effects (delay, reverb, chorus). Recorded in different states of altered consciousness, Mt. Gemini is built of spontaneous and unexpected combinations. It is an attempt to generate inner spaces where the borders between reverie and reality blur. An hallucinatory shock, a journey made of distant echoes, an atmosphere imbued with joy and nostalgia.
More information can be found here.
Written alongside and as a follow-up to Disambiguation, Cruel Diagonals' Pulse of Indignation is a mighty next leap in Megan Mitchell's musical trajectory. Whereas, for Mitchell, Disambiguation was about sense-making and uncovering some of the traumas surrounding Mitchell’s early musical career as an adolescent and young adult, Pulse of Indignation is about recognizing the exploitation, grooming, and pain that she was subjected to as a young woman under the watchful eye of men with power in the music industry. It's about harnessing the righteous anger, repulsion, and indeed, indignation, at the proliferation of these experiences for young women and non-men. If Disambiguation was about mourning the loss of Mitchell’s self-volition through uncovering layers of previously obscured suffering, Pulse of Indignation is about moving through to the next stage and owning the narrative she projects into the world.
More information can be found here.
"Azzazin is a double standout Muslimgauze album, first LP originally issued in 1996, as a CD and the second LP as a 10", tightly focused on a singular palette of monotone drones and swarming electronic buzzes, which arguably sound like a parallel to early Editions Mego.
They're probably the most minimalist Muslimgauze tracks you've heard, and even still he manages to express a fine range of abstracted emotions, from aggressive buzz to tender ambient pieces and spectral concrete prisms. Starting with an extremely minimal opening number -- it's no surprise Finnish experimental duo Pan Sonic are Muslimgauze fans, based on this track -- Azzazin has a much more electronic feeling than most of Bryn Jones' other albums, eschewing the traditional elements used elsewhere for a rough, quietly aggressive and disturbing feel. The fourth track, with its unpredictable keyboard snarls over a low, quiet pulse, and the sixth and seventh songs, with distorted, high-pitched noise tones mixed with a soft series of bass notes and a slight spoken-word interjection from time to time, are some of the strong points from this intriguing release.
Surprisingly this album contains no trace of percussion whatsoever and instead presents a dry and claustrophobic minimal electronics that sounds more like a Warp band or a project by some S.E.T.I.-inspired laptop artist than a Middle Eastern-inspired band. Outerspace sci-fi sounds meet with found sounds and human-made noises, isolationist experimental knob tweaking and mostly hi frequency material loops playing at random. Beats are used in an extremely limited way throughout Azzazzin, with rhythm, always a key component of Jones' work, more suggested at points by the nature of the keyboard lines than anything else. This record draws a picture of the artist that is different than the one we got to know. Closing with an equally minimal track, Azzazin won't be everyone's cup of tea, but adventuresome listeners will find themselves rewarded."
More information can be found here.
Twenty years ago, Jan Jelinek's debut album Personal Rock was released by Source Records. Under the pseudonym Gramm, it brings together eight tracks that have not been available on vinyl since their original release. Faitiche is very glad to announce the re-release of the album: Personal Rock will appear as a double LP featuring the original cover artwork.
What people wrote about Personal Rock two decades ago:
"Situated somewhere between Jelinek's much-loved Loop-Finding Jazz Records, Farben, Move D's Conjoint project and Atom Heart's most immersive work for Rather Interesting, it is a late-night album full of subtle production tricks and melodic House structures that belong to the pre-millennial IDM heyday, but which transcend its overly-masculine templates.” (Boomkat)
"Though many producers have pushed forward the clicks-and-cuts style of experimental ambience developed by German experimentalists Oval (among others), few have been able to match their knack for making abstract cuts into pieces of undeniable beauty. Jan Jelinek's first LP as Gramm is one of the precious few, and it is obvious from the opener." (AllMusic)
"Organized in organic structures and minimal movements, the tracks get into utopian states and super-desirable moods, offering superior contentedness and dependable taste of the kind seldom sustained for a whole album. (...) Subway-Escalator-Soul." (Spex)
Releases April 6, 2019 on Faitiche.
The latest liminal low-end odyssey from French shape-shifter Maxime Primault's BZMC entity swaps the screwed alien dancehall of past outings in favor of miasmic subterranean ritual, with compelling results. Born of "a few very intense sessions, in altered states of consciousness," the three sprawling compositions comprising Voyage Sacrifice ooze in slow, smoke-choked darkness, awash with dungeon groans, insectoid noise, reverbed bells, molten bass, and distant demonic mumblings. Primault speaks of recent creative strategies attempting to "delete time, or escape time," at which these pieces certainly succeed, entrancing the listener in their spiral sinkhole infinity: beatless, lightless, limitless.
Occasionally a rusted, lurching metronome emerges, infusing a drugged sense of forward motion, but the essence of Voyage Sacrifice is textural and tantric – "almost like some kind of prayer." Chants are chanted; the zone is black. The specter of dub still looms in the disorienting fog of FX and negative space but ultimately these sides exist outside (and deep beneath) any recognizable sonic lineage. This is cultic, questing music, deprivation chamber hallucinations "beyond good and evil, beyond sense and non-sense."
This Rorschach enigma dimension is foundational, as Primault admits: "It's a mental journey. I handled the sacrifice; the voyage is yours."
More information can be found here.
Low Distance is Deaf Center´s third full-length studio album and perhaps the most focused effort by the Norwegian duo to date. After their last record Owl Splinters (2011) was quite an eclectic endeavor, Erik K Skodvin & Otto A Totland draw their sound back into something more quiet and minimal.
The record starts with a piece of sweeping analougue electronics. It is a spacious, yet dynamic opener that leads directly into the static tones and piano motifs of "Entity Voice," which balances a new sense of abstraction with the classic Deaf Center sound. It's warm and close while sounding like it's set in the outer horizon. Overall Low Distance feels both alien and familiar with its atonal synths, close pianos and drowned-out noises.
After meeting in studio for the first time since 2011, the recordings came out of a 3-day session in 2017. It was then mixed at both EMS Stockholm and at Erik's home studio over a longer period to create a blend of deeply layered as well as stripped-down pieces. Both Erik & Otto have been active individually since their last meeting as Deaf Center: Otto released 2 solo piano albums, while Erik has furthered his descent into musical abstraction both under his own name and as Svarte Greiner. It is long overdue to hear them connect their personalities into something new. Low Distance is a welcome return replete with beauty, mystery and uncertainty.
More information can be found here.
Both Stephen Vitiello and Taylor Deupree are seasoned collaborators. Each new collaboration is a new context, a new conversation and a unique opportunity to learn. Vitiello has worked with musicians such as Scanner, Steve Roden, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Machinefabriek. As an artist often represented in galleries and large scale sound installations he has also had the frequent opportunity to work with visual artists from the likes of Tony Oursler to Julie Mehretu and Joan Jonas. Deupree has a long history of collaboration including early works with Christopher Willits and Richard Chartier as well as Marcus Fischer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Bon Iver’s S. Carey. Fridman Variations is Vitiello and Deupree's third release together and continues their tradition of exploring their unique form of experimental improvisation.
Stemming from a live performance at NYC's Fridman Gallery, Fridman Variations was co-produced by the gallery and will remain as part of the gallery’s publications. Fridman Gallery is a visual exhibition space that also boasts a unique dedication to experimental music through their annual New Ear Festival, at which Vitiello and Deupree performed and recorded the main piece for this album.
Side A of Fridman Variations is the live recording, edited for vinyl while side B contains two pieces made with some of the same source material as the live performance and intended to be related, but entirely new, works. Guitar, modular synthesizer and a small tape synthesizer are at the heart of these songs. The improved layers draw on buried melodies and hint of field recordings and found textures. Not overly melodic, not overly noisy, Vitiello and Deupree like to find the edge between the pretty and the obscure, often suggesting more than laying their intentions bare. This type of sound is one that the duo often explores as an opportunity for Deupree to adventure beyond his melodic comfort zone and for Vitiello to work and experiment with new instruments and how they interact with his signature guitar.
One of the biggest inspirations to the artists for this work was the hushed and dreamy state of the audience during the performance. The late-night ambience added to the immersive quality of the surround speakers and helped to channel creativity and a sense of sharing.
Both artists feel that recording live performances is an opportunity to capture a unique moment that simply won’t happen again. Despite a performance’s flaws or imperfections the energy and interaction is a special moment in time for the performers and audience. The opportunity to not only document it for the listeners who were present but also to be able to share the moment with those who weren't there is a positive one. To further be able to expand on the ideas in the controlled studio environment serves to enrich the experience and further the communication.
More information can be found here.
Nodding God were formed 666 years ago by Andrew Liles, David Tibet, and The UnderAge Shaitan-Boy in a Boys-Only preparatory boarding school in Babylon, since shut down by unfortunate events that took place there, in the night, in the dark.
Their first album, Wooden Child, is released on House Of Mythology in May 2019. Sung 93% in Akkadian by David, who has studied this language for many years, this New Baby God Who Nods—a Nodding God, a Godding Nod—Wooden Child is powered by Stars and Cuneiform and Pop and Drop and One Thousand Liles In One Thousand Axes.
As we approach the 20-year anniversary of the breaking of ground on the "Playthroughs" systems, I have begun performing the piece again on request, first at the Kranky 15th Anniversary party in Chicago, then at l'Auditori in Barcelona, finally picking up again for a trio of performances in late 2018, two of which are presented here in their unexpurgated states, exactly as they were performed & intended, with the "live to semiconductor" signals mixed with their in-situ environmental ambiances.
The settings of these two improvised performances; specifically, the Modern Art wing of a European Museum, then an outdoor floodplain in rural Western Japan flanked by mountains in all directions, couldn't have been any different, and so these two stagings, specifically, run at opposite sides of the possibility-sets of the piece: placid, calm, measured (Nantes) then wild, risk-enabled, chaotic (Naeba).
In addition to the two continuous performances, each broken up into three indexed "episodes", I'm including 10 still images taken during the time surrounding the performances, to give you further context on the music & its whereabouts.
More information can be found here.
Few contemporary industrial acts are spoken of in such highly reverential terms as Alberich, the solo project of underground super-producer Kris Lapke. While Lapke himself may best be known for his production and mastering work, both for such diverse sounding acts like Prurient, Nothing and the Haxan Cloak to his audio restoration work for Coum Transmissions and Shizuka, Alberich has achieved a cult on par with many of the legends he works with.
Lapke's diverse contributions as a producer are recognizable for the perfect balance of maximalist and minimalist electronics that Alberich has relentlessly authored. Since Alberich's 2010 masterful and highly collectable 2.5 hour NATO- Uniformen album, he has become a powerful force of modern industrial music. With only a series of limited tape and split releases, fans have been waiting with bated breath for a true follow-up album. The first full-length Alberich album in almost a decade, Quantized Angel will be released April 12, 2019. In the intervening years between albums, Alberich has grown more nuanced, creating atmosphere and tension on par with Silent Servant's classic Negative Fascination LP in regards to production and attention to detail.
The results create a newly polished but no less intense vision of modern industrial music. Over the course of the album’s eight tracks, Alberich demonstrates a vision of ruthless existential electronics, a sound both commanding yet questioning in introspective spirit.
More information can be found here.
Film composer and multi-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch will release his long-anticipated double album, Deceptive Cadence: Music For Film Volume I & II on May 17th, 2019 via Lost Tribe Sound.
Most of those familiar with Fritch know only of his albums as a singer songwriter or genre-elusive multi-instrumentalist, which truly represent a small fraction of the depth and range of his work. Deceptive Cadence gathers the most remarkable and memorable pieces from Fritch's vast catalog of film compositions. Rather than filling up two volumes with half- assembled film cues and fragmented themes, Fritch has gone to great lengths with Deceptive Cadence to make sure both volumes tell a story, build themes, and create a satisfying full album experience as good as any movie they may have come from. While this music once graced a particular film, show, or commercial, it has all been reimagined, reworked and made whole in post-production to complete the epic narrative of Deceptive Cadence.
Even fans who remember the release of Music for Film Vol. I in 2015 will be in for a serious treat. Rather than simply reissuing the album alongside the newly minted Volume II, Fritch dove back into the first volume, carving away the fat, leaving only the most breathtaking pieces from the original and replacing the rest with assuredly more mature and enduring compositions. The results of this care are astounding. Keeping in place the emotional sophistication and poise of the original, Fritch seamlessly entwines new classical motifs into the existing, enhancing everything for the better. It has provided Volume I with a newfound sense of regality, romance and legend.
While Volume II compliments Volume I exceptionally well, much of the music was selected from more recent films. Volume II eagerly shares the progression of Fritch's work over the last few years, reveling in a newfound subtlety, patience and confidence as his skills as a composer have advanced. There’s a more minimal and spatially aware approach at play here. Quiet and unhurriedness become the heroine of the story. With Volume II, Fritch has been consistently practicing his craft, refining his unique minimalist/maximalist approach to better support the emotional impact of the lead melodies. Dispersed sparingly throughout, are some of the most long-form ambient classical compositions of Fritch's career, offering a wonderful chance for listeners to become immersed in waves of drone-like strings, submerged piano melodies, and light-bending arrangements. Volume II undeniably deepens the well of talent and world-building that Fritch has shared with us thus far, and binds together multiple film works into a complete and captivating whole.
Droneflower is in bloom. The new collaboration between Marissa Nadler and Stephen Brodsky (Cave In, Mutoid Man), is a sprawling and expansive exercise in contrasts. It is the sound of the war between the brutal and the ethereal, the dark and the light, the past and the present, and the real and imagined.
Brodsky met Nadler for the first time in 2014 at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus Bar when he came to see her play on her July tour, and they quickly became friends. Both of them had been wanting to explore songwriting that didn't fit into their existing projects, and they soon became energized by the prospect of working together. One of the first ideas they discussed was a horror movie soundtrack, and while Droneflower isn’t that, it is a richly cinematic album. It's easy to imagine much of the record set to images, though it wasn't composed that way.
The first song that came together was "Dead West," based around a beautiful acoustic guitar piece Brodsky wrote while living on Spy Pond, just outside of Nadler's home base in Boston. By the time they started working on the song in earnest, Brodsky had moved to Brooklyn. Nadler added lyrics and vocal melodies remotely, and even from a distance it was obvious there was real kismet in the collaboration.
All the songs on Droneflower were recorded in home studios, and they throb with the frisson of that intimate environment. For much of the recording process, Brodsky would stop by the ramshackle studio that Nadler set up in Boston whenever he was in town visiting family. Songs like "For the Sun" were written on the spot there, lyrics and all. The lush ambient pieces "Space Ghost I" and "Space Ghost II" began as Brodsky piano compositions and were later fleshed out by additional instrumentation and Nadler’s inimitable vocals.
Nadler and Brodsky also recorded two cover songs for the album — the epic Guns n' Roses power ballad "Estranged" and Morphine’s beguiling "In Spite of Me." Since childhood, Nadler had been transfixed by the "Estranged" video where Axl Rose swam with dolphins, and she and Brodsky breathe new life into the song here. Their take on "In Spite of Me" is invigorated by a guest appearance from Morphine saxophonist Dana Colley, who ironically didn't play on the original recording but is indispensable on Nadler and Brodsky's version.
Out April 26th on Sacred Bones.
Based upon Ratkje's music created for the ballet ”Sult” (”Hunger") by profiled director Jo Strømgren for the Norwegian National Ballet, this is a departure from records and live settings normally associated with Maja S. K. Ratkje, as we find her placed behind a modified, wiggly and out-of-tune pump organ, singing songs and improvising.
Metal tubes, PVC tubes and a wind machine were built into the organ; guitar strings, a bass string, a resin thread, metal and glass percussion and a bow are also utilized. With little or no previous experience, she had to learn to play the thing live, using both hands and feet at the same time as singing. Maja played live on stage during every performance, but later modified and recorded the music especially for this record, with Frode Haltli co-producing.
It's a freestanding document, an entity of its own, but the atmosphere is very much the same as in the play: the dusty city of Kristiania in the 19th century, the street noises and the sounds. "Hunger" is Norwegian author Knut Hamsun's breakthrough novel from 1890. Partly autobiographical, it describes a starving young man's struggle to make it as a writer in Kristiania (now Oslo). It has been said that the whole modern school of fiction starts with "Hunger," with its themes around mental states and the irrationality of the human mind.
More information can be found here.
