Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Rod Modell returns as Deepchord for his first solo release on Astral Industries since inaugurating the label with his sought-after ‘Lanterns’ EP. Consisting of two stunning long-form pieces split on one side each, 'Immersions' captures the emotive, halcyon sound that Rod has long become synonymous with. Opening with glistening ambient textures, ‘Immersion I’ grows into an 18-minute piece of deep rolling dub techno. On the other side ‘Immersion II’ paints pristine soundscapes of soft, lapping waves, underpinned by submerged pulsations that rise to the surface to continue its deep space explorations. Two highly refined and inspiring tracks that sit on the apogee of this sound.

“I had the honour of remixing all of the Bamboo tapes that J.Derwort ever recorded. Most of my mixes were approved by the master himself during the last days of his life in Oliva, Spain. For ‘Eleven’, I sampled from his last live performance at Jazzcafe Dizzy in Rotterdam on February 11th, 2018. He died on the day of the release of our latest Chi Factory album, ‘The Mantra Recordings’, on February 11th, 2019. We will miss him, life will not be the same. Farewell soul brother!” Words by Hanyo van Oosterom.

Dots written by Atom™. Recorded 1994 at "Sel I/S/C", Frankfurt/M. Under exclusive license from the AtomTM_Audio_Archive.

Mark Van Hoen's long-running Locust project arrives on the New York label Mysteries of The Deep with The First Cause. Across the album, Van Hoen deftly balances tough, fuzzy, crunching and distorted sounds with spectral vocal loops and ethereal atmospheres - channelling the ghosts of jungle, techno and trip-hop. The crushing bass weight and gloom never become oppressive as slivers of light illuminate the darkness.

Matti Bye is a Swedish composer and pianist with an illustrious catalogue spanning two decades, with numerous soundtracks and releases on Kning Disk, Rotor Records, Tona Serenad and Time Released Sound. He has previously appeared on Northen Electronics via compilations, but Between Darkness and White Snow is his first album for the label. The creation involved playing a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano through his EMS Synthi A. It was recorded onto tape with a vintage Swiss Nagra IV S tape machine giving it a wonderful warm analogue fidelity. We get four shadowy, soul-stirring, brittle ambient pieces traversing light and dark which are a pleasure to get lost inside during the small hours.

The latest in a prolific string of solo and collaborative releases by James Rushford, Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded last year while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The side-length piece “Fallaway Whisk” explores hesitation in its many forms—reticence of speech, sonic restraint—using live, abstracted translations of text from English to German against a lush and swelling soundscape. On the flip side, “Quire” is a work in ten movements influenced by the composer’s study of late medieval repertoire on portative organ, weaving the instrument’s woodsy interlocking melodies with angelic Yamaha CS-80 synth sweeps and stuttering glitches. The combined effort is somewhat a departure for Rushford, working in traces of Klaus Schulze, concrete poetry, and ars subtilior into a precise and ever-unfolding tapestry. Rushford’s work draws from a wide range of collagist and improvisatory musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been variously described as “electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart” (Boomkat) and “haunted Jacobean ASMR” (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to New Age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre. In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorization of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s 1959–67 piano cycle Música Callada (2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, Shelter Press, 2021). His long-standing performance practice for piano, portative organ, synthesizers, and electroacoustic devices, is constantly infused with a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the twentieth century avant-garde, and popular musical structures. He has worked with a vast range artists including Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza, Dennis Cooper, Ora Clementi, crys cole, Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Will Guthrie, and Graham Lambkin. He has performed as Golden Fur (with Sam Dunscombe and Judith Hamann) and Food Court (with Joe Talia and Francis Plagne).

Repress! Vinyl LP presented in a deluxe edition with printed innersleeve and a special transparent obi strip; the cover is also printed internally. Hand numbered. Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electronic bridges in semi-darkness to allow us to cross too. No words would be needed to explain this work... It is the meeting of two people, an exchange of different points of view. A way to meet and then break up. Rod has reworked a piece of Gigi making it his own... and so did Gigi with a piece of Rod. A magnificent intersection of sounds and thoughts... remaining suspended to watch the passing of time, to listen to the noises and silences of life that passes inexorably around us.

Restored and re-mastered from the original tapes comes Gigi Masin’s much sought after first album ‘Wind’. Never commercially released the LP was in fact only given away at a number of small concerts, with many of the remaining copies destroyed during floods in the Venice based musician’s house. 

Quickly becoming seen as something of a landmark ambient album in recent years, ‘Wind' is now lovingly presented again in it’s entirety. True to it’s original private issue it is once again being made available through Gigi Masin’s very own ‘The Bear On The Moon’ label.

Acclaimed guitar duo Loren Connors and Alan Licht celebrate their 30-year collaboration with release of their eighth album — At The Top Of The Stairs.Across the decades, their improvisations turned increasingly abstract and atonal, while still maintaining complex, ethereal arrangements. The harmonious blend of Licht's meticulously crafted feedback and harmonic patterns with Connors' ghostly blue tones remains the core sound of this partnership. At The Top Of The Stairs was recorded live in 2018. Across two side-long pieces, the duo ascends slowly, through layers of atmospheric tension punctuated by thunderous waves of Connors' effects.For fifty years, Connors's adaptation of acoustic Delta blues has transmuted into miniature gray scale compositions and howling riffs. His collaborators include Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon. Rock/experimental musician Alan Licht was a member of the bands Love Child, Run On, and Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, and has released a range of acclaimed rock and experimental albums. He is an author with books published by Rizzoli, W.W. Norton, Faber & Faber and Blank Forms.

In 1998, Carsten Nicolai, also known as Alva Noto, visited a sound installation created by Robert Lippok for a group exhibition in Weimar, Germany. Soon after, he invited Lippok to release music on his label raster-noton. »Open Close Open« was released in 2001 and marked the beginning of Lippok's solo career. Before, Lippok had already played in Ornament und Verbrechen (with his brother Ronald Lippok) and To Rococo Rot (with Ronald Lippok and Stefan Schneider). The title of the EP is a linguistic reference to the instructions found on everyday objects. In fact, the sound of birds or a closing door can be heard. Besides field recordings, cultural fragments were used – including the sample of the famous Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's Symphony. No. 5. – and integrated into three loop-based pieces, that have been praised by Fact Magazine as »a masterclass in collage, looping and tactile processing.« The source material for »Open Close Open« initially served as a soundtrack for a video by Takehito Koganezawa, a visual artist from Japan. For this remastered vinyl reissue, Lippok revisited the original sound material and produced a new track called »Licht.«

Following on from last year’s acclaimed Vrindavan 1982 by rudra veena master Z.M. Dagar, Black Truffle is thrilled to present a pair of archival releases from the Dagar Brothers, among the most revered 20th century exponents of the ancient North Indian dhrupad tradition. The vocal duo of Moinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar (sometimes referred to as the ‘senior’ Dagar Brothers to distinguish them from their younger siblings, Zahiruddin and Faiyazuddin Dagar), belonged to the nineteenth generation of a family of musicians in which dhrupad tradition has been kept alive through patrilinear transmission, each generation undergoing a rigorous education of many years’ duration that can include singing up to twelve hours each day. Famed for the meditative purity of their approach to dhrupad, the Dagar Brothers helped to keep the tradition alive in the years after Indian independence in 1947, when the royal courts that had traditionally patronised dhrupad musicians were abolished. Many Western listeners were first introduced to dhrupad by the Dagar Brothers’ tour of Europe in 1964-65 and their LP in UNESCO’s ‘Musical Anthology of the Orient’ collection, both organised by pioneering musicologist and scholar of Indian culture Alain Daniélou. Documents from this tour are especially precious, as Moinuddin Dagar passed away in 1966. Berlin 1964 – The Lost Studio Recording (released alongside BT115, a newly discovered concert recording from the same trip) presents two unheard side-long performances in crystalline fidelity, recorded at the International Institute for Comparative Studies and Documentation in Berlin headed by Alain Daniélou. These stunning recordings were consigned to the archive because, as Peter Pannke explains in his liner notes, which recount his meeting with Danielou many years after these recordings were made, the tape ran out during ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, which terminates abruptly soon after the entry of the pakhawaj. Accompanied only by Moinuddin’s wife Saiyur on tanpura and Raja Chatrapati Singh on pakhawaj (a large double-headed drum), the brothers present stunning performances of the severe, serious midnight ‘Raga Malkauns’, set to a ten beat cycle once the pakhawaj enters, and the complex early evening ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, set to a fourteen beat cycle in its rhythmic section. True to the traditional dhrupad structure, both performances are dominated by the long free-floating alap section, where the notes of the raga are gradually introduced, slowly climbing in pitch and intensity as the two singers trade improvisations that display a stunning range of vocal tones and remarkable subtlety in mictrotonal nuance. The performance of ‘Raga Malkauns’ is divided roughly in half, with the pakhawaj and unison singing entering around thirteen minutes through; Raja Chatrapati Singh’s performance is particularly striking in its endlessly inventive metrical nuance within the overall crescendo and acceleration. On ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, the alap lasts almost twenty minutes, with Singh joining only for a few minutes of sparse pakhawaj hits before the tape cuts off, the absence of the more active concluding section serving only to magnify the mystical calm the Dagar Brothers establish in this setting of a 16th century love poem. Illustrated with a striking full colour concert photograph, Berlin 1964 – The Lost Studio Recording is accompanied by extensive liner notes by Peter Pannke celebrating musicologist Alain Daniélou, whose study, documentation and promotion of dhrupad was so important for spreading awareness of this great musical tradition, ready to be discovered anew in this stunning recording from two of its master exponents.

"The first vinyl release of Charlemagne Palestine's Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca's Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998. Although Palestine has worked in an enormous variety of media, his long form performances for solo piano are perhaps his most acclaimed works. Palestine immersed himself in the study of overtones throughout the 1960s, working first with carillons and then with electronic synthesis, searching for the 'golden sound'. Beginning in the early 1970s he continued his exploration of the complexities hidden within seemingly simple tones and intervals on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, the 'Rolls Royce' of pianos. With the piano's sustain pedal constantly depressed, Palestine hammers out rapidly repeated notes, allowing a complex cloud of overtones to rise above the percussive texture of the struck keys. Initially working with simple intervals such as octaves and fifths, Palestine gradually expanded the harmonic range of his piano performances over the years, while still retaining their ecstatically single-minded nature. Revisiting his signature piano style in 1987 after several years focusing on visual art, Godbear presents three distinct variations that demonstrate the development of his piano music after the classic recordings of the early 1970s. Occupying the entire first side, 'The Lower Depths' stages a slow descent from the piano's mid-range to the Bösendorfer's cavernous additional low octave, building into a thundering swarm of booming overtones. Breaking entirely with the stereotype of clinical minimalism, Palestine's journey to the depths embraces passages of darkly romantic melody before slowly ascending to its starting point. The version of 'Strumming Music' performed here condenses the developmental arc of the piece into eleven minutes, fanning out from a single octave to a complex harmonic wash that calls to mind Palestine's enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel. 'Timbral Assault' is like an evil twin of 'Strumming Music,' transforming its insistency and harmonic complexity into aggressive intensity and creeping dissonance, foreshadowing Palestine's later collaborations with Christoph Heemann. A classic release, and one that, because of the variety of approaches surveyed within, serves as an ideal introduction to Palestine's ecstatic and mysterious sound world" --Francis Plagne. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve designed by Stephen O'Malley.

Written and recorded with the goal of creating a one-movement suite in the least amount of time possible, "Succo di formiche" reflects the archetypal joy of music making, the spontaneous impulses underlying its formation, and a love of the record album form.

Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialism’s warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial music’s multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreal’s Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuire’s Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusier’s L’Habitation apartment complex — an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles. Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience. McGuire’s pulse pieces were realized electronically, in the newly built Studio for Electronic Music at the State University of Cologne and WDR, but Pulse Music II adapted his ideas to an orchestral canvas. Commissioned retrospectively by the composer and radio producer Hans Otte for his Pro Musica Nova festival at Radio Bremen. Alongside the Bremen orchestra, conducted by Klaus Bernbacher, were four pianists—Christoph Delz, Herbert Henck, Deborah Richards, Doris Thomsen—and McGuire himself playing a series of twelve drone-like chords on the organ. The techniques of the electronic Pulse Music pieces required a speed and precision too great for live musicians, so for Pulse Music II McGuire adapted his method to an expanding progression of durations; this had the advantage of being much slower and requiring none of the carefully calibrated tempo changes of Pulse Music I or III. It was still based, says the composer, “on what seemed to me an interesting foray into a completely different kind of time structure. Complex time structures had, by 1975, become a condition for me in two senses: a compositional requirement and maybe an illness.” The present recording was made by Radio Bremen at the work’s first and only performance, and has been held in their archive until now. “108 Pulses” – originally composed a proof-of-concept piece and realized as a single, repeating loop in a 20 minute tableau – is also presented here for the first time.

Operating in the farthest margins of L.A.'s cutthroat music business from 1961-1991, Mel Alexander's Consolidated Productions was among the longest running Black-owned independent record conglomerates of the 20th century. Caught up in a confusing web of imprints—including Ajax, Angel Town, Car-A-Mel, Emanuel, and Kris-this first volume gathers 28 smoldering R&B cuts by the likes of Lee Harvey, B.B. Carter, Marilyn Calloway, Del Reys, Deb Tones, De Velles, Gene Russell's Trio, Jimmy "Preacher" Ellis, and Ty Karim. Remastered from the original 1/4" tapes, Consolidated Productions Vol. I includes carefully researched annotation, discography, and photographs from a vital producer.

Echoes, Spaces, Lines collects Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, the first three albums by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. Exploring all corners of the multiverse through transpersonal form and freedom, Strom’s first three albums share a singular sensibility, different streams flowing from the same oracular font. Echoes, Spaces, Lines establishes Strom’s rightful place in the canon of great synthesists. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, newly remastered, and adding Oceans of Tears, a fully realized but previously unreleased album exclusive to this box set, these are the first official reissues and the definitive encapsulation of Pauline Anna Strom’s prolific and visionary early work. This four LP box set includes a 12-page booklet containing liner notes, an unearthed interview with Strom, and unseen ephemera.

Spectre is the third album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1984, the album finds Strom exploring the darker corridors of human mythology under the influence of vampiric lore, evoking a hushed gothic solitude and showcasing her breathtaking dexterity of sound design. Despite its shadowy hues, Spectre offers generous glimpses of a vivid light that could only have come from a heart wide open to the cosmos. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Plot Zero is the second album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1983, Strom envisioned the album as a “mind trip without chemicals,” utilizing boundless imagination to cover a canvas with brilliant synthesized shapes and tones. The pieces on Plot Zero flow freely and infinitely, evoking a transportative momentum with Strom’s distinctive synthesizers soaring across infinite horizons into vast, colorful nebulas. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Trans-Millenia Consort is the near mythical debut album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1982, the album is a bold and beautiful evocation of a life that exists between and beyond time. Evoking ancient rituals and primordial futures, the music of Trans-Millenia Consort glows with a strange iridescence; its pulsing embryonic waveforms flutter and drift, tones fall like raindrops of the long-ago, and melodies shimmer and dance across the ages like fireflies of a lost world. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Limited to 1000 copies! The first collaboration between Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man) and guitarist / producer Blake Mills, who have long respected each other. When the scent or lighting hits the face, it unfolds quietly and strangely, evoking the outline of the memory floating outside the frame. Mills' characteristic fretless baritone guitar and sparse decoration form the basis of the song, and the gap between the instrument and Meath's delicate voice comfortably leads to the night scene. On the B side, the performance of the same song by the genius Sam Gendel is recorded with an original interpretation. The wonderful performance that distorts the existing melody and coexists with mystery and eerieness invites you to sleep deeper at night.

As escapism from corporate banality turned the corner in the ‘90s, a new generation of vibrant, software generated soundscapes emerged. Communal access to the internet propagated the new hive mind of ideas online, giving way to smoother, stress-free textures. The PC revolution opened the gateway to ray-traced playgrounds of color and light, allowing for visions of utopic proportions to manifest themselves on screensavers far and wide. Boot up your machine, load the software on this floppy diskette, and drop out of a reality bounded by the physical laws of the universe.

Numero 95 is the soundtrack to the screen saver fever dream we’re all trying to climb back into. Eight droplets of proto-vaporwave, synthesized in vinyl (or digital) form, fresh from Numero’s archive of forgotten sounds. Are you looking for that half way point between smooth jazz and new age? Mac and PC? Quantum Leap and the X-Files? This software is for you. 

Housed in a replica floppy diskette, Numero 95 explores an early computer music unbound by scene or region. Eight solo pioneers vibing out at home in their headphones, traveling as far as the sound card would allow. This is music that barely escaped the hard drive and yet percolates at the edges of the algorithm 30 years later. 

Welcome to Numero 95.

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography and creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within Walker’s music has never been so articulately explored, or graced with as much intention, as on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed and engineered entirely by Walker, with the exception of some subtle upright bass from C.J. Boyd on the song “Window I.” Producing the album on her own wasn’t Walker’s original intention, though; after flying to New York in November 2019 to develop some home-recorded tracks with The Blow’s Melissa Dyne, a sudden illness forced Walker to cancel the sessions and return home to Tucson to recover, and soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic ruled out the possibility of a return trip to New York. Instead, Walker decided to finish the album herself in her makeshift home studio. She spent the following months recording, processing and arranging her self-described “messy Ableton sessions” into densely harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and her own dulcet singing voice, allowing trial, error and intuition to guide her way. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient compositions (as in the instrumentals “Horizon, Harbor Resonance” and “For Heddi”) and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting (as in the lyrics-focused tracks “Reconstellated” and “Waking the Dreaming Body”), their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

A timeless minimal ambient masterpiece that was released only in CDR in 2003.

Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. The 2017 reissue of his lauded debut, Music For Nine Post Cards, along with a slow building cult internet following has helped ignite a renaissance in his acclaimed body of work, much of which has never been released outside of Japan. Known for his sound design and environmental music, Yoshimura worked on a number of commissions following the 1982 release of Music For Nine Post Cards, including works for museums, galleries, public spaces, TV shows, video art, fashion shows, and even a cosmetics company. Originally released in 1986, GREEN is one of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s most well-loved recordings and a favorite of the artist himself. Recorded over the winter of 1985-86 at Yoshimura’s home studio, the compositions unfold at an unhurried pace, a stark contrast to the busy city life of Tokyo. As Yoshimura explained in the original liner notes, the album title in the context of this body of work is not meant to be seen as a color, but is rather used to convey “the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN”—which perfectly encapsulates the soothing and warm sounds contained on the album, although it was created utilizing Yamaha FM synthesizers, known for their crisp digital tones. This edition marks the first reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible to find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US). Additionally, this release is the first in our ongoing series, WATER COPY, focusing on the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura.