Ambient / Minimal / Drone
1973 products

Yoshi Wada's Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, originally released in 1982 on India Navigation, remains one of the most remarkable flowers to grow in the rarefied air of American minimalism – akin to Terry Riley's Reed Streams and Pauline Oliveros' Accordion & Voice, yet with a wild, liberated energy all of its own. After graduating from Kyoto University of Fine Arts with a degree in sculpture, Wada moved to New York City in 1967 and quickly fell in with the community of artists known as Fluxus. In the early '70s, he began building his own instruments and writing musical compositions, studying with La Monte Young and Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Recorded during an epic three-day session in an empty swimming pool in upstate New York, Wada's first album brings together two of the oldest drone instruments – the human voice and bagpipes – to simple and glorious effect. A visit to the Scottish Highlands spurred Wada's interest in bagpipes, which the composer integrated into these sparse, otherworldly sounds heard on Lament. "That swimming pool was quite hallucinatory," recalls Wada. “It was another world. I felt it in terms of resonance. I slept in the pool, and whenever I moved, I woke up because of the reverberations.... The piece itself is an experiment with reeds and improvisational singing within the modal structure." This first-time vinyl reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with poster.




“A sultry haze of shimmering ambient electronics and sparkling, effects-heavy guitar. Just what the ambient doctor ordered." - Electronic Sound
"Consumed in its entirety Late Spring is a soothing breeze, teleporting you directly to a grassy field in the sunshine – as transfixing as any record released thus far in 2021." - The Vinyl Factory
"The record sounds exactly like what you would expect with a name like Late Spring; it is a meditative, hypnotic look at the human condition and its emotional spectrum, as it attempts to grasp undefinable." - Far Out Magazine
-----
Japanese musician Chihei Hatakeyama is set to release his new album ‘Late Spring’ on 9th April 2021. An album of a humble nature, ‘Late Spring’ gently unfolds as a shared journeying experience through a series of rich and outstanding encounters.
An extract from the liner notes by Nick Luscombe:
"For an artist who typically works quickly, Hatakeyama considers Late Spring to be one of the more time-intensive records of his career – he started working on it in 2018, and completed it towards the end of 2020. For Late Spring, Hatakeyama re-examined his approach to musical performance, using a new amplifier and microphone set-up to playback and record his guitar and synthesisers. From the cathedral organ-like opener Breaking Dawn with its sub-aqua resonances, to the subtle drift of the closing track Twilight Sea, this record is a masterpiece of dense and beatific melodies. Drawn from evolving synthesised sounds and shimmering slow motion guitars, it combines these with occasional sonic elements that are best described as evoking computer code running through the veins of the machines like artificial blood."
Chihei Hatakeyama is a sound artist, mastering engineer, and record label founder who was born in 1978 and lives in Tokyo. He has performed for years under his given name and also as one half of the electroacoustic duo Opitope alongside Tomoyoshi Date. From his first full-length album ‘Minima Moralia’ (“Excellent” 8.1 Pitchfork) in 2006, through the subsequent 70+ albums that followed, Hatakeyama has created a mighty canon of work. His catalogue is spread across a number of highly-regarded labels, including Kranky, Room40 and his own White Paddy Mountain imprint. His release rate is unquestionably impressive, but what is even more striking is the continual high quality of each alluring album.


Volume 8 in the ongoing FRKWYS series on RVNG Intl. is a double album-length collaboration between Blues Control and Laraaji.
Following the "fodder first" tradition of previous FRKWYS installments, Vol. 8 was birthed over e-mail dialogue between RVNG and Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho of Blues Control. Blues Control's evolved output gracefully arcs with influence and innovation that gleams electronic, New Age, and hard rock terrains. Laraaji's name came up early in that conversation and felt intrinsic to Waterhouse and Cho's own musical calling.
After learning various instruments in his formative years and studying composition at Howard University, Laraaji eventually found his musical conduit in an electronically-modified zither. Laraaji's 1979 album Celestial Vibration (recorded as Edward Larry Gordon) places the stringed instrument at the forefront on two side-length excursions in rhythmic ambiance. The 1980 album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, produced by Brian Eno for his ambient record series, further documented Laraaji's zither explorations alongside Eno's soundscaping. Laraaji continues to pursue music both in its recorded form and as a healing tool.
Blues Control and Laraaji convened at Black Dirt Studio in upstate New York on December 9th, 2010. Over the course of a single studio day, the three musicians (accompanied on certain jams by Laraaji's "musical friend" Arji Cakouros) improvised on several themes, providing nearly four hours of material and the basis for FRKWYS Vol. 8. After meticulous note taking, sharing, and rough edits among Blues Control and Laraaji, the album was fully fleshed out.
Without context, it's hard to imagine that these musicians never creatively collaborated before this juncture. The dynamic breadth (and breath) of the album feels both effortless and epic, a line usually straddled only after years of playing together. It's clear a cosmic force is at play, and that this playfulness is the creative mediator of the music.
A 14 minute solo piano piece from Terre Thaemlitz alongside an incredible 15 minute Dead End House mix from DJ Sprinkles on the second in this two-part vinyl series, proper head-melters the pair of them... Presenting vinyl versions of the bonus reworks to his 43 minute Deproduction album track Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave), the A-side includes Terre’s haunting 14 minute Piano Solo, where he drops the unsettling backdrop of samples to leave the keys suspended in reflective space, reverberating in plangent overtones which take on a starker effect if you care to play it at 33rpm. The B-side is Sprinkles’ uncanny, brilliant Dead End house mix, a more percussive adjunct to the House Arrest mix off EP1, framing traces of the original vocal and keys in a sumptuous, rolling and swinging deep house workout full of rustling congas and lustrous low end that marks up among her most affective, especially in its closing minutes.
Watch-Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Piano Solo) (Vinyl Edit)
Watch-Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles' Dead End)
The return of Terre Thaemlitz / DJ Sprinkles with a first solo vinyl release in over five years, features an exclusive 17 minute vinyl edit of 'Names Have Been Changed’ from the Deproduction album and DJ Sprinkles’ incredible House Arrest mix - which totally destroys us each and every time...
Asking pertinent questions about the hypocritical nature of relations between LGBT agendas and Western Humanist notions of the nuclear family, Terre’s Deproduction sensitively yet unflinchingly broaches topics usually considered taboo by a mainstream who are all too happy to pick and choose parts of radical, fringe culture to fetishise, while swerving the bigger questions proposed by those niches.
In the vinyl edit of Names Have Been Changed, exclusive to this LP, Terre contracts the original, 43 minute blend of strings and unsettling scenes of domestic violence into a 17 minute version, beautifully suspended in the cut at 45rpm in order to best represent the work’s unique democracy of frequency - from the muffled row heard next door, to its hyperrealistic avian chirrups and modestly spare, foregrounded strings.
On DJ Sprinkles' extended House Arrest mix on the B-Side, Terre’s ideas feel even more radical when juxtaposed with a sublime deep house production, placing them in context of what was and still can be a radical artform when done with insight and consideration. The result is one of this decade’s most sublime yet unsettling house tracks, bar none.
sample-Names Have Been Changed (Sound/Reading for Incest Porn) (Vinyl Edit)sample-Names Have Been Changed (Sprinkles' House Arrest)






牧歌的ニューエイジ・フォーク大傑作『Pentimento and others』を残した人物であり、サンフランシスコ拠点のフォークロック・バンド、Citayのメンバーとしても知られるニューヨークを拠点とするギタリスト/作曲家のEzra Feinbergによる最新アルバム『Soft Power』が〈Tonal Union〉からアナログ・リリース。当店お馴染みの名ハーピストMary Lattimoreに、シューゲイズ・ドローン/アンビエント名手Jefre Cantu-Ledesma、マルチ奏者のRobbie Leeといった面々と共に精巧に作り上げた親密でゆとりのある珠玉のアンビエント・フォーク作品!限定300部。




David Behrman is also known for using "microcomputers" with "memory" used for live performances and installations, along with great figures such as Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier in postwar American experimental music. A writer who occupies an important position. On the A side, Interspecies Smalltalk commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham in 1984 is recorded, and it was formed as a collaboration with Takehisa Kosugi (violin) and completed as a minimalist masterpiece full of fantasy beauty.
On the B-side, starting with the early version of Leapday Night, "Circling Six," six synthesizer loop phrases were used, and German experimental writer Werner Durand was in charge of the saxophone, avant-garde jazz. It is finished in a strange minimalist refraction that crosses jazz. The final "All Thumbs" is a song for two mbiras, which George Lewis and David Behrman dedicated to the opening of the Paris Science Museum "La Villette" in the spring of 1986. The metal tip of was a sound installation that was connected to a computer music system through a sensor.
Why don't you pick up the excellent unreleased sound source of a rare writer who represents the history of American electronic music after a long time. Includes liner notes and performance photos by David Behrman. Limited to 400 copies.
