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Kakuhan - LIVE_0 (CD)Kakuhan - LIVE_0 (CD)
Kakuhan - LIVE_0 (CD)Kakuhan
¥2,000

Kakuhan, a unit of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, has released a self-released CD, which has been sold exclusively at live venues, on "Nakid," a hot label run by Koshiro Hino, who is also well known for his activities with goat and YPY and for running "birdFriend," and has released such powerful artists as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Mark Fell & Will Guthrie. The CD is a self-released CD by Kakuhan, a unit consisting of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, which has been sold exclusively at live venues and has won critical acclaim!

The CD includes a live performance by KAKUHAN, a unit consisting of YPY, Hino Koshiro, and cellist Nakagawa Hiroki, at the "Feldman meets freq 2022" event held at Kyushu University in February 2022.
KAKUHAN's first album "Metalzone", released at the end of 2022, was voted the 5th best release of 2022 by Boomkat and the 5th best album of the year by Music Magazine in the best electronic music category. The CD contains a total of six songs, including the previous night's "Prototype," a song from the same album, and includes a song that can only be heard on this CD.
As the unit name suggests, the various elements of both artists' activities-"electronic music/strings," "contemporary/club music," "traditional/contemporary," "physical/metaphysical," "composition/improvisation"-are literally "stirred" in the performance. It is highly recommended to listen to it together with "Metalzone"!

Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Kakuhan - Promo (CD)Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Kakuhan - Promo (CD)
Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Kakuhan - Promo (CD)Nakid
¥2,200

A split CD commemorating the Japan tour by MARK FELL, RIAN TREANOR, and KAKUHAN in September and October 2023 is now available!

Known as a giant of electronic or experimental techno music since the 90's, they have released many works on labels such as Mille Plateaux, Line, Mego, and Raster Noton. In recent years, Mark Fell has been going beyond the boundaries of "techno" to offer a truly "modern" sound.
In 2023, NYEGE NYEGE TAPES will release "Saccades," a collaboration with Ugandan/Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and RIAN FELL is creating music at the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music, with new deconstructions and linkages. RIAN TREANOR creates music that involves new deconstruction and interlocking from the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music.
KAKUHAN (Koshiro Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa), who started his activities in 2022 after various collaborations, "stirs" as the name implies, the poles/tunes possessed by various types of music such as "electronic music/strings," "contemporary music/club music," "composition/ improvisation," etc. that the unit is equipped with.
This 9-song split CD, which includes completely new compositions by these three artists, is not a mere "split (mish-mash)," but rather an approach that transcends and melds the boundaries of "physical/metaphysical" on the periphery of music after techno music is evident in each of the compositions. The ongoing attitude of the three artists toward music is truly and casually expressed in this work, which should be listened to beyond genres.

 
Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)
Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)Shukai
¥7,287
The founders of Cukor Bila Smert’ (Ukrainian: Цукор – Біла Смерть, English: Sugar – White Death) band were Svitlana Okhrimenko (a.k.a. Svitlana Nianio), Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi, and Tamila Mazur, who studied at the Reinhold Glier Kyiv Academy of Music in 1984-1988. In the summer of 1988, they got acquainted with Eugene Taran, a young guitarist and artist. He joined the band and also became the ideologist of Sugar – White Death. Moreover, Eugene coined the name for the band: the irony towards the Yellow Press. The musicians gathered at Kohanovs’kyi’s house, where they spent their free time not only playing music but also listening to and discussing new records and thinking about the conception of their new project. For two years, the band recorded a few home-made albums, such as “Rhododendrons Coral Aspides” in 1988 (which is considered lost), where Kostyantyn Dovzhenko took part as a guitarist and sound engineer. He also replaced Taran during the recording session because Eugene was passing an exam at that time. The band also recorded another album – “Lilies and Amaralises,” in 1989, which is also considered lost. Eugene remembers that the band made a lot of recordings but did not pay so much attention to them. Sugar – White Death played live occasionally but spent more time creating their own sound, which was named by Oleksii Dekhtyar (a founder of “Ivanov Down”) as a “sugar calypso sound.” At that time, the music was mostly created by Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi, and the lyrics were written by Svitlana Okhrimenko and Eugene Taran. In February 1990, a quartet came to the Scientists House Studio in Kyiv, where they had one studio session only, recorded by Valerii Papchenko. Musicians played live for about one take. This session was represented on the “Mannered Music” compilation by several blocks – “Venus with Long Neck,” “The New Sissies,” and “Rhododendrons Coral Aspides,” which was shortened to “Rhododendrons” on the cassette (two songs from which – “Summer Will Not Come” and “The Great Hen-Yuan’ River,” dedicated to Grigorii Khoroshylov, the sinologist from Kyiv). The compilation cover design was created by Eugene Taran. Later, this tape got to Vlodek Nakonechnyj, the founder of Koka Records, a young Polish label, who released “Mannered Music” on cassettes and made efforts to invite Sugar – White Death to play several gigs in Poland. In November 1990, Sugar – White Death played their last gig as a quartet in Kharkiv. They were invited by Sergii Myasoyedov, who curated the art association “Nova Scena” (The New Scene). The band played selected tracks from the albums “The New Sissies” and “The Shellfishes in Gold Wrappers” (the last one is also considered lost). Due to Sergii Myasoyedov's efforts, the performance was documented: he saved a lot of photos and fragments of soundboard recordings on reel-to-reel tape. Later, Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi and Tamila Mazur left Sugar – White Death: Oleksandr founded his own project Pan Kifared, and Tamila became a bass player of Shake Hi-Fi (whose co-founder was Eugene Taran). Sugar became a duo of Svitlana and Eugene. They started to focus on their next work: “Antinoy Is Leaving” in late 1990. In 1992, they were also invited by Sergii Myasoyedov for a studio session in Kharkiv, where due to the efforts of Oleksandr Vakulenko, Sugar recorded the new album called “All Secrets Of A Poem”. Some tracks from the work (“Dead Ceremony,” “Vienna Is Sleeping,” and “Untitled”) were released on their next and last album, “Selo” (“The Village”). The rest compositions were published as a part of the compilation for the first time. In the autumn of 1992, the musicians went to Poland, where Vlodek Nakonech- nyj, who wanted Sugar to come to a “real” studio, organized their last recording session. Although the journey’s beginning was unsuccessful (Eugene’s guitar was taken away by a customs officer when crossing the border), the musicians worked fast during the session at the Arek Waś studio at Marki on an 8-track reel-to-reel machine. Boleslav Blazhchyk took part as a cellist, playing the parts created by Svitlana. The album was completed in three days – the musicians spent two days recording and one-day mixing, mostly done by Eugene Taran. In 1993, this work was released as “Selo” (“The Village”) album on cassette tapes by Koka Records (remastered by Tadeusz Sudnik). Later, Sugar – White Death was disbanded.
Kevin Drumm - OG23 (LP)
Kevin Drumm - OG23 (LP)Streamline
¥4,052
Ever unpredictable, Drumm this time takes the fellow time-traveller through what sounds like an electronic field recording, a journey through an electronic soundscape of luminescent textures that invites immersive listening.
Laurel Halo / Jessica Ekomane - Octavia / Manifolds (LP)Laurel Halo / Jessica Ekomane - Octavia / Manifolds (LP)
Laurel Halo / Jessica Ekomane - Octavia / Manifolds (LP)Portraits GRM
¥3,696
Jessica EKOMANE « Manifolds » Entirely computer-generated, Manifolds is a work that explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing, extending it to the “multiphonic” universe where sources and timbres diffract themselves in the listening space. The different voices of the composition no longer follow the traditional parallel trajectories of musical dialogue, but find themselves propelled as if into a particle accelerator, a “collider” freed from all formal rhetoric to reach a state of liberation of energies that is truly confounding. It is then that, in the multi-layered universe of sonic electrons, as if against its own will, a “chant” of overwhelming humanity is revealed. Laurel HALO « Octavia » (2022) Octavia, a piece for piano and electronics, explores the relationship between melodic motifs and textures in a singular way, intermittent moments of melody, harmony and sound materials connecting and disconnecting, to indicate a series of nets or webs, swaying in and out of one another. These sonic nets gently float, spin and merge, and the effect is one of gently floating over an abyss. The work is inspired by the “spiderweb city” of the same name in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: “Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; further down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed….Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.” — François J. Bonnet, 2023
Anima Musica & R. Carlos Nakai - Atlantic Crossing (LP)
Anima Musica & R. Carlos Nakai - Atlantic Crossing (LP)La Scie Dorée
¥3,428
The strange thing about the music of Anima is that it’s often considered as strange, while it’s actually very natural. It has a free spirit, analog to nature. For this release the natural spirit is strengthened by the participation of indigenous American flute player and composer R. Carlos Nakai who did a series of concerts in the US and Europe with Paul and Limpe Fuchs in the 1980’s. As with almost all Anima work, the natural feel manifests itself not only by the musical approach and sounds generated by metal, wood, stone and air, but also by the absence of electronic devices. This LP is a reissue of a rare privately released cassette from 1988 and was recorded by the Bayerischer Rundfunk. May this slice of timeless free spirit be a trigger to more awareness concerning our decaying freedom.
Anne Gillis - Aha (LP)
Anne Gillis - Aha (LP)La Scie Dorée
¥3,937
Since more than 40 years, Anne Gillis has discreetly unfolded her proper singular universe without any compromise. She playfully moves with determined restrictions, excavating contrasting forces; sensual and visceral, mechanical and organical, black and white, … She extends this personal expression in her visuals using self-portrait photos, handwritten text and her theatrical performances are equally aligned. Her music can be considered as musique concrète using the tape machine as compositional tool, manipulating her recorded sources, mainly consisting of extended voice and different (instrumental) sounds with addition of electronics and treatments. In both her photography and her music, Anne Gillis works fully analog.
Anne Gillis, Jac Berrocal, Vincent Epplay, Timo Van Luijk - Si()six (LP)
Anne Gillis, Jac Berrocal, Vincent Epplay, Timo Van Luijk - Si()six (LP)La Scie Dorée
¥3,937
Since more than 40 years, Anne Gillis has discreetly unfolded her proper singular universe without any compromise. She playfully moves with determined restrictions, excavating contrasting forces; sensual and visceral, mechanical and organical, black and white, … She extends this personal expression in her visuals using self-portrait photos, handwritten text and her theatrical performances are equally aligned. Her music can be considered as musique concrète using the tape machine as compositional tool, manipulating her recorded sources, mainly consisting of extended voice and different (instrumental) sounds with addition of electronics and treatments. In both her photography and her music, Anne Gillis works fully analog.
Operating Theatre - Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth / Rapid Eye Movements (2LP)Operating Theatre - Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth / Rapid Eye Movements (2LP)
Operating Theatre - Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth / Rapid Eye Movements (2LP)Allchival
¥4,475
Presenting our second look at the music of Roger Doyle and Operating Theatre, a little known proto synth-pop act and experimental theatre group that he led, what you have here is a remastered and repackaged collection of two very different sides of this project. In reverse chronological order the second disc contains music from the United Dairies release of 1979 – ‘Rapid Eye Movements’. Experimental tape work heavily influenced by the French school of music concretists and recorded at various points during the 70s in Finland, Holland and Ireland, although it is most certainly a Roger Doyle solo record the label ran by Nurses With Wounds John Fothergill decided to release it under the group name for reasons now lost to the fog of time. After this a volte-face towards a more accessible sound, coming via his friendship with future Hollywood actress Olwen Fouéré and her connection to the theatre. It also featured the vocals of a young Spanish immigrant Elena López- bucking the 80’s trend by moving to, rather than, from Dublin. With Fouéré adding the theatrical element to the group (an almost essential part of any early 80s synth act) alongside pulsing synths, brass, a vocoder and the electro acoustic production talents of Doyle himself, it was the first time a Fairlight sampler was used in an Irish studio setting and gives a prescient but alternative take on the new wave sound that came to dominate the charts soon after. Doyle’s work on the newly released Fairlight sampler had brought him to the attention of U2’s Bono who had seen a feature about his sampling experimentations and reached out to him for piano lessons. This led to a deal on the bands embryonic Mother records for what Doyle calls his first “popular song” - Queen of No Heart - which alongside “Spring is Coming” made up the backbone of the EP which was released some years later (1986) on the Mother Records label. Established by U2 in 1984 and initially intended to launch Irish bands, many of the acts – including this one – were subsequently unhappy about the label’s haphazard approach to releases and lack of promotion. The record was released as a die cut 7 inch with the two main tracks and a 12 inch EP with additional tracks – ‘Part of My Make-Up’ / ‘Atlantean’ / ‘Satanasa’. The Mother experience was for Doyle and the rest of the group a frustrating one with no promotional plan and no tour. After that Operating Theatre as a quasi pop project ‘just kind of fizzled out’ says Doyle. Doyle, the musical maverick at the heart of the act, continues to produce to this day and has released 30 albums. A frequent collaborator we round out the record with a remix from another Irish outsider - Morgan Buckley of the Wino Boys.
Beatriz Ferreyra - Senderos de luz y sombras (LP+DL)Beatriz Ferreyra - Senderos de luz y sombras (LP+DL)
Beatriz Ferreyra - Senderos de luz y sombras (LP+DL)Recollection GRM
¥3,698
« Senderos de luz y sombras » (2016/20), 30’13 Senderos de luz y sombras (Paths of Light and Shadows) – Commissioned by the French State for INA grm – 2016-2020 In memoriam Bernard Baschet, Bernard Parmegiani and Carlos Pellegrino. A 16-channel piece inspired by astrophysics, the mystery of the pre-Big Bang era and some of the uncanny motions of the unconscious mind, where strangeness meets the ordinary. The themes that permeate Senderos de luz y sombras simultaneously engage the overwhelming, unyielding immensity of the beginnings of the universe and the forces at work in the unconscious mind. What connects these themes are the dark energies operating outside our knowledge, far beyond the conceptual scope of our limited thinking. How to convey all this and build music from these concealed forces? What Beatriz Ferreyra achieves, thanks to her trademark virtuosity, is precisely to summon energies, to bring in the raw forces that govern the laws of Acoustics, so as to trigger sonic storms as one would call the rain, to transform all sound matters into the core of a ritual. Indeed, Beatriz Ferreyra addresses the mind-body reconciliation, for in providing this unique sound and musical experience, with a rare sensitive intensity, the great composer simultaneously invites us to engage in a personal experience. François Bonnet, Paris, 2021


Daniel Teruggi - Sphæra Cat (LP+DL)Daniel Teruggi - Sphæra Cat (LP+DL)
Daniel Teruggi - Sphæra Cat (LP+DL)Recollection GRM
¥3,698
« Sphæra » (1984/89), 42’09 « ... this spherical shape being the most perfect of all and the most similar to itself, for he thought similarity to be infinitely more beautiful than dissimilarity. » Platon, Timaeus Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously belongs to one of the four substances as well as the whole. These four sections, of uneven durations, embody the different resonances of each « element » upon my imagination. The movements are ordered compositionally and range from the intangibility of the air to the extreme density of the earth. In Eterea, the dual nature of air, a space for the dissemination of sounds and an environment for mobile masses, shaped the work and the development of its forms. Whether it be the vast expanse of particles as organised movement or the displacement of sources in our three-dimensional perception, ethereal air fills the space and drives the immaterial motions and gestures. Aquatica locates the materiality of water in relation to its amazing extremes: from the drop to the ocean, an extensive journey unfolds through the various phases of the reinvented liquid. Still waters, deadly waters, raging waters follow one another, leading to the aerial fusion of a primordial equilibrium eventually retrieved. Then comes Focolaria and the unsteady fires, the elusive and wild will-o’-the-wisps that open and adorn the gates leading to the depths of the earth. The land of Terra is devoid of atmosphere, a land of matters before the advent of life. The sounds of the original matter merge and evolve into purer forms. The motions trigger progressions towards new equilibriums of forces, the ultimate fusion, the very last attempt, needed for the emergence of life. The sphere is now complete, the world ready for creation… Daniel Teruggi
Robert Cahen - La nef des fous (LP+DL)Robert Cahen - La nef des fous (LP+DL)
Robert Cahen - La nef des fous (LP+DL)Recollection GRM
¥3,829
In the 1970s, Robert Cahen turned to the burgeoning field of video art, where he became a pioneering artist. He was originally trained in musique concrète, his creative background, and joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1972. The pieces on this record were composed in the GRM studios between 1971 and 1974. They testify to a lively inspiration and imagination combined with a precocious formal mastery that already carries the seeds of later developments, which the artist cleverly and inventively deployed in the field of visual arts.
Horacio Vaggione - Schall / Rechant (LP+DL)Horacio Vaggione - Schall / Rechant (LP+DL)
Horacio Vaggione - Schall / Rechant (LP+DL)Recollection GRM
¥3,829
A discreet but essential figure in the field of musical creation, Horacio Vaggione has been crafting an ambitious, precise and highly significant body of work for over the last fifty years, coupled with a demanding research activity. This disc offers four purely electroacoustic pieces which illustrate, each in their own way, this singular and fascinating grammar developed by Horacio Vaggione, a complex but fertile grammar which establishes a very special relationship between structure and texture, between matter and formula, to create a fascinating musical space, made up of polyphonies and metamorphoses.
Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (CD)Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (CD)
Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (CD)Shelter Press
¥2,498
When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. “The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.

Okkyung Lee - Yeo-Neun (LP)Okkyung Lee - Yeo-Neun (LP)
Okkyung Lee - Yeo-Neun (LP)Shelter Press
¥3,698
Recommended for fans of modern classical music like Another Timbre and Elsewhere! Okkyung Lee is a Korean cellist and improviser who has collaborated with Christian Marclay, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton and many other big names. is out now on Shelter Press! It's from a rather unexpected label. A dreamy chamber music ensemble featuring Okkyung Lee (cello), Eivind Opsvik (bass), Maeve Gilchrist (harp) and Jacob Sacks (piano). The avalanche of sentimental melodies and gentle, melancholic touches, wrapped in a myriad of aspects from chamber to spiritual jazz and folk music, also evoke the beauty of the pull and the aesthetics of "pause" that are common to Japanese environmental music/ambient music by Satoshi Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (LP)Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (LP)
Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here (LP)Shelter Press
¥3,698
When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. “The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.

Stephen O’Malley & Anthony Pateras - Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé (2LP)Stephen O’Malley & Anthony Pateras - Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé (2LP)
Stephen O’Malley & Anthony Pateras - Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé (2LP)Shelter Press
¥4,597
Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments are notable: this is O’Malley’s most extensive recording on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones) and Pateras return to the prepared piano, which he has rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the 21st century exploring its possibilities. Recorded during O’Malley’s residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, from the first moments of the opening ‘déjà revé’ the music immediately establishes the distinctive landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance explored throughout its one-hour running time. Pateras’ preparations create tolling bell-like tones alive with complex overtones, alongside which O’Malley’s open strings and natural harmonics add a sparkling clarity. While Pateras’ music often uses a densely chromatic harmonic language, these duos are remarkable for their modal simplicity. However, the interaction between the pure intervals of O’Malley’s just-intoned strings and the unstable harmonies created by the piano preparations suspends the music in an oneiric state of hazy ambiguity. Without obvious reference to tempo or meter, the music floats in what the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler has called a ‘bottomless sound space’, the temporal placement of events determined by bodily rhythms and the performers’ own listening to (and enjoyment of) the sounds being made. Heard one way, this music can seem striking in its consistency, almost environmental. Attending more carefully, the listener hears the pitch sets and tunings changing throughout the album’s length. Each piece has its own character, subtly distinguished from the others through mood, pacing, and timbre. On ‘déjà voulu’, for instance, O’Malley makes prominent use of slide, the woozy, bending pitches weaving through a series of lush arpeggiated chords from the piano. ‘Déjà senti’, on the other hand, is particularly spare, the gestures spaced out to the extent that they often float in isolation against the background of fading resonance. Much of ‘déjà su’ is built around a slowly pulsing single prepared piano tone, creating an almost ominous tension, whereas the sparkling guitar harmonics and arpeggios of the closing ‘déjà raconté’ have a gently triumphal air. While the music’s calm, rippling surface is immediately entrancing, these seven duos – in the tradition of the best improvised music – also reward close listening, which reveals sonic details and focuses the listener’s attention on how the music unfolds spontaneously from decision to decision, from gesture to gesture. Recorded during a period when O’Malley and Pateras were grieving the loss of recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven duos possess a reflective, at times almost mournful quality. More importantly, though, they are imbued with other qualities that can arise from personal loss: a clarity that allows one to clear away the inessential, to begin again, to renew one’s faith in friendship and music. — Out now on a limited 2xLPs with an etching on fourth side housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Artwork by María Jesús Valenzuela Vittini, Design by Bartolomé Sanson.
Félicia Atkinson - Image Langage (CD)
Félicia Atkinson - Image Langage (CD)Shelter Press
¥2,498
Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022
Lucy Railton & Max Eilbacher - Forma / Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly) (LP+DL)
Lucy Railton & Max Eilbacher - Forma / Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly) (LP+DL)Portraits GRM
¥3,564

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding - its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance . Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher’s work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. These works, each with their own agenda, evolve with grace and inspiration in their exploration of vast sound worlds, and it is with great pride that we present them in the new collection. Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier 
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

Kali Malone - Living Torch (LP)Kali Malone - Living Torch (LP)
Kali Malone - Living Torch (LP)Portraits GRM
¥3,696
Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.
Félicia Atkinson / Richard Chartier - Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) / Recurrence.Expansion  (LP)Félicia Atkinson / Richard Chartier - Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) / Recurrence.Expansion  (LP)
Félicia Atkinson / Richard Chartier - Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) / Recurrence.Expansion (LP)Portraits GRM
¥3,696
Félicia Atkinson’s Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one’s creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson’s music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it’s a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. « Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) », de Félicia Atkinson, s’aborde comme une méditation, non pas comme une musique méditative, mais bien comme une réflexion autour de l’art de créer ; comment habiter sa création, comment la porter, la domestiquer et vivre avec. En puisant son inspiration chez l’artiste Georgia O’ Keeffe, à la fois dans son travail de peintre, mais également dans les maisons dans lesquelles elle a vécu, au Nouveau-Mexique, ou même dans les paysages qui les environnent, Félicia Atkinson compose ici une pièce qui évoque et célèbre, de manière poétique et holistique, le mystère de l’art, le balancement somnambulique qui accompagne l’acte de créer. Mêlant voix fragmentaire, îlots de piano, textures et trames électroniques ou encore enregistrements de terrain, la musique que nous offre Félicia Atkinson est une musique sincère et inspirée, une méditation, donc, mais aussi une leçon qu’on oublie parfois : être artiste, ce n’est pas une activité, encore moins une profession, c’est une façon singulière d’aborder le monde et, par là même, de le densifier. — Richard Chartier’s music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier’s music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier’s music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis. La musique de Richard Chartier se loge aux frontières de l’audible, dans cette lisière où le son se diffracte dans une inter-dimensionalité où les sons, l’espace sonores, l’écoute et le silence se recombinent en une arborescence de devenirs qui se présentent à nous et disparaissent. L’espace-temps dans lequel se déploie la musique de Richard Chartier est un espace-temps étiré, affleurant à peine dans le monde sonore. La délicatesse, la précision et la justesse de la composition Recurrence.Expansion réside précisément dans ce dialogue entre une forme exposée, déclinée, de manière inspirée et maitrisée, et le biotope sonore dans lequel cette forme se développe. C’est d’une telle rencontre qu’émerge la singularité de la musique de Richard Chartier, musique d’écoute attentive, mais également musique sensible, habitée, une musique des métamorphoses discrètes. —Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023
Richard Teitelbaum - Asparagus (2LP)
Richard Teitelbaum - Asparagus (2LP)Black Truffle
¥6,357
Black Truffle is thrilled to announce a major archival release from legendary American composer and live electronics innovator Richard Teitelbaum, centred around his soundtrack for Suzan Pitt’s cult 1978 animation Asparagus. Best known to some listeners for introducing Europe to the Moog synthesizer as a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome, Teitelbaum’s extensive and radically experimental body of work includes collaborative recordings with master improvisers like Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille and George Lewis, intercultural experiments combining electronics with non-Western instruments such as the shakuhachi, works for computer controlled piano, and large-scale multi-media operas. Recorded at York University, Toronto in 1975–1976, ‘Asparagus (European Version)’ sprawls across both sides of the first LP. Discovered by composer Matt Sargent in Teitelbaum’s tape archive, this is a previously unheard major work for Moog modular and Polymoog synthesizers, unique in Teitelbaum’s oeuvre for its lushness and gently melodic quality. The music unfolds slowly, submerging lyrical melodies and burbling arpeggios into uneasy, glacially shifting harmonic swells, the luscious texture thickened with subtle changes of modulation and phase, calling up the shifting layers of Costin Miereanu’s classic Derives or the kosmische Musik tradition more than any academic synthesizer exercise. Teitelbaum incorporated much of this material into his soundtrack for Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus, which receives its first official release here. Asparagus, famously paired with David Lynch’s Eraserhead for a two-year run of midnight screenings at New York’s Waverly Theatre, uses hand-drawn and stop animation to unfurl an oneiric succession of images, beginning with a sequence in which the female protagonist defecates two stalks of asparagus, which multiply and float out of the toilet bowl to form the letters of the title. Teitelbaum’s soundtrack interweaves delicate drifting tones from the ‘European Version’ with contributions from Steve Lacy and Steve Potts on saxophones, George Lewis on trombone and Takehisa Kosugi on violin. Edited closely to the film, even without images the soundtrack proposes a surreal journey through floating synth tones, squealing horns, propulsive arpeggios, distant chatter, and an old-timey waltz. The final side of the set presents a new realisation of Teitelbaum’s text score ‘Threshold Music’, performed at a memorial concert at Roulette, New York in 2022 by Leila Bourreuil (cello), Alvin Curran (sampler and objects), Daniel Fishkin (daxophone), Miguel Frasconi (glass objects) and Matt Sargent (lap steel). The piece asks musicians to match their instrumental volume to that of the sounds of the environment in which they play, sometimes with the addition of recorded environmental sounds, reinforcing frequencies they encounter in listening deeply to their surroundings. Here the players use a field recording taken at Teitelbaum’s home in Bearsville, New York, their long tones and shimmering, glassy textures delicately emerging from the white noise of the location recording. Released with the full approval of both Richard Teitelbaum and Suzan Pitt’s estates, Asparagus is illustrated with striking images from Pitt’s film and accompanied by detailed liner notes by Francis Plagne. These previously unheard pieces shed new light on the work of a key composer in the American experimental tradition, offering up some of Teitelbaum’s most beautiful and engaging music.
Olivia Block - The Mountains Pass (LP)
Olivia Block - The Mountains Pass (LP)Black Truffle
¥4,282
Black Truffle is pleased to announce The Mountains Pass, a major new work from Olivia Block. A key player in Chicago’s vibrant experimental music scene since the late 1990s, Block has developed an extensive body of work grounded in a personalised, at times emotive approach to the studio-based practices of the musique concrète tradition, while also encompassing improvisation, orchestral pieces, sound installations, and a sustained engagement with the piano. On The Mountains Pass, recorded by Greg Norman at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and meticulously edited and constructed over the course of three years, Block pushes into new terrain, introducing her singing voice and drums played by Jon Mueller into flowing assemblages that move seamlessly from ruminative organ tones and fragmented piano airs to explosions of sizzling synths and thundering percussion. Like many of Block’s past works, which include, for example, a sculptural installation using the sound of oyster beds, The Mountains Pass draws inspiration from nature and the animal world. Time spent in a particular mountain range in Northern New Mexico informs this suite of pieces, whose lyrics and titles refer particularly to animal life in the area. Beginning with bursts of white noise and delicate synthetic pops and squeaks, opener ‘Northward’ very soon reveals the special direction the album will take, as lyrical piano lines are joined by Block’s fragile voice, singing words written from the perspective of f2754, an endangered Mexican gray wolf who wandered more than five hundred miles from Arizona to New Mexico in 2022. The fragment of song quickly breaks off, leaving us with a ghostly electronic hum. ‘The Hermit’s Peak’ follows, one of two epic pieces at the album’s core. Beginning with chiming, almost harpsichord-like tones, it moves through episodes of spacious, ruminative piano, Jon Mueller’s sparkling cymbals, stuttering cut-up piano sounds, and a climax of keening organ and trumpet tones (performed by Thomas Madeja). Continuing the exploration of vintage keyboard and synth tones heard on Block’s Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room 40, 2021), the music sometimes suggests the great outer-limits works of 70s Italian prog figures like Franco Battiato or Arturo Stalteri in the languorous drift of synthesizer, organ, and piano tones and the meticulous yet organic flow of its construction. ‘Violet-Green’ opens the second side with another epic journey, its lyrical content concerning ‘a mysterious bird die-off and a forest fire’. Block’s crystalline voice and rich piano chords at times call up the restrained chamber songs of Janet Sherbourne, but fragmented and threaded through passages of woozy pitch-bent keyboards, hypnotic distant thuds, tinkling bells, and searing distorted synth tones. On ‘f2754’, the freedom of the roaming wolf surges through dense layers of rapid keyboard attacks and long organ tones over a propulsive drum performance straight out of Animal Magnetism-era Arnold Dreyblatt. This distinctive sound world is then reencountered in a darkened mirror image in the uneasy, metallic shimmer of the closing ‘Ungulates’, named in reference to a heard of elk roaming through the mountains. Like Battiato’s Clic or Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife, The Mountains Pass inhabits the underexplored terrain where the beauty of song coexists with a radical formal openness, illuminating the deep musicality and warmth that have been present in Block’s work all along.
Sun Ra - Horizon (LP)
Sun Ra - Horizon (LP)Strut
¥3,484
In the years leading up to 1971, Sun Ra wrote many compositions and poems specifically inspired by the ancient African Kingdoms and many others with associated mythological and heliocentric connotations. As such, a visit to Egypt and the opportunity for the Arkestra to play there was a matter of necessity. Ra’s first ever concerts outside of the US had occurred in late summer and autumn of 1970 with performances in France, Germany and the UK and a second European tour was arranged for late 1971. At the end of that second tour, Ra caught wind of cheap flights from Denmark to Cairo. This release comprises recordings made by Arkestra member Thomas “Bugs” Hunter made in December 1971 in the streets around the Mena House Hotel, Giza, from a concert held at the house of Goethe Institute ex-pat Hartmut Geerken in Heliopolis, from a live Cairo TV channel broadcast and a concert at the Ballon Theatre in Cairo. The impact and significance of these few weeks upon Sun Ra can be measured by the growth and development of his output over the next few years; the immediate post-Egypt period included new studio and live recordings on the Saturn, Blue Thumb, Atlantic and Impulse labels and the ‘Space Is The Place’ movie. Ra also edited the three LPs of the ‘Live In Egypt’ series which were subsequently released on his Saturn record label and its affiliated twin, Thoth Intergalactic: ‘Dark Myth Equation Visitation’, ‘Nidhamu’ and ‘Horizon’.

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