Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Recorded in 1970 during the same period of "Overground", UNDERGROUND was recorded into 2 volumes (RT 104 and RT 16), both released in the same year in may and june at Dirmaphon studios, Roma. Together with Overground these records are really fascinating instrumental Free Jazzy/Psych Library, released with the auxiliary of historical Rai session musicians like guitarist Silvano Chimenti and organist Giorgio Carnini. This record collects all Underground' tracks in 1 LP. Established Jazz composer, Sandro Brugnolini written some among the greatest Italian soundtracks and Library music ever.

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving.

Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions as he covertly delivers familiar folk tunes and tales. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.”

Yowzers is ripe with the fine mash of that loop’s changes and diffusions, recalling the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. More amalgam than pendulum swing; a fresh thought made up of old ideas, like some imaginary Sacred Heart Ensemble led by Elvin Jones and Rashid Ali. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true Americana, despite what that word might mean to the average white person in the United States.

“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live.” Translating that language to a studio situation is a tough task, even for a seasoned crew. “You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in a room there can be a disconnect.” Striving to document the magic of those live moments, to great end, Gay chose to track the quartet pieces (“the glorification of small victories,” “there, inside the morning glory,” “I am (bells),” and “cumulus”) for Yowzers live, in real time, seated with his bandmates in a small circle at Palisade Studios in Chicago.

The spectrum of the album is widened by a batch of music created via Gay’s highly successful approach to composing in-studio, augmented with contributions from his bandmates, instrumentalist Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu. This straying from the quartet material throughout the course of the record acts as an expansion of detail rather than an interruption of continuity.

All together, the pacing and flow of Yowzers is proof-positive of Gay’s practiced grasp on how the album format can traverse such a breadth of atmospheres. The titular album opener “yowzers” is a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotically swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The undecorated lyrics leave ample room for a listener to comprehend references to the binding existential crises of our times. It’s a Blues that everyone in the world should feel in their bones:

Ain’t gon snow no more x4

Rain gon pour and pour x4

Fire don’t stop no more x4

“for Breezy”, a could-be New Orleans dirge, straddles the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements. Gay’s clustered synth chording sets the scene while Frye’s breathy flute and Moretti’s delicate brushwork are positioned front-and-center along with a synthetic static—the nagging question of darkness even as beauty blooms. Gay’s flugelhorn enters at the 1:35 mark, maneuvering slowly around Frye and locking the vibe into place. It’s a gorgeous and fitting tribute to an old comrade.

“John, John Henry” begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a contextually disjointed swing beat from Moretti. Enter Gay and his choir, digging into a take on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of man versus machine, an update we didn’t know we needed and an entrance we didn’t know we wanted. The way the group’s vocal rhythms hit here is a classic example of the Gay conundrum: an idea that reads as challenging on paper but sounds simple to the ear and feels intuitive to the body. With spectacles underfoot and charts out the window, the listener sings along, unencumbered by know-how. It’s all in service of Gay’s ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore in his work—arguably the one concept that bridges the gap between all of the disparate elements of his oeuvre.

This bottomless bag of tricks never induces fatigue, instead allowing for breaths and bites as needed—the quick-vibe banana peel windup of “rollerskates”; the endlessly psychedelic metallic rhythm chant of the album’s centerpiece “I am (bells)”; and the triumphant free-folk shouts of “the glorification of small victories,” which is a drastic and collaborative quartet rework of a composition originally recorded for Gay’s album Grapes that serves as further evidence of his steady crew’s interpretive powers.

How, though, does Gay end a collection that covers so much ground? The sweetest sendoff is often the one that sounds like a beginning. The album closer “leave some for you”—a balladeer’s kiss as the sun comes up—pairs a deeply disintegrated series of rhythmic loops with a diddley bow shuffle, ushered by the sturdy-yet-understated swing of Moretti’s kit. Gay’s sweetly intoned low-register lilt is front and center with an affirmation delivered as an earworm. The simple melody carries it home:

You look brand new today

Not cause you need it

Just cause you want it

New

This compilation introduces the sound pieces created by the Latin American experimental filmmakers and

is curated by the film artist Tetsuya Maruyama.

Tetsuya Maruyama

Born in 1983 in Yokohama, Japan and currently based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated from the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture in 2007 and from the Visual Language Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's School of Fine Arts in 2024. His work spans film, text, performance, sound, ideas, and installation, without prioritizing any particular medium.

Maruyama’s practice is rooted in re-contextualizing ordinary elements and textures, presenting them as ephemeral records of everyday observations. As an independent programmer and researcher, he has curated screenings of Brazilian experimental cinema across the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and Canada. He is also the founder of Megalab, an artist-run film lab based in Rio de Janeiro. His works are distributed by Light Cone, a nonprofit organization dedicated to experimental cinema in Paris.

Artist bio:

Ж

Ж (São Paulo, 198-) film-designer, programmer, educator & editor

Has a non-specialised and situated practice that explores the energetic, material,economic, political, and emotional cycles of (semio)capitalism. His work uses various strategies, materials, and media to reveal how these forces shape perception,memory, and subjectivity, especially in the context of our current ecological crisis.

His artistic propositions have taken the form of films, video installations, counter-spaces, writings, performances, and public space interventions, all aimed at reintegrating artistic practice into specific social and political contexts.

John Melo:

Visual artist, designer, and teacher of audiovisual arts. Graduated from the MAE (Master's in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts) at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), Argentina. Interested in the relationship between arts, technology, ancestry, and transdisciplinary and experimental work. Studies non-linearity in artistic creation processes, poetic thinking, magical thinking, spirituality, and political and social actions, with a deep interest in pedagogy. Their work combines creative languages such as installation, sculpture, illustration, writing, sound, and video primarily. Previously a tutor in the training program for self-taught artists at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (MAMBO PFA)

In 2022, founded SEPAE (Seminar of Editing and Experimental Audiovisual Thinking). Also involved in"Colectivo Tal Cosa," a transdisciplinary project combining biology, sound

exploration, intuition, and non-linear thinking in creative processes. A member of "2 horas de diferencia coletivo," a space connecting Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia for projects that conceptually link the three territories. Part of the art collective "Blanco Conejo" in Bogotá, aiming to share, promote, and experiment with contemporary

modes of creation.

Rodrigo Faustini:

Rodrigo Faustini is a Brazilian artist and researcher, based in São Paulo/ Campinas. His practice focuses on mediation, materiality and noise in audiovisual forms. His work has been exhibited at Centro Cultural Kirchner, Images Festival, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Annecy international animation festival, Vienna Shorts, Festival de Cine de la Habana, and others.

Francisco Álvarez Ríos:

Francisco Álvarez Ríos (1991 - Ecuador) is a filmmaker, curator, archivist, and visual and sound artist. He currently serves as the director and curator of the Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida

As a filmmaker, he explores reality and its escapes, focusing on the demystification of the image beyond the literal recording of the real. His current practice delves into moving images, sound interpretation, film installation, and performance film—practices that coexist and interact within the less-defined territory of the contemporary expanded cinema.

Martín Baus:

Multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, researcher and teacher. My artistic practice investigates the relationships between history, materialism and perception, converging my interest in the political dimensions of listening, the reappropriation of archives, and the procedures of translation between materialities such as celluloid,sound and text. I’m a member of CEIS8, a collective for experimentation with film formats and photochemical processes based in Santiago de Chile, and co-director along with Andrés Baus, of the independent record label Radio Fome, which releases improvisation-based music and sound pieces. I’m interested in aurality as a tool for a radical pedagogy from Latin America, as well as methodology for artistic and practice-based research.

I enjoy engaging with the sonic realm from non-audible or non-sonorous approaches, therefore, I’ve done poetry books related to listening and wording, text installations that engage with opaque language translation procedures, publications around the links between salsa rhythms, migration and working-class struggles, and fictional writings that speculate on the future of sound archives and digital archeology.

Lucía Malandro:

Lucía Malandro is a renowned Uruguayan filmmaker dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cinematic and photographic heritage.

A graduate of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, with a specialization in Documentary Directing, she continued her studies with a master’s degree at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. As the founder of the Archivistas Salvajes collective, Malandro has taken initiative to rescue a little-known legacy: Cuba’s underground cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, a clandestine movement that emerged on Havana’s rooftops in response to official restrictions.

Since 2019, she has directed several short films focused on the reuse and revaluation of cinematic and photographic archives, earning recognition at prestigious international festivals. Additionally, she has contributed as a film critic to various publications, including the official newspaper of the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2023.

Malandro has worked on the restoration of archives at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and has contributed to research and archival projects such as Piezas Cinéticas and Vanguardia Scópica, collaborating with institutions like Gordailua, the Basque Film

Ivonne Sheen Mogollón:

My projects are developed as experimental audiovisual, photographic and sound works, publications, texts, curatorial work and organization of cultural initiatives. From a personal and critical voice, I explore questions and reinterpretations about my surroundings, structures, archive images, my family history and the hegemonic learning that we assimilate. I am interested in self-management and the collective creation of spaces and experiences. I currently live in between Cologne, Germany, and Lima, Peru. My film Animal Within co-directed with Rebeca Alvan has been showcased in different platforms and festivals in Latin America, Europe and the USA. I am co founder of Taller Helios and associate collaborator of Isole_islas.

Javier Plano:

Javier Plano is an artist and university professor that works and lives in Buenos Aires. He has a college degree in Electronic Arts from UNTREF, where since 2014 he has been teaching courses about time based media and audiovisual performance arts. He’s currently doing a master’s degree in Sound Art at UNTREF. In 2007, he begins to produce video works and installations, participating in various festivals and exhibitions organized by institutions locally and abroad. He has received numerous distinctions for his works, among others an honorable mention in the MAMbA / Fundación Telefónica Award for Arts and New Technologies, the 3rd prize in the UNTREF award to the Electronics Arts, and three different honorable mentions at the National Salon of Visual Arts. On 2016, he has his first solo exhibition, titled "Test Patterns", in the MACLA (La Plata, Argentina). That same year he attends an artistic residence program on Signal Culture (NY, USA), with a scholarship granted by the Department of Cultural Affairs of Argentina. In 2019, he does his first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and wins a Scholarship of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to develop a new project.

Pablo Mazzolo:

Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) is a filmmaker and educator born in Buenos Aires in 1976. He works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. His work has tackled themes such as indigenous sovereignty, the spectre of military dictatorship, extinction and environmental catastrophe.

He received an MFA from the University of Buenos Aires (2001). His films, including Diego La Silla (2000), Oaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo sueña cataratas (2012), Fotooxidación (2013), and Ceniza Verde (2019), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Melbourne International Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Block Museum of Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Wavelength, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Festival, Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Festival, Museo Tamayo, Valdivia International Film Festival, FAMU International, The Latin American Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, and Cinemateca Madrid, among many others.

His film Conjectures (2013) won Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival (2013); Fish Point (2015) was awarded the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016); and Cineza Verda (2019) was awarded Grand Prize, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (2019). Mazzolo is Professor at the National University of Quilmes, works as a freelance documentary film editor, and teaches workshops on visual perception and image creation to young people living with autism. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rosana Cacciotore:

Experimental filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and

audiovisual researcher. Graduated in social communication with a master's and a PhD degree (thesis defense) in literary theory from UFSC/BR. She has taught film and visual poetics courses, had films screened in national and international festivals, and participated as a debater, curator, judge, and reviewer in festivals, shows, and film notices. She has a book and articles published.

In experimental work, I usually make the sound myself; I think it is part of the creation process. About sound in these works, I assume sound is an image that produces meaning (or sensation) as a sign independent of the image.

破壊と創造的対話。孤独と絶望を経た魂の歌声。1967年から69年にかけて、アヴァンギャルド・ジャズの革新者Albert Aylerは名門〈Impulse! Records〉に一連のアルバムを録音。1967年にリリースされたこのアルバム『In Greenwich Village』は、アイラーにとって同レーベルからの最初のLPとなった作品であり、間違いなくこのレーベルでのベストと言える内容に仕上げられています。

On composing Tom Phillips' Irma
In February and March of 1977, for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, I made a version of Irma. The following notes on the piece arise out of that involvement and try to show how the piece can be made into a performance state.
Irma is a curious score – it is printed on a single sheet 50cms x 50cms. The notation consists of fragments from Tom’s continuing treatment of the victorian novel by W. H. Mallock, which he calls A Humument, and utilises those short verbal fragments that refer to either ‘‘libretto’’, ‘‘decor and mise-en-scène’’ or ‘‘sounds’’. These 3 categories are arranged in separate sections on the square sheet with, at the bottom, a line of stave notation. At first sight it looks like a piece of indeterminate music – clearly there has to be some preparatory work done before it is performable and no-one would venture to perform directly from the score - but if it is approached in this spirit, like realising a piece by John Cage or Morton Feldman written during the 1950’s, the sounding results are either largely of a documentary
interest, or rely entirely on the gifted performer to make into a coherent sounding whole. True, one could say the same thing for a piece by Cage, such as Variations I, but there the
performer is given a number of precise parameters of sound within which he should work, whereas Irma needs to be re-composed rather than realised.
If the distinction between ‘‘composing’’ and ‘‘realising’’ is overlooked, and if only the materials present in the notation are used, then the result is likely to be impoverished and it is clear that, looked at in isolation as a self-contained work, the score is notationally very thin. So one either produces an impoverished piece of sounding music, or one takes the responsibility to look further. Tom does not say explicitly that one must go beyond Irma into the rest of his work, but he does say that one has to go outside the piece. On the score he writes: ‘‘Perhaps to treat the indications here given as if they were the only surviving fragments of an ancient opera, or fragments of eye and ear witnesses’ accounts of such, and given no knowledge of performance tradition of the time, to reconstruct a hypothetical whole which would accommodate them economically, would be an appropriate basis of approach to a production.’’ So, try to put it back together and try to fill in all the gaps between these fragments. This approach, which, incidentally coincides with an interest in such procedures within my own work, seems to be the most suitable. If the ‘‘composer’’ uses the sorts of methods that Tom evidently uses in producing pictures, in making A Humument (of which Irma is a part), and if he uses the notations of Irma as clues to lead him into whatever area seems likely to yield rich results, then a much more satisfactory outcome is likely – satisfactory both in terms of the quality of the sounding material and in terms of consistency with the rest of Tom’s oeuvre.
There are clearly many ways in which the various fragments of verbal notation can be used. One fruitful way was to take each of the fragments as the notes of, say, a critic at the only performance of the work (in a hypothetical past), perhaps jotted down on the back of an envelope (then torn into fragments in a rage, or through frustration at some element in the piece? Make the piece inadequate in some way?!). These elements, then, would have been memorable for some reason or other, or used as an aide-memoire to recall something else (even something outside the work). The elements could have occurred at evenly-spaced intervals throughout the performance, they may have all been featured in some way (loudly, as solos), they may have been the worst parts (being retained to damn the piece in a subsequent review, since lost or never written – the composer got wind of the review and murdered the critic, retaining the fragments as the only link with the crime. . .). On the other hand they could be used as discrete musical units quite separate from the main body of the work, which has to be looked for elsewhere. Whatever solution, or combination of solutions, is found it is evident that the composer and librettist are more or less obliged to move outside the work itself i.e. outside the printed score. (One of the original ideas I had, which was not very practical, was to see if I could use another opera called Irma. A possibility was one written by H. J. Banawitz first performed in 1885, which would have had the right period in terms of the connection with the W. H. Mallock original. This seems to have had few performances, perhaps only one, and seems to have disappeared. I thought of looking for the manuscript, treating it in the same way as Tom had treated the Mallock novel, and making a sort of ‘‘musical Humument’’ out of it. While that seemed to have some intellectual sympathy with Tom's work, it might not have sounded anything like an opera, and it did seem to me that one of the notions of Irma is that it is conventional to some degree. Indeed, while much of Tom’s musical work lies within the field of experimental music and graphic notation, his musical taste is conservative, and the greater part of the musical references in the main body of his work are to past, and historically respectable, composers like Brahms, Mozart, Fux, Scarlatti and so on.)
The sources that were used, then, in making the piece apart from the score itself involved the following. I obtained the volumes of A Humument and noted all connection with music, with the role of Irma, and with the possible narrative; I looked at all the prints of Ein Deutsches Requiem after Brahms, which use elements from the Humument and refer directly to a musical work; I went through the catalogue of Tom’s work (Works. Texts to 1974); I went through Trailer, which uses the Humument, in fact a spin off from the main work; I went through all the other pieces of music that he has written to see if they could be used in any way; and I checked as many paintings/prints that I could which had a direct or indirect connection with either A Humument, Irma or with music. The painting The Quest for Irma (1973) which shows her in back view looking out to sea gave much information. It is the only portrait of her and she appears even here as anonymous, or rather, faceless. It gives a marine setting for the work (though since at least two pieces of music that I have written deal, to some degree, with marine incidents it might be argued that I might have been better off avoiding such a reference, but it is very blatant). She is looking out to sea from the Dorset coast and this attitude seems to be characteristic of her behaviour: ‘‘I tell you. . . that’s Irma herself. . . watching the waves fall. . . repeating certain sorts of verse. . .’’ So here we have an elusive heroine, obsessively watching the sea off the Dorset coast, given to repetition. Further checks within the Humument revealed a spate of marine references: ‘‘boat of dreams. . . lost on rocks’’; ‘‘the sad horizon of sea, hours she spent with her sadness on the beach’’; ‘‘see, see, the things. . . the things from the changed sea’’; ‘‘a cruise in an opium clipper’’; ‘‘marine engines and boilers’’; ‘‘ten years’ travel and sport in foreign lands’’; ‘‘a certain light flashed. . . among the eastern clouds’’; ‘‘sinking lights. . .’’ and so on. On the other hand, she is not in mourning since she wears a bright red dress.
One page of A Humument is almost a summary of the feeling of Irma and is certainly one that I tried to emulate. ‘‘. . . The whole history of it is so vague. . . eagerly, gradually the words that I heard I put aside as an opera, an insufficient one; still organ for what – me, me. . . I can’t quite tell. hardly books. . . it was the libretto of the music, of the music – I can’t tell. . . I can’t tell - but all was for the same thing to capture in drawing, and to express in music, thought and study. . . the loss. . . the least important. . . moon I myself am myself in search of an object for love? way? Yes and no – enter myself. . . associating me and me. It made me within me some mystery. . .’’
Other pages give more precise information about particular sounds, rhythms, timbres and so on. The instrumentation was, to a large extent, governed by the references to musical instruments that I found in all these sources. ‘‘Tube’’ suggested tuba. The piano is mentioned
many times, especially in connection with John Tilbury. The gong is specified – ‘‘suddenly a gong in series’’ – which also gave me the whole of a short percussion interlude between the second and third sections of the work. Strings were suggested by a phrase ‘‘the history viola’’ occurring in A Humument and this gave me a reason to feature the viola in some way, in fact using it in unison with the female voice, identifying the viola with the title of the opera. The fact of having strings is such a convention of normal orchestral scoring that it would really have needed a positive clue to the contrary to have excluded them, bearing in mind the relationship of the piece to musical convention.
I used the tuned percussion, and especially metallic instruments, from certain onomatopaeic syllables, like ‘‘ting’’, ‘‘ping’’, ‘‘ding’’ which I had originally considered using as a chorus of instrumental imitations, but decided ultimately to use the instruments themselves.
Two of the prints from Ein Deutsches Requiem after Brahms gave me a great deal of material for the second section of the opera, a slow duet between the two main characters. Print number 5 shows a number of parasols, both closed and open, and has the legend ‘‘. . . a sound was given up’’ taken from A Humument. That particular picture suggested itself since there is, within both the score of Irma and within the published Humument a fragment which reads ‘‘the first parasol sound’’, with the addition, in Irma, of ‘‘f, f’’ indicating loud. From the text of the Requiem printed on the picture, I could find the precise section of music in the
Brahms original which consists of a solo for trombone (in the score I use baritone horn for its greater flexibility and ease of pitching, but it uses the same range, and has the added advantage of resembling the French Horn, an instrument more closely associated with noble operatic melodies.). The ‘‘parasol sound’’, then, indicated that I should use that particular instrument. What it plays came from another source, from the score of Irma. which gives ‘‘quiet, high, intonation divine. . .’’ and ‘‘. . . drops the tone . . . various phrases. . .’’ all of which enabled me to have that particular instrument playing, with "divine intonation’’, a long melodic line consisting of a descending stepwise chromatic scale from top E down an octave, but very elongated. The other use of the Requiem was for the other half of the slow section, and used the following print, number 6, which refers to a sequence of rather chromatic chords in the original which I used as fragments, like the Irma score, inserting chords of my own between groups of those by Brahms to make a new sequence. So the whole of the second section uses references to the Brahms Requiem – in the first half to the harmonic content (vertical), in the second half to the melodic line (horizontal).
The last section of the piece, a chorus ‘‘Love is help, mate’’ uses a page of A Humument that is dedicated to Morton Feldman, though the actual results bear no relation to Feldman's music as such. What I did with that page was to look through some of Feldman's music to see if there was anything in it that was consistent with the way that I was approaching the score of Irma. It occurred to me to use a vocal piece for something that would be vocal within Irma and since Tom had dedicated another page to Christian Wolff – in fact a page of Trailer – and since Wolff and Feldman were close associates with Cage in the 1950’s, I used a piece called Christian Wolff in Cambridge (in spite of the fact that Tom had attended Oxford, and the Cambridge here refers to Harvard). This is a wordless choral piece which is hummed – and I used a lot of humming in the score, often as a means of separating discrete images – and consists of mildly dissonant chords. There were, however, one or two more consonant ones and I omitted those which sounded like ‘‘modern music’’, and so was left with one or two chords that I used, along with others interjected to produce a smooth flow, as the accompaniment to the melody of ‘‘Love is help mate’’. The addition of other chords was necessary because of the static quality of Feldman’s piece in which each chord is an isolated entity, and this mirrored what I was doing, on a larger scale, with the whole of Irma; taking isolated fragments and finding ways of reassembling them into a continuous whole. It could be said that I was doing to Feldman what Tom had done to Mallock since each of us extracted from a body of material what was needed for a particular circumstance, though my extraction was a good deal more cursory.
The melody that this accompanies comes from a number of sources. One of these is the stave notation and references to specific notes on Irma itself – about 60% of the notes in the melody – the rest being added by myself. One of the ideas for this came from Eric Sams’ researches into the ciphers in Schumann's music, and in particular from the fact that he originally found a clue to the cipher by finding 5-note melodic phrases in which the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes were C-A-A (Schumann’s wife was called CLARA) and this gave the possibility of finding what L and R became in the musical code, and thence other possible letters. Using this notion, using the notes given by Irma, and inserting between them other notes, the melodic lines are composed by myself but taking as a starting point the notation of Irma. The stave notation at the bottom of the score I found more usable in this way, and also as bass-lines, in transposition, rather than as originally given.
There are, obviously, some very direct references in the score, and it is the presence of these that ensure a very eclectic result: references like ‘‘the Ring’’, ‘‘the Emperor’’, ‘‘the International’’. The first of these, allied to a notation that refers to many ‘‘s’s’’ (German for E flat) suggested the opening of the Rheingold. The second, ‘‘Emperor’’, could have been a number of references – the ‘‘Emperor’’ Waltz (Strauss), the ‘‘Emperor’’ Concerto (Beethoven), the ‘‘Emperor’’ Quartet (Haydn) and so on. In the event I used the last two, and toyed with the idea of using the source for Haydn’s ‘‘Emperor’’ Quartet viz. his ‘‘Emperor Hymn’’ which became the Austrian national anthem, and which was, in its turn taken from a Croatian folk tune. I considered omitting all the musical references and only using the words of this latter ‘‘Vjutro rano se ja stanem Mal pred zorom’’ – and relished the fact that I would have been injecting something with precise semantic value, though one which I did not understand, but in the end omitted it for reasons of pronunciation difficulty. With ‘‘the International’’, I was delighted that it was misspelt (Internationale) and this made of it a lipogram (like the Ellery Queen story that omits the letter ‘‘t’’) and so I quoted the music leaving out the note ‘‘e’’. I had also considered the idea of the lipogram in another context. The original of A Humument is the Victorian novel A Human Document which leaves behind the letters AN DOC, and this gives a lipogrammatic anagram of NO ADC, that is, to avoid the notes A D and C in the piece as a whole. This seemed to be excessive, however, since it would have effectively ruled out one of the two vowels available in musical cryptography, and they are not easy to come by.

THE COMPOSERS NOTES ON THE WORKS

The Machines, which date from the period 1967-1972 represent a departure from the more traditionally “narrative” nature of the rest of my pieces. I use the word Machine to define a consistent process governing a series of musical actions within a particular sound world and, by extension, the listener’s perception thereof. One might thus regard the Welsh Rarebit as a Machine in which a process is applied to the conditioning and perception of the world of bread and cheese.

Autumn Countdown Machine presents the guaranteed dis-simultaneity of six pairs of bass melody instruments, each conducted by a percussionist playing in time with, and making minor adjustments to the setting of a bell-metronome.

Son of Gothic Chord presents four keyboard players’ mobilisation of a sequential chord progression rising through the span of an octave.

Jews Harp Machine presents various permutations of the articulations “Ging, Gang, Gong,Gung, Ho!”

Drinking and Hooting Machine presents some observations on the world of bottles and their non-percussive musical potential. The effect of this piece has been compared to that of a large aviary full of owls all practising very slow descending scales.

John White, March 1976

THE SQUIRREL AND THE RICKETTY RACKETTY BRIDGE

The piece, for one player of two guitars, was written at the request of Derek Bailey, the jazz guitarist, in 1971. I had worked closely with Bailey from 1963-6 in and around Sheffield as a member of a group which included Tony Oxley on drums and myself on double-bass. Since that time, I have lost all interest in jazz, and in improvisation, and since Bailey was involved in both I wrote a piece which uses a technique which Bailey would be unlikely to have evolved in his playing. The two guitars are played simultaneously, each one lying flat on its back, and they are arranged side by side so that the two fingerboards can be played with the fingers hammering down on them, like two keyboards. In addition, the score contains a number of ironic references to jazz and to its critical literature - short texts added to the ‘musical’ notations, somewhat in the spirit of Erik Satie, involving the performer in a hypothetical dialogue with the composer using fragments culled from particularly banal pieces of jazz criticism e.g. “ ‘there is an area up here’, holding his hand above his head, palm down,’ where musical categories do not exist.’ ”. The left hand of the player moves at an even pulse, like the walking jazz bass, at a tempo “between Lady is a Tramp” as a medium bounce, and Cherokee as an embarrassment to lesser, and more intrepid, musicians”, while the right hand punctuates this with short notes, like a highly selective, or extremely lazy, trumpet soloist. The title involves an oblique pun to do with the nut of the guitar, the guitar’s bridge, the faint noise of the music in between – that each attack gives two pitches rather than one – and an English children’s song about Billy Goat Gruff.
Derek Bailey recorded the piece on Incus Records in 1971, and this new version is a multiple one, four players on eight guitars, in which each player uses a pair of guitars which are characteristically different from those used by the others.

Gavin Bryars (1971) 

Aran
‘‘Aran’’ and ‘‘McCrimmon Will Never Return’’ date from the period 1970-72, and were written for the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, a group started by White, consisting of 4 performers; White, Hobbs, Hugh Shrapnel and Alec Hill.
‘‘Aran’’was written at a time when the PTO was beginning to combine the sounds of reed organs and toy pianos, the original instruments of the group, with some newly-acquired percussion instruments. The note-to-note procedure of the piece was determined by random means, in the hope of producing a gentle unpredictability in the final result. It was hoped that the whole would be grittily resonant. This recorded version, for 12 performers, is generally more soft-centred than the original.

American Standard
Although the instrumentation of the piece is not specified, an ideal group would be similar to that which performed this version, recorded at the first performance of the piece in March 1973. It is played by the New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, directed by John Adams, the composer, and the instruments used here are:
Flute, clarinet, clarinet (doubling bass-clarinet), clarinet (doubling bass-drum), tuba, percussion (trap set), violin, 2 violas, cello, double-bass, and harp. A conductor is not necessary for performance, since the arrangement and distribution of parts depends on what instruments are available, and ensemble problems that arise are ‘‘to be worked out in standard American fashion: proposal, debate and vote’’. Extra materials, that anyone making a version considers appropriate, may be used in performance in various forms whether film, tape, video, speech, mime, dance etc. Each section of this performance has at least one example of the use of ‘‘extra materials’’.
The piece is in 3 parts, each separately performable, and separately titled:
1. John Philip Sousa
The use of a steady, insistent pulse makes the title’s derivation quite clear; the pulse is given by a bass drum and other instruments have constant pitches which are departed from and returned to. As with all 3 pieces, the dynamics are restrained and undramatic, with the exception of the ‘‘extra material’’ – a crisp snare-drum roll that both sets the tone and gives a dramatic touch that is not present anywhere else. This is not in the score.
2. Christian Zeal and Activity
The main body of the music consists of a series of long held notes, very consonant, in 4 parts which are occasionally synchronised to give unified chords. The instruments are divided into 4 groups according to their pitch ranges, with at least one sustaining instrument in a group, each group having a leader who cues movement from one note to the next. During this piece, the ‘‘extra material’’ consists of a tape-recording of a radio talk-show.
3. Sentimentals
This is the most melodic piece of the 3 and the one which involves the greatest range of variation, quoting extensively from Duke Ellington’s ‘‘Sophisticated Lady’’.The gentle swing of the trap set, that is added during the piece, is again not included in the score, and its presence gives the sound a distinctively Californian feel, close to that of the Beach Boys, or Hollywood studio bands.The curious ending is an ironic affirmation of the maudlin chromaticism of the Ellington piece which generates the music.

McCrimmon Will Never Return
‘‘McCrimmon Will Never Return’’ stems from a temporary interest in Piobaireachd (Pibroch), the most highly developed form of Scottish bagpipe music. The melody of the title has several variants, which are played simultaneously on 4 reed organs. The tempo is sufficiently slow that the characteristic skirls or flourishes in the music become audible as individual notes.

1, 2, 1-2-3-4
The piece is for instrumentalists/vocalists, each wearing headphones connected to a portable cassette machine. Each performer hears only the music in his headphones, music which contains ‘‘parts’’for his instrument or voice, and he plays, along with the cassette, his own instrumental part. His ability to reproduce this part depends on how familiar he is with what he hears, and this can range from careful practice over a period of weeks with his cassette to an immediate response from a first or second hearing. The present recording, to some extent, contains elements of these two extremes: a few players had played the piece on other occasions (at least one of which used the same material as is used on this recording), while others became acquainted with it for the first time in the recording studio.
Each performer plays the‘‘part’’that corresponds to his instrument.Thus, if the music be jazz, a bassist is likely to play more than, say, a violinist. In the case of a bassist hearing jazz (and, hence, usually a bass) on his headphones, he would attempt to play, as best he can, the bass-line in the headphones such that there is an intended one-to-one relationship between what he plays and what he hears in the headphones. He may try his part several times beforehand, or he may choose to busk ‘‘on the night’’, like the accompanist in cabaret who is told, in the middle of the act on stage, that there are no parts for the next number but that it is ‘‘Happy Streets and Paper Rainbows in D flat, 1, 2, 1-2-3-4’’ (and his entry must be prompt, even to the extent of ‘‘inventing’’ an eight-bar introduction).
In this performance, all the players have identical material on their cassettes, though each was recorded individually and not copied simultaneously, and their performance reflects a number of variables that occur: the starting point of the music on the cassettes is not precise (but the click of the machines switching on, however, is); the cassettes may not be all running at the same speed due to the uneven quality of the different machines, the state of their batteries and so on, and this, in turn, affects both the duration and key of the piece; players vary in their ability to ‘‘shadow’’ material (i.e. to simultaneously hear and reproduce); players, in this recording, vary in their familiarity with the material. The material itself, however, is perfectly homogeneous and the dislocations that occur do not destroy this. The piece was originally written for a series of concerts organised by John White and is, amiably, dedicated to him. 

Roberto Musci, born in Milan in 1956, studied guitar, music and electronic instruments. From 1974 to 1985 he traveled the world studying African, Indian, Arab and Oriental music recording ethnic music “in the field,” studying and collecting ethnic musical instruments from all parts of the world. His self-produced debut album, “The Loa of Music,” is a seminal work of staggering originality and extraordinary beauty in which field recordings, musique concrète, electronics, synthesis and instrumentation are interwoven, drawing on the countless musics from all over the World that he recorded. The subsequent “Water messages on desert sand,” composed with Giovanni Venosta, was nominated for a Grammy in the UK in 1987. In the 1980s 'and 90s' he broadcast ethnic and electronic-experimental music from Rai and Radio Popolare radio stations. He has also composed and played music for videos, commercials, dance, poetry, theater, composed soundtracks and accompanied silent films live. From 1980 to the present, he has played with many Italian and European musicians: Giovanni Venosta, Claudio Gabbiani, Walter Prati, Giorgio Magnanensi, Massimo Cavallaro, Massimo Mariani, Moni Ovadia, Roberto Zorzi, Chris Cutler, Jon Rose David Moss, Steve Piccolo, Elliott Sharp, Keith Tippett and the Third Ear Band. The theme of travel, ethnicities and mysticism are a pivotal point in this new album of his as well, demonstrating once again how music needs absolutely no sharp lines of demarcation. The music is one. It goes from the search for deep meanings in a time spent in a Hindu monastery (Ashram) listening to mantras and studying Buddhist philosophy to space explorations and human settlements on the Moon or Mars wondering how man will live and what he will bring to the new worlds imagining that Sufism, an Islamic mystical religion, will accompany him in the discovery of new worlds. An inspired Roberto Musci is increasingly aware of his hypnotic and visionary language.

Volume 6 of "Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance" intensifies the avant-garde auditory experience pioneered by its predecessors through Merzbow’s masterful exploration of noise. This edition features three meticulously crafted tracks—"Ripples On The Water," "In Solitude," and "Deep In The Heart"—that unveil a rich tapestry of tonal complexity and dynamic interplay. The intricate soundscapes fuse avant-garde noise techniques with contemporary artistic vision, drawing listeners into profound auditory realms where every tone and nuance captivates. This remarkable voyage unfolds with unexpected twists, pushing the limits of musical conventions and embracing noise as a transformative and expressive force in art.

This limited release is elegantly presented in a finely crafted birch box, and each hand-numbered copy bestows a unique sense of ownership and value. Every aspect has been painstakingly curated to augment and elevate the auditory experience, from the exquisite exterior finish to the thoughtfully organized interior, ensuring an impeccable presentation. The CD is housed within a mini-LP replica featuring an inner sleeve that amplifies the overall aesthetic.

Additionally, two inserts printed on 300g white Fedrigoni paper contribute to the luxurious allure of the packaging. Together, the auditory pieces and their exquisite packaging create a multisensory masterpiece destined to resonate in memo

Volume 5 of "Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance" amplifies the groundbreaking auditory journey established by its predecessors through Merzbow’s exceptional manipulation of noise. This edition showcases three meticulously crafted tracks—"The Bell Tolls," "Flow Of Time," and "Distant Mountains"—that uncover a rich landscape of tonal intricacy and dynamic resonance. The soundscapes interweave experimental noise techniques with a fresh artistic approach, transporting listeners into mesmerizing auditory realms where each sound and subtle variation captivates the imagination. This remarkable journey unfolds with unforeseen discoveries, breaking free from conventional musical frameworks and highlighting noise as a crucial and expressive element of contemporary artistry.

This limited release is elegantly presented in a finely crafted birch box, and each hand-numbered copy bestows a unique sense of ownership and value. Every aspect has been painstakingly curated to augment and elevate the auditory experience, from the exquisite exterior finish to the thoughtfully organized interior, ensuring an impeccable presentation. The CD is housed within a mini-LP replica featuring an inner sleeve that amplifies the overall aesthetic.

Additionally, two inserts printed on 300g white Fedrigoni paper contribute to the luxurious allure of the packaging. Together, the auditory pieces and their exquisite packaging create a multisensory masterpiece destined to resonate in memory and enhance the collections of dedicated enthusiasts.

Volume 4 of Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance takes the listening experience introduced by its predecessors to new heights, pushing the boundaries of sonic experimentation even further. This volume features three intricately crafted tracks that explore a diverse range of tones and dynamic interactions, seamlessly weaving together the traditions of sound with cutting-edge artistic concepts. The immersive soundscapes invite listeners into rich auditory worlds where each hue, echo, and resonance engages them on both sensory and emotional levels. The innovative dynamics and rhythmic explorations create a captivating journey filled with unexpected twists and nuanced discoveries, honoring and expanding upon Japanese traditional musical roots.This limited edition is elegantly encased in a skillfully crafted birch box, with each hand-numbered copy enhancing ownership with a unique sense of value. Every detail has been meticulously considered to complement and elevate the listening experience, from the refined exterior finish to the thoughtfully arranged interior, ensuring a flawless presentation. The CD is housed in a mini-LP replica with an inner sleeve, further enhancing the aesthetic. Additionally, there are two inserts printed on 300g white Fedrigoni paper, adding to the overall luxurious feel of the package. Together, the auditory tracks and packaging create a multisensory work that is destined to linger in memory and enrich the archives of passionate collectors.

Volume 3 of "Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance" enhances the listening experience created by its predecessors by exploring new depths in sonic experimentation. This volume features three carefully crafted tracks that showcase a wider range of tonal richness and dynamic interplay. The intricate textures blend the history of sound with modern artistic ideas. As the soundscapes unfold, they invite listeners into vibrant auditory environments where each distinct hue, echo, and resonance encourages a sensory and emotional connection. The engaging dynamics and creative rhythms set the scene for a captivating journey filled with surprises and hidden gems, providing an experience that both respects and goes beyond traditional musical roots. This limited edition is elegantly encased in a skillfully crafted birch box, with each hand-numbered copy enhancing ownership with a unique sense of value. Every detail has been meticulously considered to complement and elevate the listening experience, from the refined exterior finish to the thoughtfully arranged interior, ensuring a flawless presentation. The CD is housed in a mini-LP replica with an inner sleeve, further enhancing the aesthetic. Additionally, there are two inserts printed on 300g white Fedrigoni paper, adding to the overall luxurious feel of the package. Together, the auditory tracks and packaging create a multisensory work that is destined to linger in memory and enrich the archives of passionate collectors.

WRWTFWW Records is overjoyed to present the first ever vinyl release for the outstanding soundtrack of 1999 Japanese action-political-thriller anime Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade by Hajime Mizoguchi. The epic full-lenght album is available as a limited-edition LP cut at Emil Berliner Studios and housed in a heavyweight 350gsm sleeve.

Legendary animation film Jin-Roh was penned by Palme d’Or and Leone d’Oro award winning filmmaker, television director and writer Mamoru Oshii whose filmography includes Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 2: The Movie, and Angel’s Egg – critically acclaimed works praised worldwide, notably by luminaries such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and The Wachowskis. The film was directed by leading studio Production I.G. affiliate Hiroyuki Okiura (Record of the Lodoss War, A Letter to Momo…)

The film’s score, courtesy of famed anime and tv score composer, cellist and arranger Hajime Mizoguchi, evokes the dystopian world in which Jin-Roh takes place and captures the Little Red Riding Hood theme that carries the story – a dark, atmospheric, and immensely emotional soundscape that takes you on a grand and immersive journey and stays with you forever. It blends classical, orchestrated ambient, and poignant melodies carried by ominous strings.

This new project by WRWTFWW Records follows previous Japanese soundtracks from the catalogue: Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 2, Evil Dead Trap, Violent Cop and precedes the upcoming release of Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi.
 

TRACE is a collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced by Yutaka Hirose during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic Soundscape series album Nova. Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's label, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way). Following Wave Notation, Sound Process Design worked with museums, cafes and bars to create site-specific soundscapes, starting with the sound design of the Kushiro Museum. Yutaka Hirose was called to work on sound for these spaces.

Rather than simply providing pre-recorded compositions, Hirose sought to create a "sound scenery". To achieve this, he participated in the conception of the space and paid particular attention to the accidental combination of sounds by placing the speakers and using a multi-sound source, and following the concept of "sculpturing time through sound".

The composer explains: "sculpturing time through sound means that the time, the space itself, the sound played in it, and the audience all become one sculpture. It is close to the idea of a Japanese tea ceremony where you use all of your 5 (or 6) senses to taste the tea."

TRACE: Sound Design Works 1986-1989 is divided into two parts. "Reflection" is based on an ambient soundscape. It narrates "a sleep that starts with the sound of water droplets at dawn and slowly disappears into darkness" and feels like a natural and soothing progression of Nova. It was played at entrances of spaces, at events, in cafes and bars. "Voice from Past Technology" expresses the dream world born out of that sleep and is based on what Yukata Hirose calls hardcore ambient, environmental music with a noise approach. It was played in museums and science centers.

All in all, TRACE is a crucial addition to every Japanese environmental music fan’s collection, alongside Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, Satoshi Ishikawa’s Still Way, Motohiko Hamase’s Notes of Forestry, Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon, and Yutaka Hirose’s very own Nova.

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.

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

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.

Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert

The clear vinyl version is only available in the limited 99 copies boxset "artefAKTs from the Early Japanese Experimental Noise Music Scene"

This reissue of the “Collection” is limited to just 299 hand-numbered copies, making it a truly special release for fans and collectors alike. Encased in a beautifully crafted wooden box, this deluxe edition features ten LPs, each adorned with original collages by Masami Akita, printed in black silkscreen on Cordenons Astropack ivory cardboard sleeves. Accompanying the vinyl is a 12-inch booklet, also printed on the same high-quality cardboard as the cover, containing 32 pages filled with previously unpublished photographs, as well as artwork and collages by Masami Akita from 1981-83. This booklet includes exclusive notes by Lasse Marhaug, Thurston Moore and Masami Akita along with a unique interview of Jim O’Rourke with Masami Akita.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch III’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes. The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all." Dais-exclusive Lenticular Limited Editions : Come in lenticular plastic jacket that animates when tilted, using frames of projections from Coil's live performances during the era.

The first-ever official vinyl edition, completely remastered by Josh Bonati. The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Weston-super-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

Initially released in 2006, ‘Revep’ is the third collaboration album between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.’s five albums series. Remastered in 2021 in collaboration with Calyx Studio, the album’s recordings are accompanied by three new compositions titled ‘City Radieuse’, ‘Veru 1’, and ‘Veru 2’. ‘City Radieuse’ was composed for the 2012 short cinematic essay titled ‘Cité Radieuse’ and part of Carsten Nicolai’s ‘future past perfect’ series. The video shot at le Corbusier’s Unité D’Habitation in Nantes (called ‘cité radieuse’) takes the viewer through the modular system and design applied to the residential buildings. The film’s narrative unfolds through a sequence of images tracking the apartments’ indoor space and details, and points to the different benchmarks of standardized production as they correlate to their environment and its inhabitants. The album’s original recordings resulted from musical exchanges that began with ‘Vrioon’ and revolved around a collaborative arrangement of Sakamoto’s classic ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,’ the theme music to the 1983 movie starring David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano, and Ryuichi Sakamoto himself. In ‘Revep,’ the piano takes the lead while the padded bass and pitched electronic frequencies mark sudden change. Deeply evocative and effortlessly colliding worlds of analog beauty and digital mastery, this album is considered another indispensable record from the duo’s ongoing collaboration. ALBUM ART DESIGNED BY CARSTEN NICOLAI MASTERING BY BO @ CALYX TRACKLIST: