Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Music From Memory is excited to introduce the self-titled debut album of Habitat Ensemble, a new musical collective headed up by musician Marius Houschyar. The collective originates deep in the south of the Czech Republic, on the border with Austria, amongst the idyllic hills and fields of a village called Maříž, where a summer school of outsiders and creatives have been gathering since the 1990s. Enriching each other through intercultural exchange, summer school participants have created a unique gathering of artistic expression and interdisciplinary research. Originally grown out of the idea of translating the unique energy of the community and its environment into a musical journey where each member makes their own individual contribution, during the summer of August 2022, Habitat Ensemble became an exciting vehicle for connection and co-creation. Whether it be musical experimentation, composition, poetry, song or dance, Habitat Ensemble, having started as a series of multidisciplinary workshops, slowly developed into a unique musical recording. The album serves to conjure the unique nature, community, experimentation surrounding the school and the collective’s search for harmony across all of these, both musical and spiritual. MFM065 will be released in LP and digital format, comes with artwork by David McFarline, and is expected to release in November 2023.

These recordings were made in Bombay in 1968 by Bengt Berger (Bitter Funeral Beer Band) during a stay with Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, who was primarily responsible for the revival of the Rudra Veena as a solo concert instrument. His home in the suburb of Chembur was at the time the magical haunt of a plethora of fantastic musicians, including Ritwik Sanyal and K. Sridhar, who took part in the session. In perfect and stern Duphrad vocal style, these two Raga lead us to different atmospheres and perceptions : Malkauns is the contemplative state of the evening, of the abandonment of the senses before the breaking of the silence in the night; Miyan Ki Todi is the first breath of the morning, the gentle awakening of the limbs before a puja. The two Dagar brothers, Mohiuddin on the Rudra and Fariduddin on the chant, complement each other, become ocean and fire, stillness and storm, in an intimate and tight dialogue of exploration and expressive subtlety, in which the purity of an Indian summer becomes the highest symbol of beauty and freedom of spirit. Originally released on CD by Country & Eastern.

150 copies made available for international distribution, limited LP edition including an insert with drawings, score and notes. Over the past two years, Lorenzo Abattoir's work has focused on researching various breathing and amplification techniques to create a sort of non-verbal language through which to express the sounds of an 'inhuman' being. A key element of his work is the relationship between spiritual practices and unusual methods of audio processing, mainly focusing on the use of microphones as a medium for the amplification of an act. He explores the boundaries between sound and noise using breathing techniques, bodily sounds and different kinds of amplified objects as instruments to structures his performances. The first act of this transformation took place in "Disincarnazione" (CD, Flag Day Records, 2023); the artist frees himself from his own corporeal state and the cultural structures sedimented over millennia of evolution to explore the sonic possibilities of the animal body as a medium and instrument of his work. Continuing to explore these possibilities in "Second Act" (cassette, Vice de Forme, 2023) and then "Third Act" (cassette, Titania Tapes, 2023), Lorenzo Abattoir's new work succeeds in giving shape to this creature. The artist assumes the form of this new beast, delineating its field of action and incorporating movement into his practice. With "Mess (akt IV)", the fourth act of his research issued now on LP by Planam, Abattoir consecrates a new being in a state of sonic confusion, no longer human but not entirely beast, taking its first steps in his sonic and performative universe. The amplification delivers to the listener the sonic image of a hybrid primate amidst the entirety of the noises of its body, from breaths to movements, in a non-place that allows us to explore the depths of the animal body. All the material of "Mess (akt IV)" was recorded at Nub Project Space, Pistoia Italy.

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.

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.

New York-based artist Eli Keszler is at the apex of his career. This year alone he’s had a three-month-long solo exhibition (“Blue Skies” at Fuse Arts, Bradford, UK), performed internationally in a duo with Laurel Halo, collaborated with noted Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, taught experimental composition and performance at Camp in the Pyrenees mountains, composed music for Turner Prize–winning visual artist Laure Prouvost, and most recently embarked on a world tour with Oneohtrix Point Never.

“Stadium” is his new album for Shelter Press. As his ninth solo record,“Stadium” reflects his move from South Brooklyn to Manhattan, where he produced the album. The constant blurry motion and ever-changing landscapes of the fast-paced island helped him modify and shape his sound into a new kind of film noir. “After we moved into our East Village apartment,” Keszler explains, “we found a guitar pick on the floor that read ‘Stadium’. We looked at each other at the same time and had the same thought. It could have gone any number of ways.” Indeed, there is a startling amount of expression at play on each track, where intersections of melody, restraint and rhythm are used to challenge the idea of memory, impression and space.

Keszler is often mistaken for an electronic musician, but in fact his sounds are raw and natural, produced by hand live in-situ. His performance with the drumset and acoustic percussion are central to his work. He produces almost impossible textures through self-realized methodologies: cascading melodies, a shadow of voices, and a unique pointillistic materiality. Although playing with the intensity of digitally-created music, his communications are done live with no processing. These haptics are what give “Stadium” its depth and its warmth. In a recent interview for Dazed, collaborator Oneohtrix Point Never comments, “I’ve always described his playing as bacterial. He’s able to parallax into very small, very acute, very specific relationships between percussive textures. It’s beyond just being a drummer—he’s a world-building percussionist.”

In “Stadium,” Keszler uses lived experience to realize the most wide-ranging sound he’s created to date. “Stadium” draws out textures from overlapping geographies (from Shinjuku arcades to city streets and Brutalist architecture) and transforms these travelogue field recordings into starting points for composition. He then builds on these environments to create subliminal spaces for his percussion, keyboards and acoustic instruments. His “world-building” techniques are pushed to new levels with mesmerizing string and brass arrangements. Throughout the album, Keszler’s writing, keyboard playing and scoring operate like a sonic channel that transports the listener into a quaking web.

Perhaps this is the “stadium” referred to in the title: a larger network of sound and bodies moving continually, oscillating and turning in on itself. Keszler has explored these ideas before both in his visual work and sound installations—especially notable on projects such as his massive Manhattan Bridge installation ‘Archway’ or his Boston City Hall work «Northern Stair Projection.» “Stadium” takes these long-running ideas to new depths. “My installations work with massive city spaces for a complex of individuals,” Keszler states. “The recordings on Stadium are inverted. They are landscapes scaled for the singular. Like a mass collecting in one arena, this music compresses city spaces, genre and instrumentalism into an amorphous form. On the record, there are ruptures of information and happenstance. Like a game, it could go any number of ways.”

High quality reissue of the monumental work August 1974 by Japanese experimental music ensemble Taj Mahal Travellers. Pressed on 180gr. vinyl with extensive liner notes by Julian Cowley.

In April 1972 a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the changing scene and to differing ways of life. Midway through May they reached their destination, the iconic Taj Mahal on the bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, India. The Taj Mahal Travellers had fulfilled physically the promise of the name they adopted when they formed in 1969. But their music had always been a journey, a sonic adventure designed to lead any listener’s imagination into unfamiliar territory.

The double album August 1974 was their second official release. The first July 15, 1972 is a live concert recording, but on 19th August 1974 the Taj Mahal Travellers entered the Tokyo studios of Nippon Columbia and produced what is arguably their definitive statement. The electronic dimension of their collective improvising was coordinated, as usual, by Kinji Hayashi. Guest percussionist Hirokazu Sato joined long-term group members Ryo Koike, Seiji Nagai, Yukio Tsuchiya, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa and Takehisa Kosugi.   

The enigmatic Takehisa Kosugi, whose soaring electric violin was such a vital element in their music, had been a pioneer of free improvisation and intermedia performance art with Group Ongaku at the start of the 60s. Later in that decade, before launching the Taj Mahal Travellers, he had become known internationally through his association with the Fluxus art movement. During the mid-70s the Travellers disbanded and while his colleagues more or less stopped performing as musicians Kosugi continued to reach new audiences across the course of several decades as a composer, regular performer and musical director for the acclaimed Merce Cunningham Dance Company. 

August 1974 captures vividly the characteristic sound of the Taj Mahal Travellers, haunting tones from an unusual combination of instruments, filtered through multiple layers of reverb and delay. Their music has strong stylistic affinities with the trippy ambience of cosmic and psychedelic rock, but the Taj Mahal Travellers were tuning in to other vibrations, drawing inspiration from the energies and rhythms of the world around them rather than projecting some alternative reality. Films of rolling ocean waves often provided a highly appropriate backdrop for their lengthy improvised concerts. This is truly electric music for the mind and body.

Limited edition of 150 copies worldwide. For the first time since 1988, Aurora Central Records is proud to present this limited edition re-issue of the first ever Merzbow live show, Recorded Live at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo, 22 March 198, remastered by Masami Akita.

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

A free jazz / avant-garde jazz vocalist from Iowa, known for his 60's work from the legendary avant-garde jazz label ESP Disk, he has also performed with Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Miracle singing voice ... Patty Waters, a female vocalist who makes the dark side of ESP and influences many writers, made her legendary debut in 1966 !! The next work "College Tour" is famous for avant-garde topics, but with this sexy calmness This work is also excellent because it has a glossy appearance and somehow dark comfort. Above all, the key to this work is probably the free jazz dark cover of "Black Is The Color Of My True Loves Hair", which was recorded at the end and the screams and strings are disturbed. A masterpiece filled with the charm of Patty Waters' "songs" ...!

The final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe. A wild, improvisatory flaying of song; the sheer sonic force recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of it. A one-of-a-kind concoction whipped up by two fearless and often peerless souls. It’s a joy to hear their manifest mutual regard and commitment to busting a gut.

Kraftwerk is the self-titled debut album by the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk. It was produced by Conny Plank and released in 1970. LP on 180-gram vinyl with gatefold sleeve.

A live performance of four early works by Steve Reich: “Four Organs”, “My Name Is”, “Piano Phase” and “Phase Patterns.” This performance marked an important moment in San Francisco bay area new music history with the triumphant return to the east bay by Reich, who studied at Mills College with Luciano Berio, and who performed the 1964 world premiere of Terry Riley’s seminal work, “In C”, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The resonant acoustics of the University of California at Berkeley Museum’s concrete interior were especially appropriate for “Four Organs”, with its long additive sustained chords over a maraca pulse. Repressed in a limited edition of 500 copies on transparent vinyl.

Mshukai is an improvisation group that revolves around Imao Takuma, known as a contemporary artist and percussionist Pedal.The group performs in unconventional spaces such as baseball fields or inside closets, responding playfully to the environment. This tape documents their performance in the headwaters of a river in Koga, Shiga Prefecture, where they brought equipment and played around a campfire. Additionally, recordings capture their studio session in Kanazawa, where they listened to the above recorded performance while playing with Imao's studio doors open. They also recorded a performance where Imao and Pedal interacted across a road, simulating a dialogue. This project serves as the debut album for Mshukai.

Masami Tada (Marginal Consort) started his career by joining the legendary improvisational group GAP in the 1970s, and since the 1980s, he has continuously embraced improvisation while expanding his creative expression into installations, photography, and more. In recent years, Masami Tada has been capturing Mount Koubou, visible from his home in Kanagawa Prefecture, in photographs every day and sharing them on Instagram, continuing his practice of daily acts of creation. This work features recordings of his actual climb up Mount Koubou, during which Tada brought electronic devices, amps, and percussion instruments. These instruments created sounds in rhythm with the climbing process, and the recordings also capture Tada's improvised performances atop Mount Koubou, including interactions with birds, airplanes, and other elements encountered during his performance.

LP (red vinyl) & 7" (one-sided blue vinyl). Limited vinyl edition of 300 copies.

Digging deep into the legendary Igloo Records catalog, Holidays Records returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of the imprint's sixth outing, the Belgian composer Henry Krutzen’s astounding 1981 LP, “Silances”. An entirely singular gesture at the borders of sound poetry, musique concrète, and radical electroacoustic practice that draws upon disparate elements of drone, jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditions of music from across the globe, decades on from its original release it remains as striking, unique, challenging, and compelling as it did upon its release. * Deluxe edition in screen printed cover + insert * Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward-thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music. Every step of the way, they’ve seemed to step up the game. Their latest, the first reissue of the Belgian composer Henry Krutzen’s astounding 1981 LP, “Silances”, takes a deep dive into the legendary Igloo Records catalog. Once described by Keith Fullerton Whitman as being “nestled somewhere between Ghédalia Tazartès' mutant Sound Poetry, Anton Bruhin's acoustic / Alphorn drones”, drawing on a palette of vocals, hand percussion, piano, harmonica, saxophone, synthesizer, it’s a truly engrossing immersion into spaciously bristling sonority that remains as radical more than forty years down the road, as it did the day it was released. Issued in a very limited vinyl edition, beautifully reproducing the original sleeve, accompanied by Krutzen’s original liner notes, this is one for the heads that can’t be passed by. Henry Krutzen is a relatively shadowy figure in the history of experimental sound. Between the early '80s and the 2010s, there are only a handful of albums that bear his name, and little to no information about how they come to be. A multi-instrumentalist and composer who studied percussion, saxophone, and harmony in various schools and jazz clinics across Belgium, over the years he played in a diverse range of musical projects across the idioms of jazz, new wave, heavy metal, experimental, chanson française, world music and progressive rock, before relocating to Brazil during the early 2000s. Had he disappeared completely and done nothing else, “Silances”, his lone 1981 LP for Igloo Records - the Belgian imprint founded in 1978 by Daniel Sotiaux to “promote diversity, allowing expressions of more marginal music to be heard and supported in a musical context that lives under the threat of standardization” - would have ensured his legend. Sitting alongside astounding and remarkably unique albums by Leo Küpper, Jacques Bekaert, Henri Chopin, Arthur Pétronio, André Stordeur, and numerous others, in the label’s early catalog, it’s a truly stunning piece of work. Reflecting back in a note that Krutzen penned in 2022 when he was contacted for the reissue of “Silances”, Krutzen recalls: “Since I was 16, I had been experimenting with concrete music with a technician friend and we used all a teenager’s room could offer to make sounds into music: faucets, glasses of water, metal springs on ladders, objects of any kind… I had hours of recordings I pitched to Daniel [Sotiaux, of Igloo Records], to see if he was interested in making an album. I also had other ideas I wanted to be able to develop. What a joy when he accepted to work on the project! So I got to work. First, I set up a vocal improvisation quartet, and we spent long afternoons rehearsing using input I provided… We went into the studio and recorded almost two hours of improvisation, from which I then chose the best moments for the final product”. The resulting nine compositions, when viewed as a cohesive whole, unfold as an endlessly surprising journey into a diverse means of expression, incorporating elements of concrete poetry, phonetical vocal utterance, musique concrète, drone, nods to jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditional musics from across the globe, creating a fascinating counterpoint to the roughly concurrent DIY experiments of projects like Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and Organum. While radically open and experimental, one of the most striking aspects of “Silances” is how undeniably tight and considered it is, appearing as though each structure and chosen elements is exactly as it should be, and for which there would have been no other option. From the vocal squawks and ambient detritus of “Des Voix” or the incredibly constrained minimal beats and clangs of “La Machine” - a piece through the consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines - and the droning harmonics of “Froid”, which incorporate excerpts of Krutzen’s teenage experiments in concrete music with records

Hemann Damen is a Dutch artist and language designer who, among other things, has created visual poems, performance works and "verbosonies" -- a genre that Damen developed where vocalized morphomic elements are assembled in different ways. In his works, he has been exploring "kinetic language" and the spatial aspects of language. Damen's manifesto Semiotic Theatre states that his work "places itself outside official literature and wants to fascinate, shock or activate people by combining and replacing writing and articulation with extra-linguistic signs and techniques like pictures, drawings, graphics, photos, montages, collages, de-collages, projects, objects, light, darkness, signals, symbols, gestures, happenings, noise, silence, smells, tastes, situations, states, properties, streets, landscapes, etc." The first side of this LP presents five verbosonies recorded between 1966 and 1970. The second side presents three phonographies recorded between 1967 and 1973. Hermann Damen was also the founder and editor of the AH! Magazine, a magazine for "verbal plasticism." Somehow parallel in contents with the legendary Revue OU, Damen's AH! occasionally also included vinyl records and represented an ante-litteram multi-media. This edition includes eleven inserts. Because of its specific contents, this edition was issued in a limited run of just 220 copies.

Boston/Tenor/Index presents for the first time some of the earliest works by the American composer Phil Niblock, including the three never before released "Index" (1969), "Tenor" and "Boston III" (both from 1972), thus making it possible to discover Niblock's starting point as a composer. Until now, it's been impossible to encounter Niblock's compositions from earlier than the '80s, a reality thankfully rectified by the long overdue publication of this Boston/Tenor/Index, now on CD from Alga Marghen. "Tenor" (1972) represents the first evolution of Niblock's musical thought towards the aesthetics of microtones, overtones, and drones which the composer would develop in following decades. The piece was recorded by the photographer Martin Bough on tenor saxophone and gradually dubbed back and forth by the composer in his New York studio. The audio materials activated in "Tenor" through technologically de- and re-composed sounding textures, became a vehicle for those sound anomalies that would determine Niblock's audio poetics. Performing gestures are deconstructed though disseminating and editing processes by the imperceptible gestures of the composer. With its smooth flowing structure, "Boston III" (1972) stands at the very beginning of this illusion. It was recorded at the Intermedia Sound studio in Boston with Rhys Chatham (flute, voice), Martin Bough (tenor saxophone), and Gregory Reeve (viola, voice); the composer himself also contributed with his voice. "Index" (1969) is an improvised sound performance by the composer himself. The listener is lucky to listen to the movements of the artist's fingers hitting a guitar string and the soundboard in breathtaking tempo. The piece itself represents early minimalism in its virgin state, untouched by distancing technology. Guitar (both its body and strings), fingers and fingering fuse in a vehement action around which barely listenable sounds and resonances vibrate. This CD also includes "Boston I" (1972), or the first chapter of the "Boston" series. This 25-minute bonus track is less massive than "Boston III," but this version is much richer in dynamics and presents a more recognizable voice of each instrument. The music changes according to the loudness of playback. The interaction of the upper harmonics changes especially, with much richer overtone patterns being produced at louder levels. Edition of 300 copies in digipak sleeve, including an eight-page booklet with photos and liner notes.

Damião Experiença's surreal, self-released run of LPs are among Brazil's most bizarre subcultural treasures, a blown-out mix of psychedelia, freak folk, prog and reggae that defies convention at every loose beat. 'Planeta Lamma' attempts to condense the output for curious beginners, cherrypicking crucial moments from the Brazilian legend's vast catalog. Mindboggling gear. Self-taught outsider Damião Ferreira da Cruz, aka Damião Experiença, is considered to be the Brazilian answer to Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Jandek or Moondog, a wildly inventive fringe hybridist whose dadaist, semi-improvised songs - often sung in his own invented dialect - have found him a dedicated cult following. Famously press-shy and irritable, Damião was born in Bahia, escaping as a pre-teen to Rio de Janeiro, where he joined the Brazilian navy. Legend has it that Damião hit his head when he fell from a ship's crow's nest, which could explain his unpredictable moods, but he left the navy in the mid-1960s, working as a pimp to fund his private press releases. Damião's moniker was an homage to his favorite band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but the music doesn't exactly come across as a tribute. Singing in his own 'Planet Lamma dialect', Damião improvised on instruments he never learned how to play, assembling his voice into ritualistic, overlayed chatters and one-string guitar riffs into a lumbering, reggae-esque chug. Drums might match up, or might not, pattering in the background to add psychedelic thrust, rather than a rhythmic backbone. At its best, the music sounds like multiple records playing at the same time, held together by Damião's charismatic, garbled tones. 'Planeta Lamma' might share a name with Damião's 1974 debut, but it's not the same album. Confusingly, both records begin with the same track (the brief '1308 Registrou Gravou Rose Oliria Experiença'), but this edition quickly goes off piste. The focal point of the first side is the chaotic 'Ritmo Linguagem Planeta Lamma', a densely layered 20-minute romp that Damião released in 1999 (as far as we can tell). The side ends with 'Planeta Lamma' from the debut album, and the second side is mostly taken up by 'Sol', another lengthy, freeform experiment that's taken from the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist's late period. Jazzy and unpredictable, it's a frothy blast of angular funk that's got us confused and completely absorbed. One for the cranks!

It is highly recommended from electronic music fans to New Age !! The editing board that recorded the first recording (with Takehisa Kosugi) made in the 1980s by David Behrman, the most important experimental electronic musician in the United States, who is familiar with our long-selling store, is Italy. Announced by Alga Marghen, the prestigious musician!

David Behrman is also known for using "microcomputers" with "memory" used for live performances and installations, along with great figures such as Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier in postwar American experimental music. A writer who occupies an important position. On the A side, Interspecies Smalltalk commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham in 1984 is recorded, and it was formed as a collaboration with Takehisa Kosugi (violin) and completed as a minimalist masterpiece full of fantasy beauty.

On the B-side, starting with the early version of Leapday Night, "Circling Six," six synthesizer loop phrases were used, and German experimental writer Werner Durand was in charge of the saxophone, avant-garde jazz. It is finished in a strange minimalist refraction that crosses jazz. The final "All Thumbs" is a song for two mbiras, which George Lewis and David Behrman dedicated to the opening of the Paris Science Museum "La Villette" in the spring of 1986. The metal tip of was a sound installation that was connected to a computer music system through a sensor.

Why don't you pick up the excellent unreleased sound source of a rare writer who represents the history of American electronic music after a long time. Includes liner notes and performance photos by David Behrman. Limited to 400 copies.

«I met Simone through Dr. Richard Alpert, a professor at Columbia University who went to India to study with a Hindu guru and he himself became a guru afterwards called Baba Ram Dass. Coming back to US he brought Pandit Pran Nath with him. It was a time when everybody was experimenting. All came with a lot of orientalism because people were into timelessness, meditation and being stoned. It was in that atmosphere that I met Simone because she also knew Pran Nath. Around that time I moved from NY to California to work with electronic music at the newly invented school California Institute of the Arts. Simone was also living in LA and even though she was not officially connected to CalArts she knew many of the artists who were teaching there. It was in the halls of CalArts that Simone first approached me around the possibility to have Pran Nath invited to LA. In summer 1970 Simone was invited by Allan Kaprow (one of the Deans of CalArts) to do an evening of dance at the Pasadena Art Museum. One day she came to me and said “I’ve been given this commission to do a piece and I’d like to do it with music and I was wondering if you would want to do it with me?”. So I replied “Well why don’t you come to the electronic studio where I work and see how it goes? I’ll put on some sounds, we’ll make some space and see how you feel”. It immediately clicked!!!! So we decided to perform a duet together. In January 1971 in Pasadena we did our first “Illuminationss”. I played the piano, I sang a little bit, she moved a little bit when I was singing, I moved when I was singing. A Jewishy-kinf-of singing. Not only singing, but singing and running, singing and falling. I did all what eventually became my “Body Music”. Simone was also doing it but coming from a different tradition. All of a sudden we were doing a new kind of jamming together. Everybody in the audience loved it because it was so dreamy and they found amazing how a man and a woman can act in that strange, very dreamlike oriental way as in trance,,,,,together. This kind of collaboration between man and woman was uncommon at that time. Mostly other artists were doing very structural works while our performances were totally like we were on magicness drugs. Our performances had certain fixed elements like the piano or some electronics. It turned out we liked red lights so we started to always do it in red light. We liked to do it in a resonant spaces. It became more an approach than a piece, because there were never two Illuminations that were alike.» - Charlemagne Palestine «The aspect of Charlemagne’s music that most inspired my imagination was his melodies. Sometimes their texture of repetitions and evolving variations are so close that the term melody doesn’t seem to apply. What most determined our “Illuminations” was Charlemagne’s way of letting the elements in the music develop only very gradually. Once, just before a performance, Charlemagne sang to me, “Simoney don’t worry, you will dance and sing all right.” And of course I did as we walked arm in arm circling the wide-open space, a grand piano to one side shining black and covered with Teddy Bear deities, Charlemagne reflecting his childhood time as devotional cantor, and I, my childhood time striding along in the Tuscan hills, belting out Italian folksongs with my cousins. And sometimes when Charlemagne drew clear, high tones from his brandy snifter we would play our voices together more softly. Our recurring melodies were mostly Charlemagne’s. But I brought one too, with a song about not drifting away into the beyond.» - Simone Forti

Awesome Alga Marghen re-release presenting "Illuminations", or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Morton Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new “Dream School of the Future” endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange a California concert for Pandit Pran Nath. They decided to try an improvisation session together and Charlemagne invited Simone the first time to the electronic music studio where he worked regularly. Their medium blended as a play of interacting sound waves and solid matter in motion as Charlemagne and Simone shared energy and focus. The three previously unreleased recordings on this LP were made between October and December 1971. The first take titled "Illumination" is for two voices moving in the space with small bells and crystal glasses while Simone Forti plays the molimo, a corrugated tube meant for connecting the gas stove. The second take titled "Wed Oct 13th 1971" has Simone and Charlemagne in a song dialogue as animals do. It was also at Cal Arts that Charlemagne Palestine first encountered a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano of Vienna. He played it often as Simone danced during their "Illuminations". Take three is a song sang in falsetto while playing the Bosendorfer Imperial in an arpeggiated style that predates the "strummings". Listening to these "Three Takes" 40 years later they oooozza timeless carefree mystical magical dreamy atmosphere that evoked the times of the late '60s to early '70s in Charlemagne and Simone part of the California Art Scene. Illuminations were a unique open spontaneous form of performance, ritual and prayer. Edition limited to 365 copies with an essay by both Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, as well photos of the performances reproduced on the LP front sleeve.

From Pacific City Discs, to you the listener, this summer, a DJ mix of fantasy and splash-energy is coming to you in a small edition of vinyl. Fantasy writer/recording artist, Francesco Cavaliere, while visiting his seaside childhood vacation location, was extended an impromptu invitation, to DJ an 80s swimming club. He had this to say about his experience: “I was at Shangri-La and a boy and girl from the bathhouse in silver swimsuits and sand-colored streaks waved me over with a drink and asked me if I would like to DJ the next day during my lesson on the beach at Tana del Pirata! I then and there I laughed but then I accepted (I had nothing at home just my mp3 player and a Nokia with music inside) The next day there was a little wind on the beach and the umbrellas swayed to the left. From the heat they could catch fire, white flames, instead the sea was rough and that wind with very long wrists cheered us up, blowing gaseous clouds in our faces. Perfect for the day ahead. After the first few pieces, I began to see that a group of kids jumped into the adjacent pool trying flips bombs and candle dives. Someone at the bar was playing Altered Beast .. so sipping a drink with ice I imagined DJ werewolf repeating catchy pieces while a kite half cobra half skyscraper inflated above us.” This Impromptu Disc is fresh now, for you to frolic with this summer, while entertaining a daydream in the midst of entering a body of water while witnessing an apparition in the sky.