Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Masami Akita is one of the most influential noise artists of our time. Known as Merzbow, Akita has developed a recognisable sound with his harsh, confrontational and abrasive sonic emittance. Lawrence English is a curator of sound, vision and thought. As the founder of Room40, English has released countless records and has worked alongside some of the most notable and adorned sound pioneers of our time – in turn becoming one himself. To coincide with Akita and English’s involvement in issue 02, English compiled a Merzbow Mixtape of hidden gems from Merzbow’s expansive archive.

Merzbow is a Japanese noise legend who continues to advocate a thoroughgoing ahincer practice and experiment with alternative expressions that transcend the boundaries of "noise". Recorded and mixed at Munemihouse in 2021, this is the latest release from Merzbow. It's a powerhouse masterpiece, and I can't say enough about it. Don't miss it!

Limited edition colored vinyl! Recorded live in New York in 1978 and 1979. The album is a compilation of Sun Ra's live performances in New York in 1978 and 1979, ranging from glamorous big band performances to sweet and free-form performances. Includes the classic song "Space is The Place". The back cover of the album is also interesting, showing a psychedelic live performance, including a member of the Arkestra wearing a pyramid hat. Eddie Gale plays trumpet on this album.

There’s a lived-in quality to the sound of Racine’s Amitiés. Named after the French word for friendship, the Montréal-based Quebecois artist follows an extended time spent indoors to contemplate what it means to be isolated and in one’s own body, while also staying connected. The album is a follow-up of sorts to Quelque chose tombe (“Something Falls”), released in February 2020 and a kind of accidental prophecy for the crisis that was to come. Amitiés disintegrates before your very eyes. Opening with a roughshod iPhone recording of Racine playing his parent’s harmonium, the creaky acoustics of "Mon amour je ne guéris jamais" slowly degrade into digital simulations of dreadful organic beauty. That track and the rest of the LP gives the feeling of an abandoned building; a sense of frayed, earthiness dusted with the wisdom of time. And yet, it’s almost entirely made from simulations. Clipped Native Instruments violin patches punctuate the churning atmospherics of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale”. The lonely gongs and bells of “Grosso” resonate in a gust of synthesised ambient. Vocal plugins and the very occasional YouTube samples of a recorded voice are sped-up, glitched, pitched and scrambled into indecipherability. These vocal apparitions rise and fall into the sonic ether like individual ghosts of human contact. They’re bold and expressive, deeply melancholy and yet full of the potential for joy and an awareness of life’s beauty. It’s in this dearth of social interaction—the heady psychosis of too much solitude—that Amitiés’s tone and mood lies. A score for the numb dissociation from internal chaos and alienation, the album’s sense of acute distress is assuaged only by the small network of collaborators and influences it draws from. Long-time friend and peer Justin Leduc-Frenette (aka Keru Not Ever) contributes drum programming to “Mon amour je ne guéris jamais”. A last-minute reworking of the untitled “Sans titre” by German duo Arigto matches the weight and timbre of Racine’s sooty post-classical soundscapes. Ultimately, Amitiés is a very human response to an inhuman environment. It’s an intimate homage to friends and the mysterious effects of distance, while somehow finding healing in hardship.

Like a rediscovered Viking burial ship, Electro Nova compiles near-mythical drone recordings produced in 1998 and described by Helge Sten aka Deathprod as some of the most important music to ever come out of Norway. It's the work of Kåre Dehlie Thorstad and compiles two of the earliest releases on Smalltown Supersound, back when it was basically no more than a bedroom operation. It’s taken over two decades, but finally the label have given the material a first ever proper release on vinyl, complete with mixing and mastering by Deathprod. If you’re into the ice cold swells of anyone from Thomas Köner to Harley Gaber, Biosphere, Kali Malone or, of course, Deathprod - this one's as essential as they come. Kaare Dehlie Thorstad's Elektro Nova produced just two releases during the late ‘90s that have since slipped into drone lore - Trans-Inter-Ference and Elektro Nova/Electro Nova. Admired not only by Deathprod and Joakim Haugland of Smalltown, but also by his contemporaries Lasse Marhaug and Biosphere, his work has evaded pretty much any attention outside of Norway these last two decades. Following a chance meeting with Thorstad at Oslo airport a few years back, Smalltown were prompted to give the recordings a second wind, presenting what is essentially a captivating new release, and crucial addition to the Norsk drone canon. As the story goes, Thorstad was studying photography in the late 90’s in Scotland, but instead of delivering a photo for his final exam he made a record - a double album (2CDs) and a 10” to be precise. That should provide some idea of the textural synaesthetic and landscaping qualities evoked by his music, which he ended up sending to a then-young Smalltown label, who were mostly issuing tapes at the time. With no proper distribution the records largely bypassed wider attention, and become a personal favourite of Smalltown’s Joakim Haugland, as well as avowed fan Helge Sten (Deathprod), who helped render its diaphanous scale in mix down, and Lasse Marhaug who describes them as "two perfect records that deserved much bigger attention”. Between its jaw-dropping opener; the post-apocalyptic vision of its untitled part; and the cinematic white-out of the 10” tracks; Thorstad comes as close as we’ve ever heard to evoking the inhospitable nature and stark beauty of the wild far north. We can hear those landscapes palpably internalised and alchemically transmuted into its coarse grained textural swells and a reverberating multi-dimensionality, variously sustained to extents that evoke an abandonment of the senses, or likewise squashed and isolated to imply the relative anxiety relief of atmospheric flux, where a few degrees temperature rise or a drop in the wind speed can make the difference between life and death. Impressively, Thorstad realised after the release of Elektro Nova and just two live shows that he couldn’t really follow up the work and instead pursued a career as professional cyclist, eventually combining his visual skills to become a pro cycling photographer. In that sense, he’s a bit like composer-turned-tennis coach Harley Gaber, whose almighty ‘The Winds Rise In The North’ (1976) is in some ways richly prescient of this work. Like Gaber, Thorstad can remain safe in the knowledge that his contribution to the drone sphere will endure for the ages, especially with this important, impressive new edition.

On her debut album Belgian based multi-instrumentalist Ann Eysermans explores the possibilities of the train as a music instrument: a deep quest into a fascinating and mesmerizing world, which started as a five year old kid, when she climbed on board of the train helm station during a trip from Antwerp to Ostend. For the compositions ‘Prelude and Fuga For Four Diesel Locomotives And Harp’ Eysermans had the chance to capture the sounds of diesel locomotives (HD 51, 54, 55 and 60) of the Belgian Train World Heritage collection. Microscopic hissing vibrations of steaming engines slowly entwine and resonate with fragile harp playing, getting on track for an unconventional sonic rail journey. A melancholic odyssey of sound in motion: Ann Eysermans let the sparkling harp notes dissolve into the tones of pulsating train wheels. On the B-side she bends her soft singing voice around deranged horn melodies in ‘Le Départ’, connects delayed organ harmonies in ‘De Vertraging’ with the dying frequencies of a trembling and humming locomotive from the 60’s. On the key track ‘For Trainspotters Only’ Ann Eysermans assembles a hauntingly piece of musique concrete with clanging chimes, broken music boxes, ghostly whispers and throbbing machine room sounds. A lonely barking dog and the last train announcement on a desolate platform in ‘Chorale’ also mark the last part of this spellbinding record. On ‘For Trainspotters Only’ Ann Eysermans takes you on an immersive and meandering ride, connecting the dots between the free spirit of Alice Coltrane, the orchestrated field recording compositions of Chris Watson, Basil Kirchin soundtrack vibes and the magic realism of Claire Rousay.

For the 1983 edition of Company Week held at London's I.C.A. in May of that year, guitarist Derek Bailey once more invited a typically eclectic collection of guests. Cellist Ernst Reijseger is a mainstay of Dutch new jazz (ICP Orchestra, Clusone Trio...), American wind virtuoso J.D.Parran a veteran of the Black Artists' Group and Anthony Davis and Anthony Braxton ensembles, while saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, as titans of European free improvisation, need no introduction. French bassist/vocalist Joëlle Léandre is equally at home playing free or performing works by Cage and Scelsi, while Vinko Globokar is an acclaimed composer as well as a trombonist of monstrous virtuosity. He and British electronics pioneer Hugh Davies served time with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and before a brief stint with Robert Fripp's King Crimson, percussionist Jamie Muir was, with Davies, on the very first (Music Improvisation) Company outing in 1970. Bailey once described playing solo as a "second-rate activity"; while at the other end of the spectrum, large improvising ensembles can, if they're not careful, descend into the musical equivalent of a rugby scrum: dangerous, but thrilling -- listen to what happens when Brötzmann comes barreling into the final track here. Sometimes one instrument takes center stage, as Parker's circular-breathing soprano does at the beginning of "Trio Five", but knowing when to lie low, as he does in the brief austere "Trio Three", is just as crucial to the success of the whole. Muir makes sure he doesn't get in the way of Globokar and Parran's leisurely exchanges on "Trio Four", but the trombonist is all over the place on "Trio One" -- transcribe what Globokar does here and it might be the most difficult trombone music ever written -- with Léandre racing up and down her bass and Davies all spikes, squeaks and squiggles, after which "Trio Two" is a lighter affair, Parran's flute and Léandre's vocals twittering together while Derek's acoustic twangs merrily along. With a touch of dry Bailey humor, two of the seven tracks aren't trios at all: "Trio Minus One" is his duo with Reijseger, running the gamut from crazed polyrhythmic strumming (imagine Reinhardt and Grappelli playing Schoenberg and Nancarrow simultaneously) to what must be the fastest cello pizzicati ever recorded. And on the closing ecstatic nonet, Brötzmann and trumpeter John Corbett prove that too many cooks don't necessarily spoil the broth but sure as hell spice it up.

Derek Bailey x Han Bennink !!!! The live recording from Incus in 1972, in which Han Bennink, who was personally enthusiastic about coming to Japan this year, also participated, is the first vinyl reissue over 45 years. A collaboration album between Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. Beninck, who makes strange voices and hits things other than drums against Bailey's electric guitar, and messy performances such as turning on the radio, but ... Bailey's calmness and listening. Isn't it a contrast? Sometimes the moment Bailey demands silence is also wonderful. And Rashad Becker's great remastering and perfection at that prestigious Abbey Road Studios.

A timeless masterpiece live album recorded by Derek Bailey, one of Britain's leading free improvisation giants, in Paris and London and released on his own label, Incus in 1980, by Honest Jon's with the addition of two unsound sources. The first vinyl reissue!

Just twisting space-time, devilish performances, thrilling moments. Audience alarm? Even if it is interrupted at, it does not bother me at all, and even that is taken in as an element, and there is also a performance that can afford to tighten it perfectly. You can feel some kind of elegance in Bailey's performances that are completely mature. An overwhelming spiritual pressure improvisation sound derived from endless self-questioning and self-answering. 2 additional unreleased tracks are included. If you like music, you shouldn't end up with an unexperienced masterpiece of the century.

Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Hugh Davies & Jamie Muir's pointillistic classic as The Music Improvisation Company is the latest in Honest Jon's righteous Incus reissue programme, out now in a handsome gatefold 2LP edition. "Though music journalists made a big deal recently about the release of a 1965 rehearsal tape by Derek Bailey’s Joseph Holbrooke trio with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley, those early efforts were mere tentative steps along a cliff edge wearing a line safely attached to Coltrane. There’s still a whiff of jazz to Bailey and Parker’s work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble up to and including 1968’s Karyobin. But with the addition of Jamie Muir — the first great free improvising percussionist who didn’t start out as a jazz drummer — and the way-leftfield electronics of Hugh Davies, the MIC leapt right off that cliff. These six tracks — tight, electric, pointillistic, brilliant, uncompromising and exhilarating — sound like nothing else that came before. In a word, seminal. "The original concepts of vocal and instrumental music are utterly different. The instrumental impulse is not melody in a 'melodious' sense but an agile movement of the hands which seem to be under the control of a brain centre totally different from that which inspires vocal melody. Altogether, instrumental music, with the exception of rudimentary rhythmic percussion, is as a rule a florid, fast and brilliant display of virtuosity... Quick motion is not merely a means to a musical end but almost an end in itself which always connects with the fingers, the wrists and the whole of the body. "The inclusion of the above passage from Curt Sachs' The Wellsprings of Music with this album, the recording of which predates the Music Improvisation Company's only other release, the eponymous ECM outing, indicates a clear intention to stake out territory for European Free Improvisation markedly different from that of the (American) Free Jazz it sprang from. The African-American heritage that led to jazz was melodious, vocal, field holler / church-inflected, and the Germans and the Dutch never made any secret of their affection for it, but British free improvisers in the late 1960s were looking elsewhere. Even so, and though the music press made a big deal a while back about the release of a 1965 rehearsal tape by Derek Bailey's earlier Joseph Holbrooke trio (with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley), their early efforts were mere tentative steps along a cliff edge wearing a line safely attached to Coltrane, and there's still a faint but distinct aftertaste of jazz in Bailey and Parker's work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble up to and including 1968's Karyobin. But with the addition of Jamie Muir - the first great free improvising percussionist who didn't start out as a jazz drummer - and Hugh Davies and his electronics from way out leftfield in the avant garde / experimental world, the MIC leapt right off that cliff. As Nina Hagen screamed later, "1968 is over! Future is Now!" These six tracks – tight, electric, pointillistic, brilliant, uncompromising and exhilarating – sound like nothing else that came before. In a word, seminal."

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.

In 2000, Henri Pousseur was asked by Philippe Samyn, a Brussels-based architect who liked to work in collaboration with other artforms, to lend his support to the plan for the construction of a business complex by one of the most important building enterprises in the country. There were four low buildings arranged like different parts of a medieval castle-village, grouped around a kind of large open central court. Leaning on the suggested image, Pousseur immediately suggested that the first spinal-column be composed of an electronic carillon, sounding in variations every hour, thus marking the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Henri Poussuer imagined then a connection between Nivelles-time (a city 40 km south of Brussels, where this large project would be situated) and the time of the entire planet and the more or less metaphoric sonic and musical realities attached to it. He made on the one hand the 16 hours of a theoretically complete day of work (from the cleaning service up to the last research in the office) correspond to the 24 hours of a complete terrestrial revolution. He then divided the globe into eight large north/south "slices," themselves divided into three perpendicular "rings": north, center, south, with the understanding that only inhabited lands were taken into consideration. To each of the 8 "great hours" of the total duration, Pousseur associated three regions, one of each ring (north/central/south) set out as far apart as possible on the terrestrial globe. Over a background of a fairly continuous variety of noises which are perpetually evolving: sea, fire, city, swamp, industry, forest, etc., there are ethno-musical samples from one region or from several regions involved, more or less worked over by all sorts of numerical methods which vary their capacity to be recognized as quasi-traditional music. This work once finished (realized in the studio of the composer's son Denis), Pousseur made a synthesis on three discs by superimposing the landscapes (a bit in the manner of the previous Etudes paraboliques) in 16 Paysages Planetaires. The titles of the landscapes express by their contraction the simultaneous or alternate presence of several regions; for example, "Alaskamazonie" is self-explanatory. Something like "Gamelan Celtibere" is a sort of play on something between the West Coast of Europe with the Indonesian archipelago and even the northern part of Australia. Continuing like this you could find it amusing to reconstruct the circumplanetary movement of the work. Michel Butor wrote the luminous prose-verse alternating poetic structure which accompanies these landscapes. His text is included in the 60-page documentation booklet, also featuring two long essays by Henri Pousseur: "Paysages Planetaires" and "Atmospheric and Cultural Sources for Each of the Landscapes." Finally, with this work, Henri Pousseur makes an homage to all the singers and instrumentalists, sound engineers, ethnic musicologists and editors who have either produced, or gathered and transmitted, all the marvelous musical invention which inspired and nourished the work and which, with the sounds of the world, of nature, of society and of industry, are supposed to represent a kind of formal summing-up of life's multiplicity. All the images, obtained through extensive digital treatments, were conceived and manipulated by Henri Poussuer. Housed in a heavy cardboard slipcase with 3CDs and a 60-page booklet.

"Utopia Andata e Ritorno is the title of the new composition by Walter Marchetti, recorded in Milano in 2005. It has two parts, each one CD long. The first part, 'L'Andata,' puts together two former recordings of Marchetti. The recording of a real storm and a recital for solo piano. This is not the first time that Marchetti mixes a piano solo recital with the recording of a natural live event, thus creating a 'piano concert'. The second CD, 'Il Ritorno', reverses the direction of the first record and literally destroys itself. In the first part of this work, Marchetti puts music successfully in the place it has to have today: on the road to renewal in contact with reality, a reality that is a synonym for vacuity, that is the interdependence of phenomena, music, reality, technology. There is nothing mimetic or anecdotal in this work. The storm is a real storm and the solo piano recital is a modern work of pure music, without the excesses that the society expects of a piano recital from composer and virtuoso player. Pure music, in the best sense of the word. 'L'Andata' is one of the great works of music of our time, or, as José Luis Castillejo remarked, 'it may be the best modern piano concert since Brahms.' In the second part, 'Il Ritorno,' sound waves are deformed when one tries a reverse hearing and the turn around trip becomes an aural nightmare. Of course, avant-gardism has made us accustomed to noises and silences and to the arbitrary idea that anything is music. 'Il Ritorno' announces the end of musical avant-gardism and its technocratic aspirations. It points to the end of music avant-gardism because it exposes the technological manipulation not only of technology beyond its powers, but also the manipulation of both music and sound. 'Il Ritorno' is such a problematic work also because its subject is failure and impossibility."

A breathtaking self-conscious free-jazz masterwork, 'Rise Vision Comin'' summarizes more than 30 years of musical and theoretical/political expression from renowned activist/scholar/free-jazz pioneer Haki R. Standing on the verge of spiritual jazz aesthetic, his music remains timeless & unforgettable after it's longstanding creation. The first album by the group Rise Vision Comin was released in 1976, and features among others Wallace Roney on trumpet, Clarence Seay on bass and Agyei Akoto on saxophone who also served as creative director. It features 9 tracks with the title track, “Rise, Vision, Comin” a great example of the adhesive comradery between instrumentation and Madhubuti’s spoken-word.

Rudra is Shiva, the Absolute Truth. It is truly music for meditation. Heir to one of the most important musical lineages in the North Indian classical=Hindustani musical tradition, the great man who contributed to the revival of Rudra Veena as a solo concert instrument, more widely known by its release than the Ideologic Organ sponsored by Stephen O'Malley His latest studio recording, made on January 6, 2020 at Studio Swarkul in Mumbai, India, is the latest in a long line of works by Mohi Bahauddin Dagar, the son of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, who has unearthed much of the Italian avant-garde music of recent years. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Maurice Mogard.

In late October 2019, following a successful UK tour ending in a sold-out concert at the mythical Roundhouse in London, SUNN O))) entered studio 4 of the BBC Maida Vale. On invitation to record a live session for Mary Anne Hobbs to be broadcast on Samhain via her excellent radio show on BBC6. To enter the legendary John Peel studios was to enter a temple of music and experimentation, liberty in ideas and sound. The band was nearing the end of a long touring year around the Life Metal and Pyroclast albums. SUNN O))) had developed the compositions extensively, embracing the formative concepts of the Life Metal album conceptually and emotionally, but actualised and evolved into vast, open and bright hypersaturated arrangements. Particularly the pieces the band chose to perform on this recording: Troubled Air and Pyroclasts. The former enriched into a total aspect of the band's ethos and form in many ways, and Pyroclasts had evolved to become all-inclusive radiation of O))). The radiation embraces collaboration and freedom of interpretation by each player, within a structural format of the massive monuments of sound and distortion which define SUNN O))). Anna Von Hausswolf and her band had accompanied SUNN O))) on the UK leg, and Anna joined SUNN O))) in the studio on synths and with her tremendous voice on the Pyroclasts pieces.

Jan Steele and Janet Sherbourne gained a reputation for being ambient musicians thanks to their appearance with John Cage on 1976’s Voices And Instruments from Brian Eno’s lofty Obscure series. But in a fascinating catalog spanning more than four decades, these English multi- instrumentalists’ variegated sonic sojourns have proved that label to be far too narrow. In the long-gestating, decades-spanning collection, Distant Saxophones, Steele and Sherbourne flaunt a nuanced vision that encompasses ECM-esque chamber jazz, minimalist modern composition, cinematic soundtracks, and an embryonic, contemplative form of experimental pop. Distant Saxophones—many of whose tracks have been re-recorded and improved from their original incarnations—invites you to lean in and bask in an interiorized zone of revelations. These songs simultaneously freeze time and exist outside of it. Community Library’s anthology is offered in a single LP format with a tracklist more limited than the CD version; the LP’s digital download ticket provides the full music set.

Jan Steele and Janet Sherbourne gained a reputation for being ambient musicians thanks to their appearance with John Cage on 1976’s Voices And Instruments from Brian Eno’s lofty Obscure series. But in a fascinating catalog spanning more than four decades, these English multi- instrumentalists’ variegated sonic sojourns have proved that label to be far too narrow. In the long-gestating, decades-spanning collection, Distant Saxophones, Steele and Sherbourne flaunt a nuanced vision that encompasses ECM-esque chamber jazz, minimalist modern composition, cinematic soundtracks, and an embryonic, contemplative form of experimental pop. Distant Saxophones—many of whose tracks have been re-recorded and improved from their original incarnations—invites you to lean in and bask in an interiorized zone of revelations. These songs simultaneously freeze time and exist outside of it. Community Library’s anthology is offered in a single LP format with a tracklist more limited than the CD version; the LP’s digital download ticket provides the full music set.

Wisdom from the child’s mouth always tells us the truth. It’s hard to overstate the influence of Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg on A Colourful Storm; indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine the label’s existence without it. A figure whose movements within Germany’s industrial avant-garde span almost forty years, it would be in 2010 that he unknowingly entered our orbit through two important releases. At the time, SPK’s Auto-Da-Fé and Throbbing Gristle’s Journey Through A Body left some impression on us, their discovery propelling an interest in the possibilities opened up by industrial music that we still explore today. Responsible for publishing these releases was Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien - who, or what, were they? Founded in 1980 by Hamburg-based Uli Rehberg, Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien was a base for Laibach, Asmus Tietchens and Werkbund as well as Rehberg’s own artistic endeavours: the most devilishly humorous his adopting of the name Dr. Kurt Euler, spokesperson of a satirical political party comprised of musicians Felix Kubin and Gregor Hartz. The project would foreshadow the life of Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, an alias unveiled in 1998 with the first in a series of spoken word 7” picture discs that have since become highly collectable. Attracting an enviable list of collaborators throughout his career (John Duncan, Thomas Köner and Column One have all lent their expertise), it is perhaps the enigmatic Werkbund project that remains most coveted within the world of von Euler-Donnersperg. Cloistered and clandestine since their inception in 1987, their brooding, synthetik atmospheres have long been speculated to be the work of von Euler-Donnersperg himself. Listen to Werkbund’s Skagerrak or Stahlhof and tell us we’re wrong... The culmination of decades of sound research and electroacoustic investigation, Weisheit aus des Kindes Mund tut uns stets die Wahrheit kund is significantly also a tribute to von Euler-Donnersperg’s children, their voices and spoken word hocus-pocus conjuring clairvoyant visions amongst soaring metallic sheen and spectralist digital debris. Cybernetic ooze spilling into servers and causing subdued bleep signals and static. A slasher film soundtrack starring the German avant-garde dressed in laboratory coats. The latest piece of von Euler-Donnersperg’s peerless, endlessly imaginative puzzle.

XKatedral Anthology I is the first in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by XKatedral affiliated composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces dating from 2010 - 2020. Four of the works included here were originally released on cassette early on in the label's history, while the two remaining pieces are presented by the label for the first time.

The NetCast improvisation with Reynols (Miguel Tomasin, drums; guitarist Robeto Conlazo, guitarist Anla Courtis) Monique Buzzarté - trombone and Kevin McCoy-computer processing is my first International collaboration in this form. So far I have been involved in several multi-site improvisation NetCasts in the USA only. Through Pauline Oliveros Foundation I am interested in helping in the evolution of the INTERNET as an international venue where diverse collaborators can engage with one another. I met Reynols as a group in Buenos Aires a few years ago when I was leading a Deep Listening Workshop. I was impressed with this group when they played a serenade for me on my departure. All were playing brass instruments that they had never played before. It was clear that they understood and negotiated the element of risk in the kind of improvisation that I value. Reynols also has communicated with me since the workshop in many ways. I love the feedback and connection. My solo concert given at the National Library in Buenos Aires is remixed and released as the limited edition CD with hand painted covers Pauline Oliveros in the Arms of Reynols. How wonderful it is to be embraced by young people of South America.

Perennially bewildering polymath Akira Rabelais unveils the most impressive durational work of his career thus far with a 4 hour smudge of classical works by the musical zeitgeist of the late 19th and early 20th century Belle Époque. It’s a highly enigmatic erosion x sublimation of the familiar in a way that's by now etched into modern canon thanks to works by The Caretaker, but Rabelais has been weaving his own uncanny shroud of infidelity over our collective memory for over two decades now, with this extended set somehow managing to play like a homage to the mixtape, to the novel, to French pre-war culture and to the modern malaise all at once. Deeply immersive, stunning work that’s essential listening if yr into works by The Caretaker x William Basinski. The focus of the set covers the time period and culture around Proust’s 'À la recherche du temps perdu’ novels, and attempts to unravel his fascination with the illusive qualities of memory - most famously identified in his notion of “Proust’s madelaines”, outlined in the eponymous novels that inspired this release. Taking fifty-one works by Bartók, Bellini, Berg, Brahms, Caccini, Chausson, Chopin, Debussy, Delibes, Donizetti, Franck, Hahn, Jungmann, Lully, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Satie, Schoenberg, Schubert, Schumann, Scriabin, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner, and Weber, Rabelais uses his Argeïphontes Lyre software, as well as specially commissioned new recordings (Bartók's String Quartet No. 2 was recorded specifically for this album at half speed with minimal dynamics) to play with our perception of time via a prism of distortions and subliminal refractions. In an attempt to breathe in the same creative air as the French author, Rabelais’ distils the creative potential of sound in relation to our cultural fabric; everyone knows these pieces, despite precious few of us having lived in Paris in the 1920s. They're the background sound and building blocks of our culture, from cinema to advertising, but secreted in the music’s play of decaying reverbs, you get an uneasy sense of some unknown spectre floating thru the mists of time. Stunning, multidimensional work from a master of the artform.

A real masterpiece....dreamy improvised music with eastern influences and electronics!! "Before his magnificent experiments with electronic music on Elektrictus (previously reissued on Wah Wah), Andrea Centazzo was already an accomplished musician who had issued his recorded works on the PDU and RCA labels. His first release was Ictus, a free-form avantgarde jazz oddessey on which he already started to experiment with electronic generated sounds. Ictus was a band formed by Centazzo, Armando Battiston and Franco Feruglio, although back in the day the sleeve of the PDU release credited the work only to Centazzo, and as if Ictus was simply the title of the album. This was a big mistake that we have been asked to correct in our reissue. A brave drummer and percussionist, on this album Centazzo also played flute, synths and sang. He was joined on some tracks by Franco Feruglio on bass and double bass and Armando Battiston on keyboards. It has been compared to Soft Machine’s Third or Wolfgang Dauner’s Et Cetera. " Label press

Recorded over the course of 4 years during late-night, afterhours sessions at RCA's Studio @ Calle Carlos Maurrás in Madrid (one of Spain's best and bigger studio around that time), it was the result of the duo's interest in unorthodox sound-sources which they manipulated in a sort proto-sampling collage technique based on random tape-loops and best heard in their original percussive studies; their dreamy, surrealist-like lyrical passages or the sort of deep primeval atmospheres first conjured by Cluster or Kraftwerk in the early 70's.The studio as an instrument: pure sound alchemy at work. The Wah Wah edition is the first ever vinyl reissue of this legendary LP reproducing the original gimmick cover, with sound mastered from the original tapes by Eugenio Muñoz, and featuring an insert with photos and info. It is a strictly limited edition of 500 copies only.