Avant-Garde / Contemporary

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.

Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.

Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Track Listing:

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual for him, after which he would be totally spent, emotionally and physically. Graves rarely left anything on the table. Any musical performance was an opportunity to present an amalgamated version of all the things he had learned. He was an innovator and a teacher at his core, and the concert venue was one of his first classroom settings. In March 1976, Verna Gillis invited Graves to perform on WBAI's Free Music Store radio show. For the date, he chose to present a trio lineup which he had been occasionally playing – featuring two saxophonists who were dedicated to the drummer's vision. Hugh Glover is almost exclusively known for his work with Graves, while Arthur Doyle would gain exposure later for an obscure record that he made two years later, Alabama Feeling, which would become a highly collectable item among free jazz enthusiasts. Originally released in 1977, Bäbi remains one of Graves' most seminal recordings. The music played by the trio was ecstatic. Extreme energy music, buoyant and joyful. It relied on Graves' new way of approaching the drum kit, in which he had opened up the bottoms of his skin-slackened toms and eliminated the snare. Graves' art was always unblemished by commercial interests, and this album is its finest mission statement. First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

Few copies available. Exclusive translucent red vinyl. Limited to 500 numbered copies. Includes In Concert At Yale University and Nommo with reproduction of hand-painted sleeve and historical inserts. The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion."

The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion." First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion." First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint. The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage. Bryars eloquently reconstructs the passengers' experience – at once forlorn and eerily calming – through assemblages of understated strings and indeterminate elements. A core principle of the piece is that the ship's band continued to play as the vessel went down. One of the most sublime works in the modern classical canon, Titanic remains Bryars' magnum opus. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the album's second sidelong track, is based on a tape loop of a London street singer captured in the early 1970s. Featuring Derek Bailey, Michael Nyman and John White, Bryars' composition gradually builds around the cripplingly poignant voice until its emotional force is almost too much to bear. It's no surprise that Jesus' Blood is known as Tom Waits' all-time favorite piece of music. Produced by Brian Eno in 1975 as the inaugural release on Obscure, The Sinking of the Titanic draws the listener in to a majestic world. While these exquisite, hymn-like recordings have not changed in nearly 50 years, their deeply personal nature and the audience's attention to their subtlety have only strengthened over time.

Phill Niblock is an 85-year-old minimalist mogul and a true pillar of the NY avant-garde scene, who is active not only as a composer but also as a videographer / photographer. The monumental second album released in 1984 is reprinted in analog with the lead player Joseph Celli, who has collaborated with John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Ornette Coleman and others. A seamless and fascinating drone minimal masterpiece consisting of dense oboe and horn sounds. One piece that I would like to recommend to fans of Alvin Lucier, Yoshi Wada, and Dome!

Alvin Curran, an American composer / multiplayer who studied under Ron Nelson and Elliott Carter and was known to be active in Musica Elettronica Viva, which was formed with Frederic Rzewski during his stay in Italy, is Roberto Laneri and Giacinto. The gem's first album released in 1975 by his own label, Ananda, formed with Scelsi and others, is a re-vinyl reissue from Superior Viaduct!

One of the legends left by Karan when he was most experimental! Natural sounds such as the sound of waves, wind, birds, dogs, and insects, the sound of a rich synthesizer, and the minimalist melody of Kalimba that makes you feel the lyeism. A modern classical masterpiece. One piece that I want to push as much as possible from the current flow of new age / ambient re-evaluation. Francesco Messina, Steve Reich, Franco Battiato and Superior Viaduct, who evoke the musical heritage of all over the world beyond time and space, are the moments that pass through the mysterious gate. Recommended for those who like Lino Capra Vaccina, Roberto Musci and Sean McCann.

Terry Fox was a first generation Bay Area conceptual artist. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked extensively with sound, especially the use of piano wires detached from their native instrument and anchored between opposing walls of the performance space.

Linkage, Fox's first album, was originally released in 1982 to accompany an installation at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. The record would mark Fox's first attempt to realize his groundbreaking and visceral piece "Berlin Wall Scored for Sound."

Side one links five ways of playing the piano wires: drumming, pulling, bowing, beating and scraping. The room itself acts as a type of natural resonator as Fox moves the wires with padded mallet, his bare fingers, violin bow, wooden shish kebab stick and rusted metal rod. The effect of such plain arrangements can be utterly hypnotizing.

The second half of Linkage was recorded in the attic of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, West Berlin, in May 1981. A thirty-three meter long wire was held in contact with a sardine tin. Over the course of 20 minutes, pulsating drones dissolve into rhythmic patterns that sound almost synthetic in origin. As noted in the original LP pamphlet, all these sounds were strictly acoustic; the only electronics involved was the recording equipment.

In an introduction for this edition, Marita Loosen-Fox and Ron Meyers write, "The desire to eliminate any barriers between the art and the viewer/audience connects all of Fox's situations/actions/performances. The ultimate goal is to communicate as directly as possible, which finds its most concentrated expression in the artist's works with sound."

This first-time reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with booklet.

“Without producing a single phrase, the two distorted guitars became simple “electric sound” generators, and like fish swimming freely in water, they each tear through time in their own fashion. And yet there is a remarkable sense of unity to how they fill the world with electric vibrations. Is there a simpler, more beautiful music than this? …on this date, with a sensitivity to sound reminiscent of Ayler’s Ghosts, the performance reaches a plateau… Takayanagi’s trio offered the gods of free jazz the most beautiful fruit in existence.” - Yoshiyuki Kitazato Mass Hysterism in Another Situation captures Masayuki Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit in its final incarnation, at an apex in its development; it also finds Takayanagi, one of Japan’s great iconoclastic artists, at a moment of crucial artistic transformation. Recorded in August 1983 as part of his “Another Situation” concert series, the album features one of the last performances of Takayanagi’s revolutionary and perhaps most famously violent piece, Mass Projection. By this date, New Direction’s line up had been distilled to a compact, searingly hot trio of Takayanagi joined on electric guitar by Akira Iijima and Hiroshi Yamazaki on drums / percussion. Over the course of 40 minutes, the group sustains an uninterrupted, highly charged attack propelled with unrelenting energy. The music is rife with noise and dissonance intruding from both sides; a vortex of sound and fury that begins to slip from even the expansive bounds of free jazz into something almost purely electronic. The trio would perform only four more times, completing the “Another Situation” series with its 24th edition in November 1984. Eleven months later Takayanagi would debut an entirely new modality, one he called “Action Direct”. It completely transformed his approach to guitar and sound in general by embracing an entirely abstract, solo noise music projected through massive, complex sound systems of his own design. Mass Hysterism is perhaps the most powerful link in this part of Takayanagi’s history- a perfect realization and farewell to one of his greatest forms en route to territories even further afield and radical. Black Editions presents Mass Hysterism in Another Situation remastered and cut to double 45RPM 12” vinyl for maximum clarity and power. Housed in a heavy tip-on gatefold jacket with Pantone spot colors, spot ink pigment foil on gloss film laminate finish as well as printed inner sleeves. Featuring photographs by Tatsuo Minami and newly translated notes by Takayanagi scholar Yoshiyuki Kitazato.

Hilary Woods builds on the airy mystery of 2021's genius 'Feral Hymns' with the crepuscular 'Acts of Light', featuring nine creeping dirges played with double bass, field recordings and sacred choral chants that sound like mournful, Celtic ghosts wailing into a moonlit woodland. Brilliant, gaseous material for anyone into Deathprod, Sarah Davachi, David Darling or Antonina Nowacka. That last album married Wood's surreptitious hooks with Lasse Marhaug’s petrified, doomcore production, a highly distinctive marriage of cursed atmospherics and memorable songs that still sounds like pretty much nothing else we’ve heard since. Her followup ‘Isolation Tank’ for our Documenting Sound series was essentially a screwed audio diary, creating rhythms out of the clicking whirr of her old polaroid camera, her voice drifting into abstraction. In other words, Woods is no stranger to getting deep into her process, and on 'Acts of Light' she increases the contrast, bringing out cracks of colour to contrast her Vantablack striations. Voices are blurred against microscopic sounds on 'Wife Mother Lover Cow', as euphoric pads swelter into mist; like spying a midnight ritual from a safe vantage point, watching forest nymphs dance to the beat of their own drum. Ghostly, choral vapours gather on 'Where the Bough has Broken', recorded with the Palestrina Choir at Dublin's Procathedral, and with Galway City Chamber Choir in Galway, crashing into environmental recordings Woods gathered during travels across Spain. The title track plays pitched vocals against low, nauseating murmurs, while strings provide an ominous sustained drone. Voices chatter in the distance, and a rhythmic thud sounds like a march to the afterlife. Woods strips things back further on 'Awakening', giving us a short break from the crippling gloom with angelic chorals and gauzy cello, before the disorienting heartbeat 'Blood Orange' transports us into another lysergic reality. 'The Foot of Love' is the album's most emotionally resonant moment, all poetic curls of ornate instrumentation and fogged-out dark ambience that wouldn't sound out of place on an Akira Rabelais album, leading masterfully into Woods' brief, subtle denouement, the aptly-titled 'Vigil', freezing phantasmagoric vocals in a sodden mess of cello and captured rainfall. It's the ideal finale to an album that escorts us through a magickal, dusky wilderness that's never oppressive, always tender in its own way. Music that’s as creakingly baroque as it is verdant and folksy. Acts of Light is a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges. Vulnerability, majesty, and candour elicited with drone, double bass, cello, synth, viola, field recordings, electronics, noise, vocals, processing and sacred choral chant compose its private ritual. Following excavations and explorations in intuition and physicality through sound which culminated in her 2021 EP Feral Hymns, Acts of Light is a disquiet personal offering to wilderness, loss, absence, mystery and love supreme. Awakening hidden forms that emerge from the shadows with each listen, its rich and weighted lament is subterranean and chasmal whilst simultaneously detailed and tender. Textural dust and speckled light move slowly and expansively here through a deeply sonic and sensory rite of passage where Woods’ moving compositions confide in us feeling to be received with the entire body. Written, recorded, mixed and produced over a span of two years along the west coast of Ireland and Dublin, Woods recorded the voices of Galway City Chamber Choir, before recording the choristers of the Palestrina Choir in the Pro Cathedral Dublin. Strings were recorded by Jo Berger Myhre in Oslo, whilst field recordings were recorded nomadically throughout her time spent traveling through the north west of Spain.

Premiere LP by Portland's finest practitioners of Great Black Music. A spiritual record for the ages. Roman Norfleet And Be Present Art Group play deeply felt sometimes earthy and sometimes cosmic music. A trio (sax, drums and organ) are augmented by additional percussion, soaring vocals and even a vocal appearance by a toddler. This record will take you where you need to go. Don't miss history in the making. Across six expansive tracks, Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group build from free-flowing ceremony through meditative groove-based prayer and into full-on gales of improvised music. “We build our own time,” Norfleet said, a collective act of liberation through sound. Raised in the Baptist church and trained in the Hindu/Vedic philosophy of Swamini Turiyasangitanada (Alice Coltrane), Portland multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Roman Norfleet travels a lineage of Great Black Music and the world’s spiritualities on his debut for Mississippi Records. The album emerged out of drum gatherings in Washington DC’s Malcolm X Park - a pocket of freedom built on collective improvisation and shared rhythm. In Portland, Norfleet gathered a collective of artists including Jacque Hammond and members of Brown Calculus to transmit the spirit of those DC sessions. A formative encounter with Pharoah Sanders furthered the young saxophonist’s journey via the spaceways, through Sun Ra and into the universe of contemporaries like Angel Bat Dawid. The album culminates in the beautiful “Turiya the Butterfly,” sung by 2-year-old Turiya Raiah. A daughter of band members Andre and Mia and named after the great Alice Coltrane, Turiya completes both the intergenerational circle and a spiritual classic in the present. Record comes with a glossy band photo and insert

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is a vocalist and composer internationally regarded for her spellbinding timbres and her in-depth study of oral traditions. Her work takes the form of sound installations, talismanic scores, music for film, electronics, and choir. She released the groundbreaking experimental gamelan album Atria (Sige) in 2015, and has collaborated with Lori Goldston, Holland Andrews, Niloufar Shiri, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Melati Suryodarmo, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others. Kang, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. In addition to creating a striking body of solo works that has traced its way across the last two and half decades - most recently including Sonic Gnostic (Aspen Edities, 2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (Ideologic Organ, 2020) - he has played on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, William Hooker, Animal Collective, and numerous others. Since beginning to work together as a duo in the early 2000s, Kang and Kenney have collaborated on sound installations, music for orchestra, choir, and mixed ensembles in addition to releasing numerous widely acclaimed full-lengths: Aestuarium (2005), The Face Of The Earth (2012), Live In Iceland (2013), At Temple Gate (2014), Reverse Tree (2016), Seva (2017), The Cypress Dance (2020). A hypnotic return to the duo’s unique expression of “unison music", Azure is among Kenney and Kang’s most pared-down efforts in more than a decade. Its five compositions are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporalities, producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal color. The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “eclipse…inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, Dictee. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions enmeshed with Kang’s delicate viola d’amore tones - the piece’s collective elements produce a remarkable tension bubbling within its spacious calm. The title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from her/him/them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhymes of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez, such as mâh az u, râh az u, and âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola d’amore weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echoes of lost moments in far off worlds. This is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of wide-ranging techniques into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, with inspiration from ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies, which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalizations play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, and the town names of ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 from the Divan of Hafez. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating photographs and words spoken within by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pizzicato tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues strong impressions of that landscape. As Suzanne Kite states in the album’s liner notes, with each of Azure’s discrete expressions Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang “ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies… [they] draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener’s breath

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is a vocalist and composer internationally regarded for her spellbinding timbres and her in-depth study of oral traditions. Her work takes the form of sound installations, talismanic scores, music for film, electronics, and choir. She released the groundbreaking experimental gamelan album Atria (Sige) in 2015, and has collaborated with Lori Goldston, Holland Andrews, Niloufar Shiri, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Melati Suryodarmo, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others. Kang, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. In addition to creating a striking body of solo works that has traced its way across the last two and half decades - most recently including Sonic Gnostic (Aspen Edities, 2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (Ideologic Organ, 2020) - he has played on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, William Hooker, Animal Collective, and numerous others. Since beginning to work together as a duo in the early 2000s, Kang and Kenney have collaborated on sound installations, music for orchestra, choir, and mixed ensembles in addition to releasing numerous widely acclaimed full-lengths: Aestuarium (2005), The Face Of The Earth (2012), Live In Iceland (2013), At Temple Gate (2014), Reverse Tree (2016), Seva (2017), The Cypress Dance (2020). A hypnotic return to the duo’s unique expression of “unison music", Azure is among Kenney and Kang’s most pared-down efforts in more than a decade. Its five compositions are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporalities, producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal color. The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “eclipse…inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, Dictee. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions enmeshed with Kang’s delicate viola d’amore tones - the piece’s collective elements produce a remarkable tension bubbling within its spacious calm. The title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from her/him/them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhymes of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez, such as mâh az u, râh az u, and âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola d’amore weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echoes of lost moments in far off worlds. This is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of wide-ranging techniques into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, with inspiration from ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies, which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalizations play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, and the town names of ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 from the Divan of Hafez. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating photographs and words spoken within by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pizzicato tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues strong impressions of that landscape. As Suzanne Kite states in the album’s liner notes, with each of Azure’s discrete expressions Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang “ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies… [they] draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener’s breath

Chìsake [Algonquin]: to chant; to conjure; to cast a spell; this generally involves a shake-house, or shaking tent, in which the conjurer goes into a trance; the conjurer then has an out-of-body experience, going into the future to predict coming events, or into the past; as well as going into any locality in the universe to seek out someone or something generally practiced for ancestral divination. The unaccompanied flute pieces within this album are adaptations of Anishinaabeg shaking tent chants. The Anishinaabeg also known as Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples that reside in areas now called Canada and the United States. They include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree and Algonquin peoples. The word Anishinaabeg translates to “people from whence lowered”. The Anishinaabeg origin myths describe their people originating by divine breath. The shaking tent or conjuring lodge was the setting for a divinatory rite performed by specially trained shamans otherwise known as Chìsakewininì. During the shaking tent ceremony the Chìsakewininì would construct a special cylindrical framework typically of birch or spruce uprights planted in the ground with respective wood hoops to bind it together. This created a tensile structure of which birch bark, deer skin, or cloth was used as a covering. Rattles of caribou and deer hooves, or cups of lead shot, were tied to the frame. The floor was usually softened with freshly cut spruce boughs. The vertical axis of the shaking tent represents the realm of mediating beings, while the horizontal axis the earth or world of humans. The Chìsakewininì would enter the shaking tent at night and once inside would not be visible from onlookers. The singing of chants and drumming would summon the Chìsakewininì’s spirit helpers, whose arrival was signified by animal cries and erratic tent shaking. During this transcendent state, the Chìsakewininì could dispatch these spirit helpers or Manidò to distant regions to answer questions from the onlookers about the most auspicious places to hunt, the well-being of a distant relative, and what would happen in the future. The chants were usually sung using vocables before, during, and after the Chìsakewininì entered the shaking tent. Like many other similar divination ceremonies, singular or collective, the opening chants begin lyrically. They gradually turn to more reductive abstract structures midway and then end in lyrical chants. This symbolizes the performer and listener leaving the external literal world, entering a more abstract state of mind, and then returning. Traditionally all songs were carved on birch bark for record-keeping with mnemonic pictographs or other marks for future use. Tally mark clustering, sometimes used for song-keeping throughout the Anishinaabeg, is used for this album’s track titles and numerical sequence. The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear teeth, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in the middle tracks traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note or sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats off of. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with the Chìsakewininì ceremonial actions. All songs are repeated seven times to signify the seven sacred directions: east, south, west, north, above/sky, below/earth, and center. -Timothy Archambault

Official reissue of the 1977 album of Clara Rockmore’s stunning theremin performances of various classical compositions, accompanied by her sister Nadia Reisenberg on piano. Includes gorgeous interpretations of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel and more. An all time classic classical album, finally back in print. Rockmore was a violin child prodigy with training at the Imperial Conservatory in St. Petersberg. A refugee of the Russian Revolution, she arrived in New York with her family in 1921, and soon after met Professor Lev Sergeyevich Termen, inventor of the remarkable theremin, one of the first electronic instruments in existence. Rockmore stunned crowds by playing music both highly technical and emotionally intense, all without ever touching her instrument. Her work represented the cutting edge of electronic music, inspiring a generation of innovators (including Bob Moog, who co-produced this record). On her custom built theremin, Rockmore channeled deep human emotion through an electronic device for the first time.

The fourth release in Blank Forms Editions’s initiative to chart the ever-expanding musical practice of Catherine Christer Hennix, Solo for Tamburium captures the composer’s most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. This piece, documented in Berlin at MaerzMusik 2017, carefully draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. Densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtone collisions create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium or a distinctionless state of being. Since the late 1960s, Hennix has created a massive and innovative body of work spanning minimal music, computer programming, poetry, sculpture, and light art—pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of these media toward singular ends. She was part of the downtown music school in New York and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. In the ’70s, Hennix studied the nature and use of harmonic sound as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music. The exceptionally designed tamburas of Pran Nath were central to her intensive investigations, as was the devotional practice of carefully tuning and sounding the instruments in a continuous and even flow—both have guided her work with sound ever since. In 1976, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Hennix presented a pair of groundbreaking works that came to define her ensuing practice. With the Deontic Miracle—a group composed of Hennix, her brother Peter, and the Swedish percussionist Hans Isgren—she performed a series of modal compositions for Renaissance oboes, sheng, and harmonic feedback distortion. On this same occasion she premiered an equally significant body of solo work for keyboard, including the only public presentation of The Electric Harpsichord (1976), a piece that marks the beginning of Hennix’s characteristic style of playing, where dense sonic textures gradually emerge from the multilayered interplay of harmonic construction and dissolution. Solo for Tamburium represents a pointed revisitation of her endeavor to map the non-gravitational harmonics of modal musics—among them raga, maqam, and the blues—onto a tuned keyboard. Since the debut of this piece in 2017 she has continued to develop the work, reshaping and presenting it in a variety of contexts, including at Blank Forms in New York and the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris in 2022. For Hennix, to approach modality as a dynamic process is ultimately a contemplative practice. Through it, embodied attunement to harmonic vibration gives rise to epistemically transformative states, opening new ways of knowing and being.

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall. Described by Suzuki as the “culmination” of their sound, New Sense of Hearing features the two musicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radio transmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, and kikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention. Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city’s Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of “Sound Objects and Sound Tools,” an exhibition of Suzuki’s homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of the exhibition “MA: Espace – Temps au Japon,” organized by architect Arata Isozaki and composer-writer Tōru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before traveling with the exhibition to Stockholm and New York—critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice that he had “seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the same performance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be.” For New Sense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from their collaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observed in 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are “in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no direct relationships. . . . Only coincidence.”

In 2021 Nijs and Smolders started a series of free improvisations. Each came from a different background (see bio’s) and wanted to explore musical horizons that they were not used to. As a next step they decided to record an album of composed tracks. The experimental platform shifted from long improv sessions to composition and structure, with the work of Delaere as a source of inspiration. The material of his work, the unevenness, the detail of pigments clashing, superimposing on the canvas served as a metaphor and inspiration for sonic canvases that they constructed. The result has become a record full of surprises. Rhythm, drone, dynamics, timbre, notes, tones, all have been thrown in the tumble dryer and during the process many times led the two musicians towards an outcome they couldn’t have possibly foreseen. But here we are. Our own experience is that the music works best when it’s played loud. Crank up the level of your amp and dive into these 35 minutes of colorful sounds.

Lucy Railton trusts in the nuance of her own creative instincts on an intensely modern, quietly radical new album, her second for Modern Love. Following her 2018 solo debut Paradise 94 (LOVE 108LP), and countless collaborations in the time since, Railton's diverse musical circles here bleed into each other, creating an insoluble testament to a lifelong pursuit of sound. The multi-instrumentalist further articulates her own tonal register, embracing her solo strengths and trusting the process to reveal vulnerable and compelling emotional facets through a fluid mix of composition, and pure expression. On the simplest level, Corner Dancer is a record that revels in the momentum of creation. Through a range of approaches, Railton gradually loosens her grip and allows her identities to expose themselves; cut to the bone, sinew and spirit of music making. Reaching outside tried and tested zones, she lands at a charged space characterized by unmetered pacing and an embrace of imperfection, using cello, viella (a medieval cello), Buchla, 808, a fan, synths, horse hair whips, a handheld harp and her own voice, across eight tracks that arc from an opening sequence of ruptured asymmetries, to something bordering the sublime on "Blush Study," the album's masterful closing flourish. In between, Railton invokes psychoacoustic, heady spins and repetitions, while also allowing space for live performance, a mode to which she feels most attuned, and here captured best on "Held in Paradise" (her violin debut) and "Rib Cage." Collapsing boundaries, Railton harnesses a lifetime of formal training in order to patiently trace more ambiguous, intimate and sometimes deviant shapes, operating to a fuzzed logic that loops back to themes with an ingenious underlying dramaturgy of energies, dismantling the form from the inside out, in a way that bends through feeling, rather than design.。

This is an unusual album in the catalogue of Ornette Coleman, and one that passes by most critics. It is however a unique insight into the ‘free jazz’ pioneer’s way of working in the early 70s. Recorded at his large loft space in downtown New York which inspired a whole scene of experimental musicians who were locked out of playing established venues. The music is a romp showing Ornette playing trumpet as well as saxophone. His quartet which featured second saxophonist Dewey Redman alongside long term cohorts Ed Blackwell and Charlie Haden prove to be the perfect foil for this short set. This is the first vinyl reissue in nearly 20 years and utilises a fresh 24/96 transfer from the original production master.

LP version. Includes eight-page booklet; 425 gsm brownboard outer sleeve; 180 gram vinyl. "Why would I sing in French? I have Breton culture, I speak Breton, I live in Brittany, and the Breton language is the language of this country..." So explained Kristen Noguès, of whom this is the first of the (rare) albums that she recorded Marc'h Gouez, is a fabulous voyage in space on each listening. Noguès learned the Breton language as a child, at the same time as the Celtic harp, -- taking lessons with Denise Mégevand, who would go on to teach others, notably Alan Stivell. At the beginning of the 1970s, she discovered the Breton song tradition (soniou and gwerziou) through Yann Poëns and became involved in Névénoé, a cooperative of traditional expression founded by Gérard Delahaye and Patrick Ewen. It was under this label that her first album Marc'h Gouez, was released in 1976. With a dozen friends playing guitar, piano, violins, flutes..., Noguès composed not Breton music, but music from Brittany: a type of shared folklore in which imagination is married to the reality of the moment, that of social demands and companionship. At the very beginning of the record, we can hear her drawing up a chair, before the plucked notes of the harp become a cascade: "Enez Rouz", is an invitation to listen up close. You are reminded here of the Meredith Monk of "Greensleeves", there of the early albums of Brigitte Fontaine/Areski, elsewhere of Emmanuelle Parrenin, Pascal Comelade... Noguès rhyming pattern is ever changing: airy ("Hunvre"), cosmopolitan ("Pinvidik Eo Va C'hemener"), enigmatic ("Ar Bugel Koar"), profound ("Ar Gemenerez"), or enchanting ("Hirness An Devezhiou"). And then there is the track from which the album takes its name: "Marc'h Gouez" which, between nursery rhyme and chamber music, weaves a fabulous web in which the auditor is obliged to be caught. "Brittany equals poetry": so, said André... Breton; and Kristen Noguès proves it to be true. Licensed from Katell Branellec. Carefully remastered from the master tapes by Gilles Laujol. Graphic design by Stefan Thanneur.

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

Black Truffle is pleased to announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran’s classic Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, the cooperative label run by Curran, Roberto Laneri, and Giacinto Scelsi. Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers Dark Flowers) – its title inspired by an intersection in Milan – is the second in the series of four solo recordings Alvin Curran issued in the 1970s and early 1980s, preceded by Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden (1975), followed by The Works (1980) and Canti Illuminati (1982).

Each of these solo works combines field recordings with performances on synthesiser, various acoustic instruments, and voice, arranged in languorously paced, dreamy sequences. Far from the bracing pointillism of much musique concrete, the elements encountered on the meandering course followed by Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri – whether a frenetic piano improvisation, dense layers of Serge synthesiser and ocarina, or a monologue from Frederic Rzewski’s five-year old son, Alexis – often occupy the foreground of our attention for minutes at a time. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with “whole blocks of recorded time”.   The purring of a cat, toy piano, a child counting, plaintive synthesiser tones, the cacophony of exotic birds at the London Zoo – each disappears into the next, until, on the LP’s second side, a solo piano performance takes centre stage, moving unexpectedly from percussive minimalist permutations to a halting rendition of Georgia on My Mind. A subtle yet stunning work that more than forty years on still seems charged with possibility, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri arrives in a loving reproduction of the original sleeve, featuring Edith Schloss’ beautiful cover painting, remastered audio and with new liner notes by Alvin Curran and Francis Plagne.