Electronic / Experimental

At long last, Caribbean saxophonist Joe Harriott's classic collaboration with Calcutta composer and conductor John Mayer is back in print on this Koch CD reissue of the original Atlantic LP from 1967. In England in the 1960s, Harriott was something of a vanguard wonder on the order of Ornette Coleman. And while the comparisons flew fast and furious and Harriott was denigrated as a result, the two men couldn't have been more different. For one thing, Harriott was never afraid to swing. This work, written and directed by Mayer, offered the closest ever collaboration and uniting of musics East and West. Based almost entirely in the five-note raga -- or tonic scale that Indian classical music emanates from -- and Western modalism, the four ragas that make up the suite are a wonder of tonal invention and modal complexity, and a rapprochement to Western harmony. The band Harriott assembled here included his own group -- pianist Pat Smythe, bassist Coleridge Goode, and drummer Allan Ganley -- as well as trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, flutist Chris Taylor, Diwan Mothar on sitar, Chandrahas Paiganka on tamboura, and Keshan Sathe on tabla, with Mayer playing violin and Harriott on his alto. Of the four pieces, the "Overture" and "Contrasts" are rooted in blues and swing, though they move from one set of ascending and descending notes to the other, always ending on the tonic, and involve more than the five, six, or seven notes of Indian classical music, while the latter two -- "Raga Megha" and "Raga Gaud-Saranga" -- are out to lunch in the Western musical sensibility and throw all notions of Western harmony out the window. The droning place of the tamboura and the improvising sitar and alto shift the scalar notions around until they reflect one another in interval and mode, creating a rich, mysterious tapestry of sonic inquiry that all but folds the two musics into one another for good. Amazing. ~ Thom Jurek

Every person we meet, every moment we live through, all the love we feel, and the losses we endure, add another layer to the intricate pattern of our lives. Like multicolored threads, these layers twist together to form a complex, vibrant tapestry - a reflection of our life journey until this point. On his new album Layers, Khalab acknowledges and celebrates the encounters that have shaped his ever-evolving musical vision. The record represents the culmination of a creative journey that began with Eunoto EP (Black Acre Records, 2015), evolved with the Afro-Futuristic soundscapes of 2018’s highly acclaimed album Black Noise 2084 (On The Corner Records), and has since developed further through a series of experiences and deep musical collaborations. Layers summons all the alchemy of Khalab’s live performances, and embodies the transcendental power of music-making as a collective art form. “Since the release of Black Noise 2084 I’ve increasingly developed the stage and band dynamic, focusing on arranging with the musicians in mind, and this album was almost entirely conceived together with musicians I’ve collaborated with”, says Khalab. In a testament to the label’s close-knit and highly collaborative nature, Khalab's live band includes a cadre of musicians from the Hyperjazz family, including David Paulis and Enrico Truzzi of Phresoul, as well Pietro Santangelo, Fabio Sasso, and longstanding creative-partner Nicola Guida. The album’s nine tracks feature an impressive lineup of collaborators old and new, including UK drummer and producer Emanative, Burkinabe singer, guitarist, and m'bira player Gabin Dabiré, Italian producer Clap! Clap!, multi-wind instrumentalist Tamar Osborn, drummer and producer Tommaso Cappellato, British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, Bristol’s vocalist and producer Grove, multi-instrumentalist Tenderlonious, Italian jazz singer Alessia Obino and British-born Nigerian spoken-word artist Joshua Idehen. Layers still revolve around the key components of Khalab’s sound - dark and trancey electronics and his research into Black music and all its evolutions - but with a bigger emphasis on harmonic arrangements. Across the record, Khalab’s productions twist and pulsate into mesmerizing motifs, as the interplay between different instruments coalesce into focused melodies and rich, complex textures. Khalab and his collaborators masterfully blend gloomy and radiant tones, eliciting feelings of both doom and hope. For Khalab, Layers represents the end point of a journey that began with the synthesis of ancestral rhythms and electronic experimentation on Black Noise 2084 and has taken him on a meandering route through a Mauritanian refugee camp (M’berra, Real World Recordings, 2021), and deep into the catalogs of legendary Italian labels Soul Note and Black Saint (for the Hyperituals compilations). To Gabin, a friend, a teacher, a guide, and a constant inspiration.

For over two decades Jonathan Katsav has used his Crave project to fray rap at its fringes, using Memphis and Houston's low-and-slow legacy to inform sounds that have as much in common with Merzbow as they do Tommy Wright III. Working under a variety of different monikers such as Lieu Noir, Sniper Bait and Soul Collector, the French producer is most prolific as Crave, and "Inner War Delirium" is a substantial and broadly cinematic addition to his canon. Katsav approaches each track as if it's a scene from a movie, using real life experiences to explore separate characters and contrasting emotions. Using different narrators and disparate vocal styles, he navigates grim, blown-out landscapes, driving neon drenched trap synths and horror choirs against overdriven kicks and waterlogged industrial atmospheres. Mangled field recordings, squealing static and gurgling synthesized bass opens 'PHYLLIS', goading the cautious with serrated, carnival synths and cacophonous vocals that sway lugubriously between rap and grindcore. The relationship between dark and light, death and rebirth, is at the heart of "Inner War Delirium", rippling through every track's oozing amalgamation of inebriated hip-hop and buzzsaw noise. Katsav's sounds are an attempt to subject us to the physicality of his own life's puzzle, and he cuts them into vignettes like a director. On the album's final track, listeners are swiped from in front of the speakers and bundled into the trunk of a car, rain rattling on the metal and the album playing on in the distance. It's a way for the producer to turn the camera back on the audience and ask them to consider their own complicated reality - it's Crave's story, but everyone's a part of it.

Terre Thaemlitz and Zeitkratzer, two noted and highly-respected names in experimental music. This release finds the Zeit guys meeting Thaemlitz on Terre’s terms, adapting and performing pieces from Deproduction with acoustic chamber instruments. Recorded live in Berlin last year, spreading over two CDs.視聴-Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Sound/Reading for Gay Porn) (Live Version)
視聴-Names Have Been Changed (Sound/Reading for Incest Porn) (Live Version)

Stripped back and bony funk. The residue and distant memories of a party. Closing your eyes, still not dark. A lighting rig under your lids. A night lasting 20 years, falling asleep with your favourite song on repeat. The deconstructed, untangled memory lingers in your system. What you hear are the remnants of a social gathering and its body movements. KMOS. The fog machines are gone, the free deconstructed thinking laid out bare. Fourth album. The white noise funk still here, 4 to the floor and gnarly basslines. The jazz but the tight, the funk but the taut. The austere but the flow. The instruments, sinuous and intricate. The deconstructed dancefloor. Sawed up bits, sawed up pieces. The drums the strings the claps the sharpness. Rearranged, picked apart. organized for a new day. A new idea. A new blueprint. A brave new clear elusive promise. The love in the strict. The strict but the mess. The strict but the lie. A promise. Drifting through a sleepless world. The rent, the eyes, the mirror the scrolling the daylight, and the gravel in your eyes. Sounds of endless nights long lasting days, reality and visions, blurred and frazzled. The eavesdropping the neighbour the conversations the sleep. The fear and the joy and the new that I project onto you. The loopy sound of sirens. The joy of the sun. The field, the horizon, the light, the smoke. Xeroxed memories are now our new. The love the dream. The sleep the wake. The wish the longing. The promise the fear. What once was promised We will reclaim

The official reissue of Adelhard Roidinger’s contemporary jazz/fusion masterpiece. An extremely talented and eclectic musician, Adelhard Roidinger’s creativity couldn’t be contained by the walls of music. His compositions for computers, graphic designs and geometric studies are a testament to his wide array of interests and artistic expressions. This fascination for computers is in full display in Computer & Jazz Project I. Adelhard believed that machines are vital tools for the development of humans. By using the machines, one can refine his own self, absorbing into their mind the possibilities that such tools unlock. It’s with this belief that Computer & Jazz Project I was created: fusing a coustic instruments, that Adelhard had mastered through his career, with new machines and computers. A timeless masterpiece that unleashes the artist’s creativity, enhanced by the machines of which he is now enamoured.

Ritmiche Italiane transports the listeners through an anomaly in the fabric of musical space-time, connecting the distant past with the modern era and the plains of a lost continent with the cities of the Italian peninsula. The artists featured in the compilation strongly believed in the absence of barriers and conventions between genres, fully able to effortlessly put together West-African influences, World music, Jazz and crime movie soundtracks to achieve a boundless, meditative and hypnotic kind of music that still feels relevant today.

Pacific Rhythm is elated to present a grounding offering from Oakland's Space Ghost entitled Private Paradise as our first release of 2022. The LP is an ode to Space Ghost's time spent at Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast, a place he and his partner visit to refresh their spirit and regain optimism and enthusiasm for the outside world. Private Paradise possesses a rare ability to restore, rejuvenate, and inspire through each listen and is something we've only grown more and more fond of during the unforeseen complications we encountered during its release over the past two years. It's a piece of music that feels like a perfect nod to where we've been musically for the past 8 years and where we see ourselves heading in the future. Deep, contemplative, and uplifting audio that compels its listeners to focus on the positive forces in the world and the power of being present in a moment.

Objekt #5 is the latest instalment in Objekt's eponymous whitelabel series and his first release since his 2018 album Cocoon Crush. Tackling "the slow banger" with a signature flair, he delivers two of his most raucous club tracks to date.

If HiTech were wrapped into one person, you would get FULLBODYDURAG, an awesome producer and DJ spinning everything from Ghetto Tech to House to Hip-Hop and Jazz. This LP features all his friends including FXHE label head Omar S on "Trillionaire" and "Juice." HELLO :) proves there's tons of young talent in Detroit that deserve to be heard — Omar S heard their passion and desire to keep Detroit on the map for at least another 100 years and this LP is the epitome of their talent.

It’s an album about roads, roots, paths and emotions, the ones you’re not used to feeling everyday. But most importantly it is about change, about the inner force one discovers when forced to transform. After finding out he had to move out his beloved Resonance Jungle Studio, Hollyspleef decided he had to make one last record before the big move. Exploring his inner self through R&B, Jazz, Trip Hop, Footwork and Trap he delivers yet another gem.

There isn’t much to go on other than the soundscapes when it comes to Civilistjävel! What is rumoured to be a figment of the pre-internet era tapping into a similar consciousness as Biosphere, Chain Reaction or early Fax +49-69/450464 is ultimately left up to second guessing. For the average listener crossing paths with the project, a steady run of small-run, minimally packaged LPs has cemented Civilistjävel! as a leading force in the dub techno/glacial drone scene of present. However niche that may sound, this collection of tracks for Perko’s new FELT imprint navigates the same territories as the previous outings but with the folkloric tag “Iron Night” to help guide our ears. A Swedish expression for long nights of frost that damage plants and crops, the spectral and foreboding atmosphere of the opening cut already hints at the direction of the album. Combining dense ambient synth layers with hard to place industrial motifs (sometimes in rhythm, sometimes chaotically arranged) are what Civilistjävel! does best, indeed Järnnätter unfolds as a piece of work you can really spend time with. At points it feels as if the machines in some old factory complex have spluttered back to life through some unknown force and have begun to sing to one another. Other times the atmosphere is akin to a hydrophone placed deep into an ice-covered lake and the synthetic pulses of ‘A2’ are the only vaguely human touch. However, the sparse melodic flourishes across the record stem from an interest in psalms and early Swedish folk music, the juxtaposition of machine-led intuition and personable studiousness adding a hidden depth to the album.

Froid Dub continues to explore its synth-lined slowed down digi-dub cave flooded with waves of echoes and acid bleeps. Bass lines and flanged delays sail over deep waters, seemingly barely disturbed by the minimal pump of the synth-wave vibe.

Ylia—aka Susana Hernández—had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut album, Dulce Rendición, on Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth. But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. “That’s a lot of things all at once, no?” she says. Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response to those life events—a record of grief. The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia’s debut, but it differs in key ways. Where Dulce Rendición was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru—a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, “the rain lifts”— captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements, even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro Lévar, lends fingerpicked acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of “Todos los Cuerpos”; multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to “Ame Agari”—or “after the rain”—which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an extended deluge. One track, the dub techno-influenced “Flowers in June,” grew out of Ylia’s live sets, but the rest are the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in Málaga, five minutes from the beach—jamming and then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the closing track, “El Único Adiós Posible,” she leaves us alone with the instrument in all its stark, unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means and purity of expression: a cycle of life counted out in the passage of storm clouds and clearing skies.

What can't be said about Funki Porcini. From doing Film scores to the surreal live performances with his recent 'Laserium' tour. An Incredible album of weird & wonderful ridiculousness. An exclusive first time on vinyl, collection of Funki's Famous Fat ones. A fusion of downtempo to eclectic jazz cuts & horns with b-boy latin funk breaks with elements of blissfull strings & melodies throughout. Funki Porcini delivers his most Incredible vinyl, buffed & ready to play. The most joy you will have with a 12" since 'Lets See What Carmen Can Do'.

Following his collaboration with Nicolas Jaar's Clown & Sunset label, Cruz has self-produced and self-recorded this landmark album. ‘Prender el Alma’ is a new strain of Latin American music Cruz calls ‘Andes Step’. Influenced by new digital technology, blended with local influence, Cruz builds his tracks layer by layer, instrument by instrument, drum by drum, exploring local indigenous and Afro-cosmologies in a modern setting. From atmospheric opener ‘Sanacion’, the 10-track album journeys through short, sharp acoustic guitar riffs on ‘Puente Roto’ and the percussive ‘La Mirada’, to the electronic ‘Prender el Alma’. Down-beat ‘Equinoccio’ gets a vocal kick from Ecuadorian singer Huaira, ending with the blissful, lo-fi ‘Cocha Runa’ featuring Tanya Sanchez. ‘Prender el Alma’ ebbs and flows through a range of production of local sounds, feeling like a digital awakening. This digital revolution is spreading through Latin America like wildfire, and nowhere is this more exciting than in the heart of the continent's bustling music scene, where Nicola Cruz is leading the way. Led by forward-thinking young producers and musicians, Ecuador is beginning to experience its own digital folklore revolution. A new crop of producers and musicians are using homeland traditions and rhythms to build on a vibrant history of visual and sonic art, catapulting them into the 21st century. ZZK are at the forefront of this burgeoning music scene. With artists such as Frikstailers, La Yegros, El Remolon and Chancha Via Circuito, they are defining a new and exciting Latin American music culture.

Carmen Villain returns with the 'Planetarium' EP, the follow-up to her 2013 debut, Sleeper. In the span of the last few solitudinous years, the US-born, half-Norwegian and half-Mexican has honed and nurtured her songwriting and production craft, while still drawing from the gossamer atmospheres of 'Sleeper.' She weaved the hyper-personal songs in peaceful seclusion, creating starry tapestries of field recordings, piano, guitars, programmed drums and synths.

Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music. Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit. In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form. Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP. Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve. While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm. What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms.

From 1984 until 1987, Greek artist Costis Drygianakis and a ramshackle assembly of friends and collaborators produced a slew of recordings under the name Optiki Mousiki, or Optical Musics. Their first full-length "Tomos 1" was released in 1987 and documented a prolific early period, combining grizzly industrial noise elements with dizzying electro-acoustic experiments and wild instrumental stings. "Tomos 2" is a collection of work taken from the band's second epoch after a brief hiatus; released in 1994, it arrived after a long period of self-reflection from Drygianakis about not only what his own music represented, but what avant-garde art might be useful for in general. A very different album from its predecessor, it attempts to question popular ideas of taste, folding together "non-serious" musical ideas with traditional elements while tentatively drawing from the spiritual world both near and far, from the lives of the Christian saints to tales of Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism and Hinduism.Drygianakis started the process by recording performances from his collaborators such as Sokratis Sinopoulos, Kostas Tsianos, Dimitris Yiagas, Ross Daly and Konstantinos Karagounis. He had been working as a studio engineer in Larissa but the work had been grueling and the financial side of the business was painful. In contrast, his work as Optical Musics became more passionate and deeply personal, and the creation of the album took on a life of its own as he channeled his melancholy and frustration into four long tracks that melted together his inspirations, impulses and desires. Since the project was primarily electronic, driven by Drygianakis's interest in synthesizers and computers, there needed to be a bridge between the acoustic world and the digital. That came from a revolutionary piece of gear: the legendary Akai S-1000 sampler. This tool allowed Drygianakis to pull sounds from across the musical spectrum and tailor it to his needs, fusing dreamy, far-off sounds with ideas recorded closer to home.The result is an album that neatly pulls creative air from its influences - Tangerine Dream's "Zeit" and Diamanda Galas' "The Divine Punishment", for example - and forms it into defiantly unique sonic clouds that signal towards the East without uprooting themselves from the West. The opening quarter layers ornate strings over a hiccuping electronic rhythm and submerged synthesizers, allowing hypnotic vocals - sung, chanted and spoken - to suggest the album's religious themes without overstating it. On the second segment, Drygianakis reduces his sounds to a whisper, with faint, minimal piano and gentle atmospheres that slowly shift from acoustic to electronic, touching the boundaries of new age music without crossing it. Dense instrumental drones characterize the epic, cinematic third chapter, while the fourth and final section offers us Drygianakis' most crushing treatment, burning religious vocal techniques and Balkan string flourishes into searing noise and dissonant electro-acoustic wails.Listening almost three decades later "Tomos 2" sounds almost prophetic, picking up on themes and concepts that have only become more relevant. By consciously questioning the logic of world music, new age and the avant-garde, Drygianakis managed to formulate a narrative that continues to draw breath with each passing day.

Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational collaboration series. Revisited and expanded for a radiant, radical 2023 edition, the Pacific Coast’s panorama provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of the ocean’s life-giving form, vast and volatile with change. Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.'s intergenerational collaboration series. For this expanded edition, a panorama of the Pacific Coast provides the place and head space for exploratory Buchla synthesizer passages that meditate on a life-giving form vast and volatile with change. This Pacific Blue color edition includes bonus track "Retrograde" and a printed insert with photographs and artist essays.

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

Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II continues Black Truffle’s documentation of the late work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who sadly passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. Like the first volume of the series, the two works recorded here were written for The Ever Present Orchestra, an ensemble founded in Zürich in 2016 to perform Lucier’s work exclusively. At the core of the music Lucier wrote for the ensemble is the electric guitar, an instrument he began to explore in 2013. Played with e-bows, in these works electric lap steel guitars take on roles akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier’s works since the early 1980s. This strikingly elegant pair of compositions would serve as an ideal introduction to Lucier’s late music for a listener as yet unfamiliar with its graceful exploration of beating patterns and other acoustic phenomenon. The two pieces have quite different characters, exemplifying Lucier’s ability to harvest a remarkable range of musical results from closely related compositional procedures and concerns. In Arrigoni Bridge (2019), Lucier uses a technique familiar from earlier works such as Still Lives (1995), where sine waves traced the shapes of household objects. Here, three lap steel electric guitars (played by Oren Ambarchi, Bernhard Rietbrock, and Jan Thoben) follow the form of the Arrigoni Bridge that connects Middletown and Portland, Connecticut. The bridge’s two enormous steel arcs become slowly sweeping pitches, alongside which alto saxophone (Joan Jordi Oliver Arcos), violin (Rebecca Thies) and cello (Lucy Railton) sustain long tones, creating a variety of audible beating patterns depending on their distance from or proximity to the guitars. With its stately pacing, warm middle register tones, and rich timbral variety in the sustaining instruments, Arrigoni Bridge is a beautiful example of compositional reduction producing immersive results. Flips (2020), on the other hand, is more austere. Scored for two lap steel electric guitars (Rietbock and Thoben), double bass (Ross Wightman) and glockenspiel (Trevor Saint), the two acoustic instruments played with bows, the piece zooms in on the range of a major second (two semitones). The two guitars sweep in opposite directions within the range, crossing every four minutes; the double bass and glockenspiel sustain long tones, producing beats of different speeds determined by their distance from the guitar tones. This limitation of the tonal range means the music is often dissonant and forces the phenomenon of audible beating to the surface, resulting in a paradoxical music composed entirely of long tones yet alive with pulsating rhythm. Exemplifying Lucier’s ability to uncover near-infinite complexity within seemingly simple materials, Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II is a fitting tribute to one of the major figures of the experimental music tradition and a testament to the continuing power of his work.

2001’s »Anima« was the third album released by Sasu Ripatti under his Vladislav Delay moniker and marked a turning point in the stylistic development of the prolific producer. Clocking in at roughly 62 minutes, the single piece draws on dub aesthetics while working with Musique concrète-like methods through the liberal use of samples to create a dreamlike logic. Muffled voices, lush chords, subtle rhythms and indefinable sound events are not so much integrated into a composition with a predetermined outcome but rather engage with each other freely in a constant sonic flow, forming constellations in one moment before moving on to connect with other elements in the next one. »Anima« marked the first time Ripatti was using a DAW in his working process, creating a piece constantly in motion that subtly evolves over time. This vinyl reissue on the German Keplar label follows up on the 20th anniversary edition of 2000’s »Multila« and will be complemented by a ten-minute long version of the original piece, previously only available on the CD version released by the artist on his own Huume label in 2008. After the release of his »Ele« and »Entain« albums in 1999 and 2000, respectively, Ripatti took the 1998 independent movie »Hurlyburly« as a conceptual starting point to experiment with different gear and production methods. »Until then I had worked with an old MSQ-700 MIDI sequencer and an Ensonic EPS16 sampler/sequencer that had one or two MB of sampling memory and mixed the music live on a Mackie, which was very limiting arrangement-wise,« says Ripatti. Loading a slightly shortened version of the film into his DAW however allowed him to play along to it with the DrumKAT MIDI controller, triggering and playing all the sounds that can be heard on »Anima« while also contributing synths, bass and other sounds during repeated playthroughs before mixing a total of six stereo tracks together. »This way, after I had edited out most of the few parts that had music in them, I was in the movie; almost like an extra character playing music,« explains Ripatti. »This was certainly the most organic way in which I have ever made music, and I have never again approached another record like this.« While »Anima« sounded like an unusual Vladislav Delay record at the time of its release, it also prefigured many of the developments Ripatti would go through in the course of his long career. Combining visceral immediacy with a sense of abstraction, it is far more than a mere missing link in his discography but rather a conceptually and musically outstanding piece of work that remains as engaging as it was 21 years ago.

Japan's composer and sound artist Yui Onodera and Grammy-nominated Takashi Kokubo are visionaries who are celebrated for their ability to cook up immersive soundscapes that captivate your attention despite their minimalist designs. Kokubo's traditional Japanese instrumentation defines the work as it sweeps you up and transports you to someone that is serene and introspective. Across four pieces here they do just that - each one unhurried and vast in sci, with delicate keys tinkling above yawning chords and spring day energies on 'Thousand Bells 1'. The second piece is a little warmer, with synth smears and distant breezes bring in all manner of elegant percussive sounds. Side two continues the exploration of the Far Eastern countryside on a sunny day in mesmerising and soothing fashion.