MUSIC

Emotion and Reason. Past and present.
The pianist Nobuko Kondo, who highly integrates conflicting elements to create a well-honed musical world, plays richly flavored Bach. While Kondo has expanded her international activities through first and second prizes at the Artur Schnabel Competition and prizes at the Busoni International Competition, she has also been active in premiering new works and performing contemporary music, including Stockhausen's works, Bach has always been present in her activities.
Included on this CD are six works that were featured in a 2014 recital and garnered rave reviews from all quarters. Each of the six works encompasses a completely different style, and Kondo sublimates them with a high degree of emotional and rational integration, while maintaining the philosophy of the works themselves. The unique, one-of-a-kind, and solitary Bach resonates from a unique piano and contemporary perspective.

[1]-[2] Chromatische Fantasie und Fuge d-moll BWV903
Fantasia
Fuga

[3]-[4] Fantasie und Fuge a-moll BWV904
Fantasia
Fuga

[5]-[6] Ricercar a 3 / Ricercar a 6 aus dem „Musikalischen Opfer“ BWV1079
Ricercar a 3
Ricercar a 6

[7]-[12] Capriccio B-dur sopra la lontananza de il fratro dilettissimo BWV992
1. Arioso. Adagio
2.
3. Adagiosissimo
4.
5. Aria di Postiglione. Allegro poco
6. Fuga all’imitatione di Posta

[13]-[16] Vier Duette BWV802-805
Duetto I e-moll BWV802
Duetto II F-dur BWV803
Duetto III G-dur BWV804
Duetto IV a-moll BWV805

[17]-[19] Concerto nach Italienischem Gusto F-dur BWV 971
1.
2. Andante
3. Presto

[20] Ricercar a 6 aus dem „Musikalischen Opfer“ BWV1079 (Bonus Track)

Nobuko Kondo
D. in Instrumental Music from Tokyo University of the Arts. D. for her thesis and performance of Stockhausen's piano music, and received the Bunka Hoso Music Award. She was awarded the Bunka Hoso Music Prize, and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts as a scholarship student of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 1986 to 1988, graduating with the highest honors. He won a prize at the Busoni International Competition and was awarded the Nancy Miller Memorial Prize at the William Kapell International Piano Competition in 1990. He has performed with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra Berlin, Haydn Orchestra (Italy), Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo University of the Arts Orchestra, and many others. In 1993, she began the recital series "Piano Music of the 20th Century". In recent years, she has also concentrated on the works of J. S. Bach, especially her recitals in 2000 and 2005 of the complete works from "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Volumes I and II", which were highly acclaimed. She has also released the CDs "J.S. Bach Toccata Complete Works," "New Viennese Music School Piano Works," and "Nobuko Kondo Plays J.S. Bach" (specially selected for "Record Geijutsu"), which have been well received. In April 2017, he spent a year in Berlin as a long-term overseas trainee at Kunitachi College of Music, where he conducted research focusing on Beethoven's piano works. She is currently a professor at Kunitachi College of Music.

A timeless minimal ambient masterpiece that was released only in CDR in 2003.

Before coming to Europe, in 1970, pianist Manuel Villarroel was a vet in his native Chilli. A few years later, as leader of the Machi Oul Big Band, he returned to the animal kingdom. A very specific kind of animal, for sure, the Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Feathered Serpent. What is behind this title (also the name of one of the three original compositions on this album released on the Palm label in 1976), is first and foremost a sort of homecoming… After discovering the jazz of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Villarroel was taken by the free jazz which was all the rage at the time in America and Europe, and this would inspire the first version of his Machi-Oul, project. This was a septet, with which the pianist would record, in 1971, the tremendous Terremoto (re-released by Souffle Continu FFL085). After this masterstroke Villarroel was invited to record with Perception (Perception & Friends) and with Baikida Carroll (Orange Fish Tears). While these were notable contributions, Villarroel was already looking into other combinations. “I had to deal personally with my situation as an expatriate, without disavowing it. I tried not to betray my roots, I tried to translate into my music what was essential to me, to reflect my origins – Latin America, its musical and above all human feelings – while remaining faithful to jazz, which is the mode of expression of the musicians in the group”. This then is the ‘homecoming’ we mentioned, which would incite Manuel Villarroel to compose what he would call “structured free music”. In January 1972 the pianist enlarged his formation to reach the size of a real big band: the Septet became the Machi-Oul Big Band. Three years later in January 1975, with producer Jef Gilson at the helm, fifteen musicians including those from the old Septet (Jef Sicard, François and Jean-Louis Méchali, Gérard Coppéré) worked on a rare form of jazz. From togetherness to dissonance, we danse to it “Bolerito” then shake it up on “Leyendas De Nahuelbuta”. As for the concluding serpent, it is a piece which is impossible to pin down: “Quetzalcoat” is as impressive as it is difficult to grasp. To remind ourselves of this, lets listen to it again.

To abandon animals for music – and avant-garde jazz at that –, could seeming shocking to some people. However, it is exactly what Manuel Villarroel did, as he was a vet for three years before leaving his native Chili for Europe and a career in music. And though the animals may have suffered, the world of music can be grateful. Born in 1944, Manuel Villarroel lent an ear to the best pianists from North America: Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner then Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor. Manuel left Santiago in September 1970 to participate in the Contemporary Music Workshop in Berlin. To pursue his musical career, he rapidly decided to remain in Europe. The following year in Paris, Manuel began a quartet with saxophonist Jef Sicard (who would also play with his brother Patricio, in the Dharma Quintet). But the group would rapidly expand: Villarroel and Sicard added Gérard Coppéré (saxophone), William Treve (trombone), François Méchali (bass) and Jean-Louis Méchali (drums). And with the arrival of Sonny Grey, a Jamaican trumpeter heard ten years earlier with Daniel Humair, the Matchi-Oul Septet was complete. Complete and ready: on May 8th, 1971, Matchi-Oul was in the studio for Gérard Terronès’ Futura label. The septet recorded seven of the pianist’s compositions. A succession of tracks which flow magically from one to the next: from the first drum strokes to the last deep notes of the bass, the successive waves roll over the piano and whistle through the wind instruments. And when they all come together it gives even greater force to Villarroel’s beautiful songs. Terremoto is a masterpiece of collective expression: but what else could we expect from a “supergroup’’ of this stature?

Recorded in 2007 and 2008, Cursory Asperses was created with cassette tape recordings of water sounds from various rivers, streams, lakes, beaches, and pools, combined with direct to tape instrument recordings from synthesizers, an organ, cello, piano, and bowed instruments. Instead of traditionally mixing these, at the time we were interested in software, using free Mac OS Classic programs such as Audiosculpt and Soundhack. Before we had a DAW, before VSTs, we used non-realtime convolution processing through software, using the water recordings as an impulse for the instrument sounds. The instrument sounds were "arranged" (by adding silence before, during, or after) in layered, visual swathes, to create an audio interpretation of the movement of water and waves, slowly evolving and shifting, for a meditation on deep and focused listening. Opposed to passivity, where sounds become lost in distant tones and layers upon layers are misinterpreted as single, meaningless tones. Or, it's just as meaningless as the passing of water, the flow of rivers - the crashes of sparkling ocean waves, all those sounds that we recognize. The tones are unpolished, left in their fuzzy form, with the high noise crushed into the deep. Behind the swells, and under the depths is a longing, or a lack thereof. It's passing by, no different than it was years before.

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

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey.

Ndox Electrique results from the collaboration between François R. Cambuzat, Gianna Greco (also known for their work with Ifriqiyya Electrique), and the n'doëp community in Senegal. The project originated from the duo's quest to trace the origins of North African rituals, which led them to the Lebu community in Cap-Vert, an isolated region at Africa's westernmost point. The album seamlessly blends the duo's electronically-infused avant-rock with the intense, ritualistic vocal chants and rhythmic percussion of the n'doëp ceremony. It serves as a captivating bridge between these two musical worlds, capturing the essence of this cross-cultural collaboration. The text also highlights the challenges of merging Western rock and experimental influences with the sensibilities of their Senegalese collaborators, ultimately resulting in a unique and powerful musical experience. "Ndox Electrique" transcends cultural boundaries, immersing listeners in the enchanting sounds and mystical narratives of Western Africa.

In August 2022, Australia-based, French born fourth-world music legend Ariel Kalma was invited to participate in BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction series of special collaborations. The program pairs artists who have not previously worked together to create new music cooperatively. Kalma was quick to suggest working with two musicians whom he had never met – International Anthem recording artists Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, whose critically-acclaimed duo debut 'Recordings from the Åland Islands' had been released just a few months earlier. An invitation was sent to Chiu and Honer, which was received with great enthusiasm, as Chiu had long been a fan of Kalma’s work, even citing him as a major influence on his approach to electronic music composition. The essential structure of the Late Junction collaboration was that the artists would work together to create around twenty minutes of music. They began passing music back and forth, some that Kalma had started, and some that Honer & Chiu had started, with each adding to or editing the track before returning it to the other. The music would only go back and forth a few times before being finalized. After meeting their twenty minute goal for the program (four pieces total), the three musicians were satisfied in what they would present and sent along their work to the producers of Late Junction. However, there was a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t the end of the story. There were several pieces that they had nearly completed but that weren’t sent for inclusion in the radio program, and there were many ideas for refining those pieces that had. With this in mind Kalma, Chiu and Honer agreed that they would continue to work together to try to push the music further. The freshly minted trio felt like there was much more to be said and more work to be done. The Late Junction program was broadcast in September of 2022. Simultaneously, Kalma, Chiu and Honer began expanding upon the music they had started for the purpose of the broadcast, working diligently on the music for several months. After meeting their twenty minute goal for the program (four pieces total), the three musicians were satisfied in what they would present and sent along their work to the producers of Late Junction. However, there was a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t the end of the story. There were several pieces that they had nearly completed but that weren’t sent for inclusion in the radio program, and there were many ideas for refining those pieces that had. With this in mind Kalma, Chiu and Honer agreed that they would continue to work together to try to push the music further. The freshly minted trio felt like there was much more to be said and more work to be done. The Late Junction program was broadcast in September of 2022. Simultaneously, Kalma, Chiu and Honer began expanding upon the music they had started for the purpose of the broadcast, working diligently on the music for several months. Their collective approach to this work was born in improvisation and realized via collage-based editing. The end result brings several distinct musical moments — recorded sometimes decades apart — into conversation with one another, forming new narratives from building blocks of old ones. There are snippets of improvised playing from each musician, edited together with recordings that Kalma had made in the 70s at GRM, and even moments of audio notes — like Kalma explaining his ideas — that would make it into the final mixes. Their collective approach to this work was born in improvisation and realized via collage-based editing. The end result brings several distinct musical moments — recorded sometimes decades apart — into conversation with one another, forming new narratives from building blocks of old ones. There are snippets of improvised playing from each musician, edited together with recordings that Kalma had made in the 70s at GRM, and even moments of audio notes — like Kalma explaining his ideas — that would make it into the final mixes. Ultimately, the collection of music highlights the work of all three musicians, intertwining the contextual immersion heard on Chiu & Honer’s 'Recordings from the Åland Islands' with an intergenerational reverence for (and the undeniable presence of) Kalma’s decades-spanning body of work. It is work that has definitively enshrined him as one of the true, transcendent pioneers and sages of new age and fourth-world music. That reverence is affirmed by the album title chosen by the group — "The Closest Thing to Silence" — which is taken from a quote by Kalma included in a documentary by RVNG Intl (as part of their release of the 2014 compendium/retrospective An Evolutionary Music). Perhaps coincidental, Kalma’s quote was a slight modulation of a legendary ECM Records motto, as he said: “Music is the closest thing to silence.” Ultimately, the collection of music highlights the work of all three musicians, intertwining the contextual immersion heard on Chiu & Honer’s 'Recordings from the Åland Islands' with an intergenerational reverence for (and the undeniable presence of) Kalma’s decades-spanning body of work. It is work that has definitively enshrined him as one of the true, transcendent pioneers and sages of new age and fourth-world music. That reverence is affirmed by the album title chosen by the group — "The Closest Thing to Silence" — which is taken from a quote by Kalma included in a documentary by RVNG Intl (as part of their release of the 2014 compendium/retrospective An Evolutionary Music). Perhaps coincidental, Kalma’s quote was a slight modulation of a legendary ECM Records motto, as he said: “Music is the closest thing to silence.” The Closest Thing To Silence is an album-length collaboration between fourth-world music icon Ariel Kalma and the recording duo Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, which evolved from a twenty-minute selection pieces they recorded in 2022 for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction’ program as part of a scheme that places together artists who have never worked together before. Chiu and Honer, who both cite Kalma as a huge influence on their work, beautifully fit into Kalma’s vision.

This is the Medium's 2nd ambient compilation album.We offered this compilation to 24 artists from all over Japan, Canada and Shenzhen who have a great expression of ambient music, and it has finally come to fruition.

“Spuren & Gegenworte” began with a quasi-telepathic collaboration between KM and RW. Both recorded a track on May 3, 2021, from 8:00 PM to 8:10 PM. These recordings were subsequently transformed, combined, juxtaposed, and further modified over the course of several months, resulting in the completion of the four pieces on the CD.
“Spuren & Gegenworte” can be translated as “traces & antonyms”, opening up a wide range of interpretations. “Traces” may refer to the remnants of the original sounds that have been transformed in the process of reworking, or it can symbolize the cultural and musical influences that can be discerned. “Antonyms” oscillates between contrasting/contradictory and complementary meanings. Of course, other interpretations are also possible.
The 4 titles are indicated as Japanese terms on the cover:  痕跡、対立、変動、補完. They stand for the themes of traces, confrontation, fluctuation, completion.
***
Kohei Matsunaga is a musician and illustrator, born in Osaka in 1978. He has been actively making music since 1992, with notable releases on labels such as Raster Noton, Wordsound, Mille Plateaux, Important Records and PAN. He has collaborated with many artists, including Mika Vainio, Sean Booth from Autechre, Conrad Schnitzler, Merzbow and Asmus Tietchens. He lives in Osaka and Berlin.

Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected electronic composers of our day and was also a founder member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today’s experimental music scene. His work is split between solo releases (under the moniker RLW) and collaborations, exploring all fields between media exchange and realtime presence recordings. His music is impossible to pigeonhole into one simple bracket. It is neither industrial or musique concrete, nor computer music nor improvisation. In fact, it could be all of these.

Korpses Katatonik was a musical solo project of Zoe DeWitt during the years 1982 and 1983. Unlike DeWitt's later project Zero Kama, the work of Korpses Katatonik remains entirely within the realm of electronic music and shows an uncompromising experimental style comparable to that of other industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, or Cabaret Voltaire. Like many other exponents of industrial culture Korpses Katatonik was inspired by dark psychiatry, pathological abnormalism, necrophilia, and other types of paraphilic aberration. These served as a metaphor for the dark side of a dehumanized society that seeks to maintain control by the suppression of anything that could be regarded as dark, sinister, deviant, or unpleasant from the viewpoint of popular mass culture. As a means of escape from this totalitarian pressure - thus a statement by Korpses Katatonik - there remains only self-destruction, murder, or the withdrawal into catatonic schizophrenia. Korpses Katatonik's first release was a Nekrophile Rekords cassette entitled subklinikal leukotomy aphrenia spasmophiik lyssophobo asphyxia sinister lethal anorex. The titles on the album were: shatok, schmertzlabor, enzephallik mortuor, nekom, kcok transzlant, kaltfleisch corporor, skarzisko and okzipital slash. The terminology of psychopathological disorders was used by Korpses Katatonik in a subversive way for its own poetic value and many of the rare vocals and track titles (as for example shatok, enzephallik mortuor and kaltfleisch corporor) were taken from writings of patients of Viennas famous psychiatrist hospital in Maria Gugging (dissolved in 2007). The title skarzisko refers to a national socialist concentration camp in the polish town Skarżysko-Kamienna. The upcoming influence of occultism within the postindustrial underground of the 1980s is finally reflected in the last track of Korpses Katatonik, Choronzon, which was published on the Nekrophile cassette compilation The Beast 666. This track, which refers to a ritual performed by Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the desert Sahara in 1909, anticipates the strong occult implications of Zoe DeWitt's musical follow-up project Zero Kama. In 2012 all recorded tracks by Korpses Katatonik have been released under the title Oeuvres complètes by the Viennese label Klanggalerie. Currently, the remastered album is reissued on IFP on VINYL, CD, TAPE, and ultra-limited collectors box. Recorded in 1982 by Michael Zoe Dewitt (synth, guitar, voice, tape loops) and mixed at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Wiener Konzerthaus studios). First published as audio cassette NRC01 on Nekrophile Rekords in 1983. Remastered by Zoe Dewitt for Infinite Fog Records in 2022.Korpses Katatonik was a musical solo project of Zoe DeWitt during the years 1982 and 1983. Unlike DeWitt's later project Zero Kama, the work of Korpses Katatonik remains entirely within the realm of electronic music and shows an uncompromising experimental style comparable to that of other industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, or Cabaret Voltaire. Like many other exponents of industrial culture Korpses Katatonik was inspired by dark psychiatry, pathological abnormalism, necrophilia, and other types of paraphilic aberration. These served as a metaphor for the dark side of a dehumanized society that seeks to maintain control by the suppression of anything that could be regarded as dark, sinister, deviant, or unpleasant from the viewpoint of popular mass culture. As a means of escape from this totalitarian pressure - thus a statement by Korpses Katatonik - there remains only self-destruction, murder, or the withdrawal into catatonic schizophrenia. Korpses Katatonik's first release was a Nekrophile Rekords cassette entitled subklinikal leukotomy aphrenia spasmophiik lyssophobo asphyxia sinister lethal anorex. The titles on the album were: shatok, schmertzlabor, enzephallik mortuor, nekom, kcok transzlant, kaltfleisch corporor, skarzisko and okzipital slash. The terminology of psychopathological disorders was used by Korpses Katatonik in a subversive way for its own poetic value and many of the rare vocals and track titles (as for example shatok, enzephallik mortuor and kaltfleisch corporor) were taken from writings of patients of Viennas famous psychiatrist hospital in Maria Gugging (dissolved in 2007). The title skarzisko refers to a national socialist concentration camp in the polish town Skarżysko-Kamienna. The upcoming influence of occultism within the postindustrial underground of the 1980s is finally reflected in the last track of Korpses Katatonik, Choronzon, which was published on the Nekrophile cassette compilation The Beast 666. This track, which refers to a ritual performed by Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the desert Sahara in 1909, anticipates the strong occult implications of Zoe DeWitt's musical follow-up project Zero Kama. In 2012 all recorded tracks by Korpses Katatonik have been released under the title Oeuvres complètes by the Viennese label Klanggalerie. Currently, the remastered album is reissued on IFP on VINYL, CD, TAPE, and ultra-limited collectors box. Recorded in 1982 by Michael Zoe Dewitt (synth, guitar, voice, tape loops) and mixed at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Wiener Konzerthaus studios). First published as audio cassette NRC01 on Nekrophile Rekords in 1983. Remastered by Zoe Dewitt for Infinite Fog Records in 2022.

What have we here? 16 pieces of hard-to-classify music, created during the period 1994-2008, a cornucopia of playful, intelligent, questing and eminently listenable electronic music from Osaka-born artist Hyu, who released two albums on Nobukazu Takemura’s Childisc label, in 1999 and 2002. Although a member of the turn-of-the-century generation of artists subsumed under the rather vague term “electronica”, his work stands apart in many ways, particularly in his unique exploration of microtonality, his ability to humanize music technology, and his distinctive trait of combining a light touch and sense of fun with conceptual rigor. This collection is an intriguing mix of previously unreleased tracks and re-edited versions of previously released pieces. There is a wide range of music here, many of the pieces truly unique: wiggy and wiggly robo-pop, fractured funk, swinging sample assemblages of subtle sensory overload, dynamo-drones, overtone explorations. All of it distinctive, much of it prescient, all of it rising above the strictures of genre. Hyu’s music is appealing and fun, but driven by a desire to not only create music, but to create ways of creating music. This desire, this quest, is clearly audible in all of these tracks, and in the overall excellence of his music. Available on CD or 2LP with DL. The 2LP features a bonus cover of “Kaze wo atsumete” by Happy End. A notable feature is the entertaining and enlightening notes, written by Hyu himself.

MAAVAK a two 10xCD box sets presenting the intense, present, sometimes fragile & often challenging music of Swedish/Israeli composer, musician, artist and activist DROR FEILER, celebrating 50 years of musical, artistic and political actions in Sweden and around the world. These two box sets presents his wide range of styles; from noise attacks to orchestral compositions, from chamber music to solo saxophone pieces. There is a sort of brutal sensitivity to his works, or maybe rather a sensitive brutality. Let it be works for solo acoustic instruments or full symphony orchestra works (in one of them with Blixa Bargeld as vocal solist). Each volume is limited to 300 copies and is mastered and designed by Lasse Marhaug. To be released in Stockholm on October 7th 2023 on Feiler’s new archival label The Celestial Fire which is a sublabel to iDEAL Recordings.

MAAVAK a two 10xCD box sets presenting the intense, present, sometimes fragile & often challenging music of Swedish/Israeli composer, musician, artist and activist DROR FEILER, celebrating 50 years of musical, artistic and political actions in Sweden and around the world. These two box sets presents his wide range of styles; from noise attacks to orchestral compositions, from chamber music to solo saxophone pieces. There is a sort of brutal sensitivity to his works, or maybe rather a sensitive brutality. Let it be works for solo acoustic instruments or full symphony orchestra works (in one of them with Blixa Bargeld as vocal solist). Each volume is limited to 300 copies and is mastered and designed by Lasse Marhaug. To be released in Stockholm on October 7th 2023 on Feiler’s new archival label The Celestial Fire which is a sublabel to iDEAL Recordings.

Avalon Emerson & The Charm is an evolution. Created during an extended break from the hectic blur of her life as a touring DJ, the album is a personal statement of intent from an artist who’s long looked beyond the club for inspiration. It’s also the first time that Emerson has put herself, her emotions and, most notably, her voice fully into the spotlight. Having spent her entire career working more or less alone, Emerson purposely sought out a small cast of like-minded artists to help bring the album to life. Chief among them was UK avant-pop savant Bullion, who executive produced the record and, most importantly, shares both Emerson’s predilection for shimmering pop melodies and her boundaryless approach to music-making. Working together, they cracked open her head and heart alike, creating a space where she could intimately reflect on the people and places she’s loved and left behind. Set for release on Another Dove—a new label that Emerson has launched alongside AD 93 founder Nic Tasker—Avalon Emerson & The Charm places lyrics and emotion at the forefront of its identity.

Is this a projection of the world bursting out of a formula?
Or is this an indistinct report from a three-dimensional intersection where indifference and anonymous malice scramble?

After the breakup of the legendary psychedelic rock band White Heaven and The Stars, Yo Ishihara, who in recent years has been active as Hiroshi Ishihara with Friends, has now completed his solo album.
Ishihara is also known as a sound producer for the bands "Yurayura Teikoku" and "Ogre You Asshole," but this is his first solo album in 23 years.

The music and songs that can be faintly heard from the depths of the urban hustle and bustle are not ambient, avant-garde, or so-called mellow, but rather a sensual music that has never been heard before,
It is an extremely conceptual and innovative work that shows the distance between music (Ishihara) and the world.

The musicians include Michio Kurihara, who has worked with Ishihara for many years in White Heaven and The Stars, Tomohiro Kitada and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, and Soichiro Nakamura, a former member of White Heaven who also serves as engineer.

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 2009.

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 1999.

FLOCKS is a new duo, formed by drone specialist WERNER DURAND and ULI HOHMANN. Musical landscapes that move between traditional as well as experimental sounds with influences from Krautrock and JON HASSEL's "fourth world" aesthetics. WERNER DURAND has made himself a name with various projects with Dhrupad singerAMELIA CUNI, playing with URBAN SAX, ARNOLD DREYBLATT, HENNING CHRISTIANSEN, DAVID BEHRMAN, ELLEN FULLMAN, CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX, as the co-founder of THE 13th TRIBE, ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER and TONALIENS (with ROBIN AYWARD and HILARY JEFFERY) plus numerous solo albums, released on labels like Black Truffle, Unseen Worlds or Edition Telemark. Having studied saxophone as well as Indian / Persian flutes, the Berlin based DURAND is a highly reputated protagonist in the drone scene, famous for his self-built wind instruments like buzz-clarinets or his PVC neys & horns. His partner in FLOCKS (and longtime personal friend) is ULI HOHMANN whose early encounters with music from Asia, India and Africa led to studies with the Ghanaian master drummer MUSTAPHA TETTEY ADDY and later Tombak and Daf with NEMAD DARMAN (Iran). HOHMANN played in a couple of projects that explored the language of classical Persian music, and started building his own stringed instruments (being an educated carpenter). In 2014 he joined DURAND and AMELIA CUNI for the album "Clearing", and 2018 DURAND and HOHMANN decided to continue as a duo: FLOCKS was born. On their selftitled debut they shape drone-y soundscapes based on their self-built wind- & stringed instruments, Persian percussion and subtle electronics, drawing additional inspiration from Krautrock (listen to the irresistible, hypnotique groove of "Quicksand") as well as JON HASSEL's "fourth world" aesthetics, placing the duo nicely between tradition and experiment!

The first volume in a survey of a form of Brazilian country music known as música caipira ("hillbilly music") - a stripped-back forerunner to música sertaneja, the Brazilian equivalent to US country & western which in it's contemporary form has come to dominate the domestic music industry in recent decades. This collection covers some of the earliest recordings made by the pioneering folklorist Cornélio Pires at the end of the 1920s, through to records from the 30s, 40s & 50s and the beginning of the 60s. Somewhat rooted in Portuguese troubadour folk traditions, música caipira is typically performed by a duo singing in parallel thirds and sixths, drawing upon a Portuguese-Brazilian style known as moda de viola - with the viola being the viola caipira, a Brazilian-style ten-string guitar that is the core instrument of the music. Born out of the "outback"-style region in north-eastern Brazil, these songs tell stories of pain, love, loss & betrayal - often backed by homemade guitars using invented tunings. Away from the polished pop country & western-stylings of the sertaneja, these recordings could be viewed as the Brazilian equivalent to the roots music of the American dustbowl or Appalachia.

ASA Arturo Lanz Saverio Evangelista AtomTM are the last three futurists on earth. »Radial« is the result of a vivid creative merge between Esplendor Geométrico and AtomTM. A transparent diamond formed by a heavy implosion. Its underlying massive mechanics are covered by a crystal surface made to cut reality in half. Just one letter short of “radical”, this album is no less than exactly that - an orgy of powerful, blunt repetition and hyperbolic simplicity, a profound evocation of nothingness and its surroundings. The 13 tracks (which comprise the digital full-length version) of »Radial« are the exact expansion of sonic ideas those three artists have explored during the last couple of decades. Unexpectedly so, this makes this production an outstandingly atemporal one - some would even classify it as meta-contemporary. A selection of 10 tracks of the digital full-length album will be released on CD through raster on September 01, whereas an accompanying vinyl release is scheduled for the end of 2023.

Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment -- acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity, and the human presence. For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves, and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession -- an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control, and interaction with the acoustic space. "Calligraphy" was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about ten second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. "Fortune Biscuit" is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of "biscuit" (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound. "Clepsydra" (meaning "water clock") features Sauvage's classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. Sauvage tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument. Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. All the tracks were live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. Recorded during night or very early in the morning, and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. CD version comes in a digipak; Edition of 1000.

Hania Rani announces her new album, Ghosts, bringing her songwriting and beautiful vocals to the fore and featuring special guests Patrick Watson, Ólafur Arnalds and Duncan Bellamy (Portico Quartet). Ghosts is the sound of an ever-evolving artist and, just as the album’s title suggests she passes repeatedly and gracefully between musical worlds: as composer, singer, songwriter, and producer. This album builds on Rani’s earlier successes Esja and Home with an expanded yet still minimal setup of piano, keyboards, synths (most importantly her Prophet) and features more of her mysterious, bewitching voice. Its spirit is warm, beckoning one into an ambitious double album that unfolds at an exquisite pace, informed by her revelatory, exploratory live performances. Ghosts is also an album of collaborations as Rani is joined by Patrick Watson, who breathes unearthly life into the ethereal ‘Dancing with Ghosts’. ‘Whispering House’is written and recorded with her friend, Ólafur Arnalds and casts a peaceful, ineluctable spell; and Portico Quartet’s Duncan Bellamy contributes vital loops to ‘Don’t Break My Heart’ and ‘Thin Line’. Rani’s lyrics are partially inspired by a two-month residency in a small studio in Switzerland’s mountains, where Rani was working on the soundtrack On Giacometti for a documentary about the renowned Swiss artist. “Where I stayed was once an old sanatorium in an area which used to be very popular, but now there are huge abandoned hotels where the locals say ghosts live. I mean, it's kind of a local belief system – these ghosts even have names! – but once you're deep into nature or some abandoned place, your imagination starts working on a different level.” “The edge of life and death,” Rani summarises, “and what actually happens in between: this was what really interested me. Even singing the word ‘death’ was quite a shock. It’s such a weird word to say out loud, and people are afraid of it, which I found extremely interesting. Most of the songs probably still talk about love and things like that, but Ghosts is more me thinking about having to face some kind of end.”