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The self-titled tape by Ulises Carrión, reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, revisits his elusive Trios & Boleros, a work once privately circulated. Here, Carrión reimagines popular form through a deconstructed lens, where fragments of music and voice are refracted into conceptual gestures that linger between intimacy, satire, and radical sonic experimentation.
Counter Culture Chronicles present the reissue of a scarce recording by Ulises Carrión, originally distributed in private circles under the title Trios & Boleros. Best known as a writer, publisher, and leading figure in conceptual art, Carrión also developed a body of sound work where his investigations of language and structure took on aural form.
This release captures his unique approach to the conventions of popular music. The recognizable formulas of trios and boleros emerge only to be fractured, recontextualized, and reframed as conceptual gestures. Sentimentality becomes parody, melody is interrupted or destabilized, and the listener is pushed to hear not only the sound but the cultural scripts it carries.
More than a curiosity from the archive, the work embodies Carrión’s insistence on communication as a shifting field of rules, signals, and noise. In re-presenting these recordings, Counter Culture Chronicles offers insight into an artist who challenged literary, visual, and sonic forms alike, leaving behind fragments that continue to resonate for their precision, wit, and critical edge.
The tape Afrikan Klavierkonzert by Rolf Julius, recorded in 1980 and now reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, reveals the German artist’s delicate approach to sound: sparse piano textures, environmental resonance, and a restrained poetics of listening that dissolve boundaries between music, silence, and space itself.
Counter Culture Chronicles is proud to reissue Afrikan Klavierkonzert, a 1980 recording that captures a rare side of Rolf Julius, the German artist celebrated for his “small music” and subtle environmental works. Known for creating soundscapes that merge with their surroundings rather than dominate them, Julius developed an approach that was at once intimate, fragile, and quietly transformative.
In this recording, the piano becomes less an instrument of virtuosity and more a source of resonance and atmosphere. Notes unfold slowly, placed with restraint, allowing silence and space to shape the listening experience as much as the sound itself. The title hints at a distant geography but functions more as poetic suggestion than cultural borrowing, underscoring Julius’s interest in imagery that evokes listening beyond the familiar.
Afrikan Klavierkonzert is not a concert in the conventional sense but a meditative work in which music and environment blur into each other, extending Julius’s lifelong pursuit of sound as a form of presence. This reissue offers a rare glimpse into the early 1980s period of his practice, reaffirming him as one of the quiet innovators who redefined the relationship between music, space, and attention.
From the archives vol. 13, released by Counter Culture Chronicles, gathers rare recordings from key figures such as Lawrence Weiner, Ulises Carrión, Michael Gibbs, and others. This collection traces the porous boundaries between conceptual art and sound, where language, gesture, and environment intersect in works both fleeting and resonant.
With From the archives vol. 13, Counter Culture Chronicles continues its excavation of overlooked and ephemeral sound works from the conceptual art milieu. This volume assembles recordings by Lawrence Weiner, Ulises Carrión, Michael Gibbs, John Baldessari, herman de vries, Jacob van Donselaer, Terry Fox, Maurizio Nannucci, Marinus Boezem, Hamish Fulton, and Georg Winter. Each artist extends the possibilities of sound as material, whether through spoken word, minimal interventions, or conceptual gestures that hover between the audible and the imagined.
Rather than a traditional compilation, the release functions as a collective document of practices that redefined the relationship between art and sound in the latter half of the 20th century. The pieces presented here embody a range of strategies: the taut precision of Weiner’s language-based constructions, Carrión’s playful subversions of form, Baldessari’s wry performativity, and Fox’s meditative listening experiments.
From the archives vol. 13 preserves fragile traces otherwise consigned to private recordings, underscoring the cross-disciplinary energy of a generation more concerned with ideas than categories. By making these works accessible again, Counter Culture Chronicles confirms the enduring relevance of artists who approached sound not as music or text alone, but as an unstable, vital field of thought and experience.
The tape Wildlife & it’s Results by Sue Fishbein, reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, captures a collage-based soundpiece from early 1980s San Francisco. A key figure in the mail art network, Fishbein constructs an aural patchwork where found sound, irony, and cultural debris converge into a sharp yet playful critique of everyday noise.
Counter Culture Chronicles unveils Wildlife & it’s Results, a rare sound collage by Sue Fishbein, recorded in the early 1980s when San Francisco’s underground scenes provided fertile ground for cross-disciplinary exchange. Best known as a central force in the mail art network, Fishbein used sound as another medium of correspondence—fragmented, suggestive, and defiantly anti-hierarchical.
In this piece, wildlife is less a subject than a metaphor for unruly activity: snatches of found recordings, cut-up voices, urban din, and unexpected silences intertwine in a restless composition. The results are both humorous and disorienting, echoing the anarchic spirit of mail art’s international dialogues. By treating sound as fungible material, Fishbein extends her cut-and-paste aesthetic into the aural domain, challenging notions of authorship and form.
Wildlife & it’s Results carries the immediacy of a cassette-era experiment yet resonates today as a prescient reflection on media saturation, excess, and play. More document than performance, more collage than composition, the work encapsulates Fishbein’s singular ability to twist fragments into a sonic correspondence that remains vital, unruly, and fiercely independent.
Counter Culture Chronicles presents a historic discovery: La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela – Live in Rome, 23/6/1969, an 18-minute drone recording of exceptional sound quality, now released for the first time. This intimate document captures the legendary duo at a pivotal moment in their artistic development, just as they were establishing the foundations of what would become their revolutionary Dream House concept. Recorded in 1969, this performance predates their landmark 31 VII 69 10:26-10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM release by only months, placing it at the height of their Theatre of Eternal Music period. The duo's Roman concert represents their early European touring, spreading the drone music revolution beyond New York's downtown scene where they had been central figures since the early 1960s. The 18-minute duration captures the essence of Young's "dream music" philosophy—sustained tones that exist, as he conceived them, "before and after any particular performance." This recording documents the hypnotic power of their live work: precisely tuned frequencies that create physical sensations in listeners, sounds that change with the slightest movement of the head, and harmonic relationships that challenge conventional musical perception.
Louise Landes Levi - reissue of her Jack Kerouac Centennial reading that was part of her long out of print CCC boxset. The originally one-sided tape has new artwork and on the B side new material by LLL and Bombay Lunatic Asylum.
Limited to 60 copies only and released by Counter Culture Chronicle, the “Behind the Buddha's Mask” cassette is a stunning effort, largely built around the unique recordings made by Christophe Albertijn at the Middelheim Museum in May 2021. While the pandemic forced poet, writer, sarangi player and global wanderer Louise Landes Levi to reside in Japan, her voice – reciting poems from the “Behind the Buddha’s Mask” poem – was transported to the confines of Bruce Nauman’s site-specific installation named Diamond Shaped Room with Yellow Light, hosting the hypnotic, ritualistic playing of Bart De Paepe (Harmonium, Shruti box) and Koen Vandenhoudt (Sarangi, bells), under their Bombay Lunatic Asylum guise. Flirting with the outer-reaches charted by Buddhist music, “Behind the Buddha's Mask” is a trance-inducing, meditative, cosmic world of sonic interplay. On Side B we find Louise Landes Levi recorded live at Restaurant Tangine, NYC on November 20, 2002 with Ira Cohen, Kelvin Daly, J.D. Parran and assorted mysterious guests. Louise Landes Levi is a poet, translator, musician, and performer whose travels have charted an elaborate constellation of mystic and cosmic pathways. A founding member of Daniel Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, she participated - from 1967 to 1969, alongside Terry Riley and Angus MacLise - in multidisciplinary drama inspired by Artaud’s research with the Tarahumara, the Balinese Gamelan, Tibetan monastic ritual, and Indian dance. Following studies at Mills College with sarangi master Pandit Ram Narayan, Levi traveled alone from Paris through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, on her way to India to study the country’s traditions of Classical music and poetry, becoming the student of Ustad Abdul Majid Khan, and later of Ali Akbar Khan, Annapurna Devi, and La Monte Young.
Counter Culture Chronicles is proud to announce the release of a remarkable archival discovery: Allen Ginsberg – En Route To Gent, a previously unreleased recording capturing the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in an extraordinarily candid and intimate setting. This unique audio document presents Ginsberg interviewed in Amsterdam, traveling en route to Gent, and finally performing at the concert hall, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and artistry of one of America's most influential poets. This extraordinary tape features Ginsberg with his lifelong partner Peter Orlovsky, alongside prominent figures from the European literary scene: Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, who served as Ginsberg's translator and was a key figure in the Dutch "Fifties Movement", and Dutch Beat poet and artist Harry Hoogstraten, known for his collaborations with international literary figures. Throughout the recording, Ginsberg displays the remarkable candor and spontaneity that made him a defining voice of his generation. Far from a formal interview, this is an intimate portrait of the poet in conversation, revealing his thoughts on poetry, politics, and the human condition with characteristic honesty and insight. The tape captures Ginsberg not only speaking but also singing and playing, demonstrating the performative dimension of his work that made him such a compelling live presence. Vinkenoog was European Beat personified, serving as Ginsberg's translator and publishing the first substantial Dutch translation of Ginsberg's poems. Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong companion and fellow poet, was a central figure in the Beat Generation, portrayed by Jack Kerouac as the saintly Simon Darlovsky in Desolation Angels. Hoogstraten was a veteran Dutch poet and artist whose work appeared in publications from Rolling Stone to The East Village Other. This recording represents a convergence of American and European counterculture movements, capturing a moment when Beat poetry was finding new audiences and interpretations across the Atlantic. What makes this recording particularly special is its unguarded nature. Ginsberg speaks with the same directness and vulnerability that characterized his greatest poems, including Howl and Kaddish. The presence of Orlovsky adds an intimate dimension, while Vinkenoog and Hoogstraten provide the European perspective that enriches the conversation. For scholars of Beat literature, this tape offers invaluable insight into Ginsberg's working methods and philosophical outlook. For general listeners, it provides an accessible entry point into the world of one of America's most important poets, presented in his own voice and words. This is essential listening for anyone interested in Beat literature, 20th-century poetry, or the international counterculture movements that shaped modern literary expression.
'TTT grip Reckless Records don and record collecting heavyweight Toru Yoneyama on a mad cosmic noise mission sparked off with bony dancehall and mutant tekno-electro pulses – think Conrad Schnitzler meets Jeff Mills at Heinrich Mueller's lab afterhours, it's that wild.
The 92 minute 'Rescue at SW4' is among the best of TTT's already deadly run of '25 so far. Toru's eight trax take all the time needed – nearly up to 20′, and more often at least 10′ – to work out unpredictable permutations of spiny machine rhythm and rudely activated arp leads that seem to have a jazz-noise-tekno mind of their own.
An ideal case in point is the opening passage '052 T.HOLE', which spends the first 10 mins coaxing analog machines to sputter like a Schnitzler-meets-Dilloway jam, overeasy on the curdled chromatic distortion, before crystallising into a gnashing dancehall and Kongo tekno drum pattern whilst the synth wheezes psychoactive spumes. The transition is as effective and it is unexpected, and sets the tone for a class session of strangely sidewinding treats.
'BITT 35ER' stays in the longform lane with a more direct, if wobbly, traction from the offing, recalling some noisy Drexciyan probe and Mills' offbeat jazz-techno treks, whilst a pair of acrid palate cleansers set off a 2nd half encompassing pulsating, kosmiche dub techno noise in 'SPKXXX042', to Ra-esque wormholer '254222 BC' resolving in coiled acid tekno, and the stewed 303 gunk of '052 T.HOLE (048 bottoms)'.' (Boomkat, June 2025)
"I don’t keep photographs, old letters, keepsakes or memorabilia.
I have sound-files, thousands of them, un-used, un-heard: folders of field recordings; sonic sketches; experiments that failed but weren’t deleted. The files are saved on hard drives or the cards of obsolete pieces of equipment replaced – bit by dusty bit – with something new, clean and shiny.
A remnant is what’s left over when the greater part it once belonged to has been used up, removed, or destroyed. I think of my sound-files like this, the remains of ideas, of a time too.
Remnants.
The sound-files that became this album were recorded through a particular period in my life when I found myself in flux, between jobs, flats, geographical areas; after the end of one thing, but before
the next thing had started. The recordings felt restless too…
They were packed up in boxes and moved across town.
Finding them again years later was disorientating. Background sounds that had been hum-drum were suddenly, even sickeningly vivid. The chatter of the crew who would turn up each day to drink beer in the square behind my building, the crows that would rattle and click in the tree hanging over
my small roof terrace, the thrum of aeroplane engines which ebbed and flowed without end.
There were sounds from excursions too: the street preachers of Brixton; some untypically groovy Hari Krishnas in Ramsgate; an orchestra tuning up in a church. There was something vertiginous and nauseous about the nostalgia I felt on the first listen, but I soon fell into a process of “fixing” all the loops and sketches, tugging them into shape, threading them into a whole tapestry.
Once this process came to an end they were put away once again…
Things have their time. I dug the project out for a late-night listening session with an old friend who’d known that place and that period in my life. Hearing them with him changed them. They were no longer the sonic equivalent of those old photos and letters I never wanted to keep; they became something else, more communal.
An album.
We hold on to all kinds of memories – bits and pieces, fragments, remnants we so rarely think to share.
Here are some of mine." - The Dengie Hundred
live during the 4th anniversary of Sagome at Cafe Oto, London - 20th January 2024 ( January Jenilek + Ottomani Parker Live)
Recorded in one straight take - no over dubbing.
One of the most expansive instrumental Hip Hop series to date, MF DOOM’s lauded Special Herbs collection assembles a mountainous collection of his beats, ranging from series exclusives to slightly reworked favorites he produced for himself and others. Released under the alias Metal Fingers, Special Herbs succeeds at capturing DOOM’s highly influential sound which continually breaks and reinterprets the rules of the game in favor of The Super-Villain. The world is a treasure trove of sounds, and the Metal-Fingered DOOM accepts no limits; ’70s Soul/Funk classic, ’80s R&B hits, rap nostalgia, and even soundbites from children’s records & TV all find their place in the ingredients needed to perfect his recipes.
When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.
That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.
The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.
When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.
That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.
The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.
When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.
That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.
The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.
it was recorded live at my first concert in new york city in the summer of 2022, right before i recorded iiyo iiyo iiyo and right after i recorded the doober with sam gendel and then Nothing with Louis Cole.
i think it is my most grooving record.
The album that shines as the "ultimate" rare groove masterpiece, Mighty Ryeders' Help Us Spread The Message, is being resurrected!
This rare groove classic, whose signature track "Evil Vibrations" was sampled by De La Soul on "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'" in the '90s and covered by THE REVIRTH in the 2000s, proving its timeless appeal, is set for reissue as a 2-LP, 45 RPM edition! Beyond the super killer tune "Evil Vibrations," the album is packed with many other phenomenal funk tracks. These include "The Mighty Ryeders," which hits you in the hips with its sharp cutting guitar and deep, bottom-heavy bass groove, and "Let There Be Peace," a track where horns and clavinet interweave exquisitely (the original single of which is also a sought-after rarity). This is a foundational masterpiece, unparalleled in both its rarity and musical quality!