MUSIC

CD version limited to 270 copies, six panel digipack** Recording of the premiere performance of Nitsch’s latest large scale symphony for full orchestra, brass ensemble and choir, in five movements. Composed for the 155th Action of the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater, and performed at the nitsch museum, Mistelbach, September 9th, 2018. Directed by Andrea Cusumano. "The 155th action in Herman Nitsch's Das Orgien Mysterien Theater took place on September 1, 2018. As the first action to be staged in the Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach, Vienna, it coincided with the occasion of his 80th birthday. A series of processions both viscerally affecting and poignant in their restraint took place in the museum to a very crowded audience. This action was accompanied by a new symphony composed by Nitsch for large orchestra, brass band, and choir. Sudden and explosive motifs for the brass band punctuate still, though unnerving, drone-like passages that modulate over the course of the two-hour performance. Throughout, the movement of the participants in the action and the audience is accentuated by the incongruous percussive ring of the whistle that calls attention and directs the activity, heightening the intensity of the entire work.“ (Patrick Quick)

76 minutes collection of recordings made at the Friedrichshof commune between 1982 and 1990. Performed by Otto Muehl and members of the commune. Includes actionist group-music, improvised conceptual pieces, and barpianist-songs. Artist co-founder of the Viennese Actionism (with Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler), controversial founder of the sulphurous utopian community of Friedrichshof in 1972 (which will earn him seven years in prison in the 1990s), Otto Muehl (born 1925 in Grodnau, Austria, died 2013 in Moncarapacho, Olhão, Portugal) staged a series of "material actions" from 1963 to 1970, for film and photography, in which the body becomes part of the environment. Since then, he has developed his work as an enterprise of "surpassing pictorial painting by representing the process of its destruction", with the idea that the body is also an "object" to be shaped, the living body, as well as the social body, art and life being inseparable.

A seminal figure in the history of 20th century avant-garde, yet sinfully overlooked, Wolf Vostell unleashed ideas - those running wild through his debut LP "Dé-coll/age Musik", which remain a slap to the face, more than half a century after they were set into play. A founding member of Fluxus, an early instigator of Happenings, an innovator of video art, Vostell was equally one of the most radical and irreverent practitioners in sound that the world has ever known.

First released in 1982, "Dé-coll/age Musik" draws from material dating between the late 1950’s and early 80’s - the results of Vostell’s application of décollage, the near perfect inversion of collage. Rather than gathered and assembled sounds - as with Musique Concrète, these are the result of subtractions from a former whole - the death of one, giving life to the next.

Swelling from the past, Vostell’s efforts pull the rug from beneath the common history of structured sound. A singular body with no loyalty, producing shocking results. A grinding confrontation - an intoxicating immersion in sound - as brutal as it is ecstatic - an exercise in joy. "Dé-coll/age Musik" assembles the essence of a creative spirit which is rarely known. Each work as radical and fresh today as the moment it was made.

Returning from a self-imposed musical hiatus, Silvia Kastel materialises on YOUTH with a long-incubated follow-up to her 2017 'Air Lows’ album for Blackest Ever Black. It’s an oddly rendered trio of soundscapes somewhere in the vicinity of Madalyn Merkey, Lucy Duncombe or Maja SK Ratkje - beatless - and far from straightforward. Inspired by Toshiya Sukegawa’s Bioçic Music series, which Kastel describes as both calming and eerie, ‘Mantide’ manifests a mix of raw directness and conceptual subtext. Featuring loud birdsong recorded outside her Berlin apartment, Kastel foregrounds her subjects against strafing choral motifs in a way that refuses to inhabit new age environmentalism. It’s all genuinely unsettling - on paper it reads like a calming listen, but instead plays into something much more angsty, and hard to define. On 'Spoons' Kastel takes pointers from electronic music pioneer Carl Stone (who is supposedly working on his own version of the track for future release), as well as "Îles Resonantes", a short documentary about Éliane Radigue. It’s a slowly keening smear of quizzical chords and ribboning tendrils that wrap up into what she intends to “sound and feel like a long goodbye hug…surging and overdriven at times, quiet and soft at others… “ Xantharmony closes the EP on its weirdest flex, constructed entirely out of layered and processed vocal elements. It recalls Lucy Duncombe’s clipped theatric melodrama and Maja Ratkje’s more guttural vocal acrobatics, but follows its own hackle-raising logic, acting more like a cue, or trigger, for sudden and overwhelming feelings of unease. And in our book - that’s high endorsement for continued, closer listening.

Studio recordings of "Kobeta Piano" by electronic musician and sound engineer KND, keyboardist Shoichi Murakami, and drummer/percussionist Watz Uematsu. from Kyoto Japan. Jazz layers, Afro-essence, and modular sounds are woven together to create Kyoto's advanced music.

Saxophonist, flautist Chip Wickham takes us to Cloud 10 with his most soulful and lyrical album to date Chip Wickham is a jazz musician and producer who divides his time between Spain, UK and the Middle-East and who has made a name for himself with a series of beautifully crafted solo albums that draw equally on the hard swinging spiritual jazz of Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef and Sahih Shihab, alongside the music of British jazz legends such as Tubby Hayes and Harold McNair and the more contemporary sounds of Jazzanova, Kyoto Jazz Massive and Robert Glasper. Originally from Brighton, Chip studied in Manchester and became involved in the 00's UK jazz, soul. trip-hop and funk scenes, working with the likes of The Pharcyde, The New Mastersounds and Nightmares On Wax as well as playing with Matthew Halsall's Gondwana Orchestra. And his relationship with Gondwana Records goes right back to the very beginning as he played on Halsall's 2008 debut Sending My Love. Cloud 10 is his debut album for Gondwana Records (following a 12" of Lonnie Liston Smith covers in May) and it is a wonderful, timeless, lyrical, slice of hard-hitting, soulful, spiritual jazz and modal hard-bop with a distinctly UK flavour - driven by Chip's deftly funky flute work and hard-hitting tenor. Underpinned by Chip's restless energy and driven by his desire to connect with the listener on a deeper level. "My albums are my legacy. Each one is a statement to the world of music and my contribution to its growth, its energy and ultimately it's history." Cloud 10 features pianist Phil Wilkinson, vibes player Ton Risco, bassist Sneaky and drummer Jon Scott (all veterans of previous albums) together with harpist Amanda Whiting and percussionist Jack McCarthy whom Chip met touring in the Gondwana Orchestra, and rising star Irish trumpeter Eoin Grace who also doubles on flugel horn. The album was recorded at the legendary all analogue Estudios Brazil in Madrid, with the band spending a week at Chip's house in the mountains just outside the city, eating and drinking together, listening to music till the small hours and recording all day. It was a magical time and the positivity seeped into the recording. "It was a beautiful week of pure music and joy, I think you can hear it in the recording and that's the inspiration for the title: Cloud 10 is a place of a great happiness, way out beyond Cloud 9!" And it is that purity, energy and joy, that makes Cloud 10 such a life-affirming recording and makes Chip the perfect addition to the Gondwana Records family. Lean in, you'll be on Cloud 10 too!

"I'm sitting in a different room than you are now. I'm recording my own voice. By the resonant frequency of the room strengthening itself, my voice is excluding only the rhythmic elements. Repeat recording and playback until completely destroyed. At that point what you hear is the very natural resonance frequency of the room expressed by my voice. I have this movement in my voice. I think of it as a way to smooth out band irregularities, and I'm not conscious of revealing this phenomenon itself. "

A repress of the classic "I'm Sitting in a Room (1969)" by contemporary musician Alvin Lucier (1931-), originally released in 1981.
By repeatedly recording and playing back the sound of voices echoing in a particular space until the voices become indistinct, the work explores the acoustical engineering of the space to reveal its specific frequencies. It is a work that can only be realized by actually being there, and although it can be perceived as a mere acoustic work just by listening to the recorded sound source, its original purpose is a groundbreaking content that allows the listener to embody a vast and infinite space.

1980 super masterpiece. A work released in 1972, in which a wire with a length of 15 meters was pasted, huge magnets were installed at both ends, and the vibration relationship between air and wire was emitted by an oscillator. This CD contains four tracks of about 18 minutes, but it seems that it was actually an installation for 72 hours in a row. A meditative ecstatic continuous sound that changes depending on the ceiling of the place, the flow of air, the comings and goings of people, etc.

It was created for the "FORESTRO SUMMIT" event space held at Forest Limit in Hatagaya, Tokyo in January 011. The sound was selected from natural environmental soundscapes, sound effects, low frequency, electronic music, and experimental music. It is a 70-minute mix including silent time, which is connected to "SOMETHING IN THE AIR" in 2012, which I personally started to experiment with during this period. I tried to create a "sound prescription" worldview that is not ambient, experimental, new age, or healing, but rather a guide to the air and space, a "sound prescription" that you can listen to and feel with your free senses and imagination, while stimulating your perception to a good degree. It is a record of the first phase of the mind-drawing challenge to explore the space between music, song selection and mix arrangement. Ten years after the recording, we felt that the appeal of this mix could be better conveyed by listening to it on cassette tape. Compuma

Hajj’s Paris-based Dawn label delivers Modern Collapse’s debut album of dembow, drill and D&B tinted witch house-gothic. Leading down their unmarked path from Ronce’s frightening ‘Aquatics’ comp and the ‘From Dawn Till Dusk’ set that introduced us to Modern Collapse in 2021, ‘Usual Case Scenario’ serves to grasp the full scope of Gabriel De Sercey & Hugo Fabry’s slant on chthonic, contemporary club styles. To our ears they merge salient aspects of now-decade old witch house and ricocheting ballistics of ‘00s junglist breakcore with flourishes of ambient chamber classical and dembow that temper the emotions at the shadowy limen of club music’s sweatier peaks. The eight tracks are arranged with a underlying narrative thrust or arc that makes for an absorbing ride, bookending the session with particularly tender, cinematic parts of icy keys, vaporised vox and ambient subtlety, while the main body staggers between ruggedest UK-style dubstep (‘Gateway to Nihilism’), gothic chamber classical (‘Untold Subjects (Skit1))’, and scowling brukouts of dembow-rooted jungle/breakcore on ’Stolen Whispers in the Club’ and ‘Rush’.

Finally, His First Album: The Flower of Youth / Souls / Yumiko’s Spring / Song from the Void / Grave / Hail the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra / Phone Call / An Akita Fox Song Run Amok / World School / Resistance, Age 23 / Mr. Ishimori / First Bon / A Cat Burglar in the Night / Bright Night Straight from the Throat: Grampa / Goddam Winter / American Kuyuran / Dagadzugu / A Fitting Adolescence / Footbridge / The Spring is Here Again Song / Fridge / Smithereens / Don’t Kill the Sea Lions / Harmonica / A Little Ditty / Stone A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth: Try Saying You’re Alive! / Kill or Be Killed / Memory / Got a Problem? / Namahage / My Hometown is Also Inside a Dog / The Boys of Hachiryū / The Donpan Song Goes Off the Rails / Runaway Boy / Missed My Time to Die A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police once put it—and a sound to match. Now, Blank Forms Editions gathers Tomokawa’s earliest records for the first time in a deluxe three CD box set comprised of Finally, His First Album (Harvest Records, 1975), Straight from the Throat (Harvest Records, 1976), and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth (Harvest Records, 1977). In each record, Tomokawa shouts, cries, wails, and croons, his folk stylings tinged with psychedelia and swelling into ground-shaking rock.. Many tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a highly regional vernacular of north Japan rarely heard beyond the prefecture, and even less often used in music. Matching his guttural, all-out vocals are profoundly existential meditations on everyday life and the world around him; this is, as record executive Kiichi Takara dubs it, “I-music.” It looks toward the interior, the quotidian, and the domestic with piercing and ever-honest eyes. The accompanying liner notes (here translated for the first time) include introductions by Takara, a round table discussion with Brain Police, and lyrics for all three albums—tracking the rise of Tomokawa as the “screaming philosopher” of Japan. The box set will be in conjunction with the release of each record in LP format in 2022, and the musician’s 2015 memoir, Try Saying You’re Alive! (Blank Forms Editions, 2021), the first-ever English translation of his prose; together they provide the definitive introduction to the singular world of Kazuki Tomokawa. Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

12H is a two hours long summa of the very best material produced for the eponymous sound installation, specifically designed by Donato for the Music Bridge - Armando Trovajoli in Rome under the curation of MAXXI Director Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. The original piece translated in music the architecture of the bridge and its surrounding life, layering samples and field recordings in the language Donato knows best: the repetition, rhythm and harmony of different building blocks. The work was originally reproduced by 24 speakers spread along the bridge colonnade, escorting the visitor through different musical places in their crossing. It now takes its final stereo form in this continuous mix version: a dense, enthralling flow akin to Tiber’s murky waters. The original installation was set up by sound engineer Giuseppe Tillieci / Neel, a frequent collaborator of Dozzy in the “Voices from the Lake” project, with Funktion One support.

« Similar to a whale skeleton beached on Tiber’s banks, the Music Bridge connects two parts of the city that had been ignoring one another for centuries. On one side the slopes of Mount Mario dominate the CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee) sports fields where many masterpieces of Italian modernist architecture were built: Moretti’s Fencing Academy, the Youth Hostel, the Olympic Pool and later on the Tennis Stadium and the Stadio Olimpico. On the other side there is Quartiere Flaminio, with its theatre, contemporary art museum MAXXI and Renzo Piano auditorium. Donato Dozzy has converged sport and music in his sound installation for the Music Bridge, recounting the story of the two universes connected there. The work, originally presented in a 12 hours format, was a day-long journey through environmental sounds and Donato’s own melodies. In the new-found synthesis we present today we experience once again time and Tiber flowing together, from the crack of dawn until nightfall artificial lights. »
(Pietromarchi Bartolomeo, Director of MAXXI)

Few DJs and producers are as widely and universally acclaimed in techno circles as Italian Donato Dozzy. He has a rare ability to work his way into peoples’ minds in both contemporary and classical settings, conjuring real mood and atmosphere. Never one to pay heed to the zeitgeist, he prefers to deal in hypnotic soundscapes that really take you on a trip.

Enigmatic as he is, and laidback as he seems, as an artist he is constantly unveiling new work. Displaying a large variation in terms of sound and method across many new releases each year — some of which come on his co-owned label Spazio Disponibile — he also puts out installations for public spaces and museums, uses obscure musical instruments, collaborates with likeminded producers, classical singers or visual artists. Donato seems to continuously challenge himself on a creative level: whatever method he uses, though, he is always likely to permeate your cerebral cortex and rewire it in fascinating and compelling new ways. 

David Behrman's work released in 1978. A masterpiece that includes "On the Other Ocean," in which flute and bassoon performances are modulated by a handmade synthesizer and computer to develop beautiful sustained sounds, and "Figure in a Clearing," which was composed by David Behrman for the first time using a computer.

Already sold out. No general distribution, Joyful White & Gold Vinyl. 5 LP box of rare and representative albums of Pastor Barrett and his choir, including "Like A Ship", "Do Not Pass Me By The box contains 49 tracks on 5 LPs, including rare albums such as Like A Ship, Do Not Pass Me By, Volume 1 & 2, and I Found The Answer, as well as a bonus album with additional rare singles and sermons. With gorgeous notes and illustrations, this is the definitive book on Barrett's 20 years of work!

For the past 10 years, it has been a sacred place that has expanded the horizon of the underground scene in Copenhagen, Denmark, to the world, and defines one of the current experimental lifelines represented by and . A new catalog of Posh Isolation, a sacred place where you can feel the shoegaze sound of a new era, which is a prestigious and unprecedented beauty, is in stock at once! !! The latest 2022 "The Last Picture Show" by Christian Stadsgaard's famous project Vanity Productions, which is known for his activities in the noise duo with Loke Rahbek sponsored by Posh, Damien Dubrovnik and The Empire Line, has been released on CD. A masterpiece that created an exceptional drone gaze sound full of melancholy and introspection as a desolate by repeating loop operations! You can enjoy the fantastic and majestic sound that is typical of Posh, which makes you feel the gaze of "somewhere other than here" far from this world such as the equinoctial week and the heavens. Limited to 300 copies.

A bearhug of chill-out room gouching gear from MFM spanning the golden era of ‘90s ambient dance music with gems from David Moufang, LFO, Global Communication, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Sun Electric and many more notables of that era. Since the world turned into a big chill out room in early 2020, albeit with a heavy sense of anxiety, this set could hardly be better placed for downtime in the comfort of your own home, rolling out mystic highlights such as LFO’s MDMA-tingle arps and pads in ‘Helen’ and the sublime suspension systems of Global Communication’s remix of ‘Arcadian’, along with Move D’s early nugget ‘Sergio Leone’s Wet Dream’, and the lush pads of his close spar Jonah Sharp’s Spacetime Continuum, plus a strip of killer slow acid in Sideral’s ‘Mare Nostrum’, and the blissed romance of ‘Love 2 Love’ by Sun Electric. One for the lovers and the ravers.

Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker have emerged as one of the most interesting duos in contemporary improvised music. First introduced to Unseen Worlds through their performance on the Philip Corner recording "Extreemizms: early & late", Tarozzi and Walker elevated recent recordings, Eliane Radigue "Occam Ocean 3", Pascal Criton "Infra", and Tarozzi’s own "Mi specchio e rifletto" to greatness. Their finely tuned sound makes even the most adventurous tones compelling. With "Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d‘amore" the duo add folk music to their contemporary classical and improvised music roots, reinterpreting songs from their youth in rural Emilia that originated from the emancipation of working class women and the partisan Resistance in World War II, especially ones sung by choirs of female rice field workers, called Mondine or Mondariso. Their songs tell a story of hard, poorly paid work, love, the hypocrisy of society, protests, war, the challenge of working far from home, the violence of oppression and the need for political awareness. Following years of incorporating, reinventing, and transforming these songs within their practice, Tarozzi and Walker unlock emotional territory where their relationship with Emilia resonates in concert with other sounds and places.

There are certain works by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley that are rightly celebrated as classics, paradigm-shifting masterpieces that exerted a wide influence within classical music, but also well beyond its often hermetic borders. Hello, “Baba O’Riley!” But there is so much more in his repertoire deserving the same accolades. On “Terry Riley: Keyboard Studies”, released by Another Timbre, one of the premiere contemporary music labels of our time, three mid-1960s masterpieces are interpreted by the brilliant pianist John Tilbury - known well for his long-time membership in AMM, to say nothing on his authoritative readings of music by Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew - sometime in the early 1980s, offering dazzling evidence of his inventive interpretations and Riley’s boundless importance. The British pianist John Tilbury has been intimately connected with AMM for more than four decades, joining the legendary improvising group back in 1980. He filled the chair once held by Cornelius Cardew, who left the group a year earlier (and who died in a tragic bike accident in 1981). Long before joining the group Tilbury had established himself as one of England’s finest contemporary classical musicians, with a particular expertise int the work of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Howard Skempton as well as Cardew. Apart from recording the latter’s music, he also penned an authoritative book about his life and music, publishing “Cornelius Cardew - A Life Unfinished” in 2008. Tilbury is a pianist of rare erudition and technical precision, surveying long-form works with a keen architectural knowledge, and his refined skills as an improviser are rooted in high-level listening abilities. He has thrived in collective enterprises, giving and taking in varied contexts in a way that emphasizes collaboration, care, and sensitivity while downplaying bald virtuosity. Outside of his brilliant work in AMM (and outside of it with core members Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost) he’s improvised with a broad array of sonic explorers including Oren Ambarchi, Marcus Schmickler, John Butcher, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey. He cleaves to an immaculate strain of austerity, operating with remarkable restraint and rigor that generally has no interest in excess or virtuosity for its own sake. Over the years he’s made several recordings for Sheffield’s Another Timbre imprint - one of the best, most thoughtful labels devoted to a post-Cagean music landscape - including one as part of the collective Goldsmiths in addition to titles featuring the music of Feldman, Cage, and Terry Jennings. Another recording for the label features his clavichord playing on work by John Lely and Christian Wolff. While working with Another Timbre capo Simon Reynell on a different long-term project, Tilbury played him some old recordings featuring several keyboard works by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley, an old and dear acquaintance of the pianist. Tilbury doesn’t recall the exact provenance of the recordings, but it seems likely they were made in Hamburg in the early 1980s. “Keyboard Studies” offers a crucial facet of Tilbury’s musical world, one that’s poorly represented by recordings, while at the same time offering new interpretations of some of Riley’s most important work. A handful of pianists, such as Sarah Cahill and Steffen Schleiermacher, have recorded the first two of his seven “Keyboard Studies”, but getting to hear Tilbury’s ravishing, breathtaking accounts of these works reveals new perspectives. Riley himself never recorded the first study, while an attractively raw iteration of the second was made under the title “Untitled Organ”, released on the 1967 album “Reed Streams” on the Mass Art imprint. Riley only notated the first two of these pieces, composed between 1964-67, as they were designed largely as piano exercises for ideas he was working through at the time - during the same period he wrote his masterpiece “In C” - and each piece requires significant improvisation on the part of the interpreter. Naturally, Tilbury was up for the task. Both of these “Keyboard Studies” use a fixed but implied pulse, with a jaw-dropping rhythmic attack rooted in fifteen foundational three- or four-note phrases that cycle over and over, with the performer determining when to move forward, although the opening figure must always remain present. As far as I can tell Tilbury’s account of “Keyboard Study 1”, with its vaguely hocket-like alteration between two phrases at a time, is a single live take on piano, but the technical difficulty of these works has required overdubbing, and that’s what we get from Tilbury on “Keyboard Study 2”, which contains five separate voices, where he plays piano, electric organ, celeste, and harpsichord in dizzying cycles of rapidly swirling, rhythmically identical passages. The writing allows the listener to trace the ecstatic shifts between those core cells, even as the lines fly by at super high velocity. Phrases seem to emerge and disappear in almost psychedelic excess. The album’s final piece is a version of Riley’s “Dorian Reeds”, a 1965 work he composed for saxophone and electronic delay - and also included on the “Reed Streams” album - which shares many of the same concerns as “Keyboard Studies”, albeit with a far more limited harmonic profile. In Riley’s own recording of the piece, which incorporated his Time-Lag Accumulator system as a delay device to allow for the removal and introduction of phrases, he plays saxophone, although subsequently the piece has been adapted depending on the instrument as Dorian Voices or Dorian Brass. Although it sticks with the original title, Tilbury’s version is for electric organ. It’s a wonderful sonic mind-storm, as terse phrases stack up, phase in and out of each other, only to be pushed aside by new iterations, bouncing across the stereo field. Obviously, John Tilbury took his practice in a direction far removed from these minimalist gems, but here he not only proves his remarkable facility for this aesthetic frame, but he reveals a creative connection to the composer. He seems to inhabit these works with rare insight, a quality surely enhanced by his personal friendship with Terry Riley.

Another Timbre releases a new CD by Barbara Monk Feldman, wife of American avant-garde music legend Morton Feldman, featuring five chamber and solo pieces composed between 1988 and 1997. Performed by the "GBSR Duo" consisting of George Barton & Siwan Rhys and Mira Benjamin from Apartment House! This is a fantastic chamber music piece that envelops you in a very ethereal tranquility.

A 4-disc box-set with Apartment House playing all of John Cage's 'number pieces' for mid-size ensembles (from 'Five' to 'Fourteen', with 'Four5' as an added extra, along with alternative versions of three of the pieces). These extraordinarily beautiful works were all composed in the last 5 years of the composer's life, as Cage approached his 80th birthday. These recordings by Apartment House are the first recordings for 15 years of almost all of the pieces. An essential release of wonderful but somewhat neglected music. Downloads include a pdf of the 44-page booklet with extensive notes about Cage's number pieces, and the cover artwork

The “Polyphonic singing of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa” was officially added to the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, but four decades earlier the musicologist Simha Arom had already discovered the music of the Mbenga (Aka/Benzele), Baka and Mbuti (Efé) populations. He described their collective contrapuntal improvisations as being characterised by a level of polyphonic complexity that European music would only reach in the 14th century.

Starting from the 60s, when the records of the UNESCO Collection curated by Arom were released, Central African music has been internationally discovered, studied and used as a source of inspiration by composers such as Christian Wolff, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Jon Hassell, and Herbie Hancock (with the famous opening track of the album Head Hunters), amongst others.

During its 2014 edition AngelicA hosted a concert by Ndima (a word meaning forest in the Aka language) a group of artists (singers, dancers and musicians) part of the Aka Pygmies tribe.
The concert was a huge success (it had to be replicated on the same night, due to high demand from the public) and like all concerts that are part of the festival it was recorded.
However, for this double album of i dischi di angelica, we decided to use the field recordings that Roberto Monari, sound technician and long-time collaborator of the festival, had carried out a few months earlier while being hosted for several days by two Pygmy tribes Mbenzelé and Aka, and living with them, in the far North of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the North-eastern (Mbenzelé) and North-western rainforests (Aka) of Ouésso in the Shanga region respectively, near the border with the Central African Republic and Cameroon.

The complex musical technique of these populations is learnt orally since early childhood, and it is completely different from that of the surrounding populations: voices (including a peculiar use of yodelling, with an alternation of head and chest voice that creates an individual identity) and hand clapping are enough to create sophisticated polyphonies and counterpoints; occasionally simple string, wind or percussive instruments are used, or quite simply the water in the ponds which is skilfully played with the hands, traditionally by women and children.

The music of the Pygmies permeates every aspect of everyday life: music dedicated to forest spirits, rituals for hunting or to facilitate a rich harvest, nursery rhymes or lullabies for children, songs of grief or entertainment, or relating to divination or sexuality… singing takes place all day, and the rhythm of the stories and the voices is forged and developed – as proved by the original and continuous sequences on these records, which are the fruit of spontaneous events that took place during Monari’s stay with the tribes – in a sound context as rich and diversified as that of the sounds of the equatorial forest in which they live – an environment, and a culture, whose survival is nowadays increasingly endangered.

Edition of 180 copies in digipack. First official re-issue. The New Vortex Blockaders Compaign was released on tape in 1984 and was bootlegged on LP in 1998. Both editions are now sought after collectors items. This release went down in noise history as a big classic, and is now reissued, in nice remastered form. 'Extreme, nihilistic Musique Concrete which creates unrelenting walls of sound... Images of chaos, collapse and extreme violence dominate.' Aeon 'This will rip your face off and wear it as a mask!' CMS Foundation

In 1981, Brenda Ray / Naffi Sandwich released the sweetly yearning “D’Ya Hear Me!”. The song is now considered a post-punk classic, and here we have a warm digi-reggae version sung by Kyoto composer/producer/vocalist NTsKI (“Natsuki”), with backing tracks performed, recorded and mixed by Osaka-based producer/guitarist 7FO (“nana f o”). Also on this release are a karaoke version, plus two remixes, the first a dancehall-flavoured version by Bim One Production, a Tokyo electro-reggae production duo. The second mix is from Nagoya-based electronic producer CVN, who provides a harder version. This revisioning of a much-loved classic is available on CD, 10-inch vinyl and digital.

Mastering: Takuto Kuratani (Ruv Bytes)
Special thanks: Brenda Ray, Hiroshi Takakura (Riddim Chango)

CD version: Gatefold cardboard case

TRACKS:
01. D’Ya Hear Me!
02. D’Ya Hear Me! (Karaoke)
03. D’Ya Hear Me! (Bim One Production Remix)
04. D’Ya Hear Me! (CVN Remix)

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