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Inventor of the “infinite guitar,” Canadian musician Michael Brook’s 1992 4AD record Cobalt Blue is a timeless and quietly stunning collection of instrumental pieces and shimmering dreamscapes, featuring contributions from ambient music pioneer Brian Eno, composer & multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno, and Grammy-winning producer Daniel Lanois.
Recorded later that year, Live at the Aquarium captures Brook’s rare solo performance in London, highlighting the hypnotic sustain and atmosphere that define his work. Beyond his albums, Brook has scored acclaimed films including Into the Wild, Brooklyn, and An Inconvenient Truth.
Newly remastered by Rashad Becker and presented as a 2XCD and crystal clear 2LP with artwork by Alison Fielding based on the original v23 designs, this set marks the first vinyl reissue of Cobalt Blue and the vinyl debut of Live at the Aquarium — a long-overdue celebration of an underrated gem in the 4AD catalogue.
Brook is known as a pioneer in the ambient music movement and a highly sought-after producer, especially in the arena of world music, for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. He has worked with a vast range of important artists, including Cheb Khaled, U. Srinivas, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and the Pogues, and toured with David Sylvian and Robert Fripp and with John Cale.
Brook was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1996 for his album with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Night Song, and for a Golden Globe in 2008 for the Into the Wild soundtrack. El Infierno won the 2011 Havana Film Festival award for best music. In 2024, Nusrat’s album Chain of Light, produced by Brook, was The Guardian’s World Music album of the year.
Dj Sprinkles’ debut full length album,continues with themes from 1998’s “Sloppy 42nds: A tribute to the 42nd Street transsexual clubs destroyed by Walt Disney’s buyout of Times Square” (a track recently featured on Ame’s “Coast2Coast” DJ mix compilation for NRK Records).
While the world celebrates the revial of New York House Music, constructing utopian fictions about the genre as it goes along, DJ Sprinkles retreats deep into the bowels of house. This is the rhythm of empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug & alcohol addiction, racism, gender & sexual crises, unemployment, and censorship.
The title song of track1&2 is a real “strictly rhythm” house music. It’s a simple 4/4 beat with piano loop.maybe this is a real minimal house! Third track “Ball’r (madonna-free zone)” is a euphoric mid tempo house.this track reminds jan jelinek or larry heard.
Fourth track “Brenda’s $20 Dilemma” is a sequel of his fag jazz style.check the beautiful kuniyuki remix of this song(mule musiq 34). Fifth track “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” is a classic new york house style.if you like the record of jus-ed or that kind of artist,you like this song.
Sixth track “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To” is a one of the highlight song on the album. Actually this track is not 4/4 beat house but very emotional powerfull music. Seventh track “Reverse Rotation” is a deep and madness beautiful song.When you listen this song,you associate the music of theo parrish or pepe bradock.
Eighth&nineth track are main songs of this album. “Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep Into the Bowel of House)” is associated the sound of jungle wonz or virgo. but this song is filled with somthing sadness.check the story about this album from terre,you will see…. http://www.comatonse.com/releases/midtown120blues.html This album is for a real house music lovers.
視聴-Midtown 120 Intro・ミッドタウン１２０イントロ
視聴-Midtown 120 Blues・ミッドタウン１２０ブルース
視聴-Reverse Rotation・後戻り
視聴-Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)・グランドセントラル駅 パート２（列車でミズーリ州から72時間）
Texas-born, Maui-based musician and producer Jesse Peterson aka Turn On The Sunlight's new LP via Music From Memory. "Originally formed in New York in the late 2000s, Turn On The Sunlight has evolved into a fluid, location-spanning practice rooted in collaboration, intuition and process. Now based on Maui, Peterson’s work draws together a wide network of musicians and environments, with recordings taking shape across Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, San Miguel de Allende and Haʻikū. Loosely situated within a framework of organic, ambient-leaning jazz, 'Iseo' unfolds as a series of open, exploratory pieces, with electronics sitting subtly beneath acoustic and environmental elements. Built from layered instrumentation including synthesizers, guitar, zither, flutes, voice and field recordings, Peterson moves between grounded, tactile detail and more expansive, immersive states. A sense of warmth and permeability runs throughout: organic percussion, environmental textures and drifting rhythmic elements lend the record a gently saturated humidity, reflecting Peterson’s base in Hawaii, where the presence of nature is felt as much as it is heard. Underlying the project is a way of working rooted in gathering, listening and tending. Instruments, ensemble sessions, field recordings and everyday environments are approached with attentiveness, shaped through collecting, refining and allowing things to settle. Relationships, landscape and lived experience shape the sound, giving 'Iseo' a tactile, almost hand-made quality. Rather than fixed arrangements, the album feels as if it has been organically and lovingly assembled through a process of listening and response, each element finding its place within a wider, evolving whole. This approach reaches a natural centre point in the 15-minute piece 'Medianoche En La Calle Aurora', which unfolds patiently, bending through shifting environments as motifs and textures emerge and dissolve with quiet continuity. Peterson’s role as both instigator and facilitator is central to the project. Bringing together a diverse group of collaborators including Carlos Niño, Mia Doi Todd, Laraaji, Ko Ishikawa, Luis Pérez Ixoneztli and Miles Spilsbury, he creates space for individual voices to emerge within a shared language. The result is a music defined by openness and generosity. 'Iseo' takes its title from Peterson’s son’s middle name, a word that can be understood to mean ‘one-world life’. The piece itself takes the form of a gentle lullaby, its melody loosely shaped around the syllables of his name and sung to Peterson’s son by Luis Pérez Ixoneztli, a close collaborator whose presence across the record reflects a long-standing relationship that extends beyond the music itself. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis."
Packaged in a 6 panel digipak. Includes a 16 page booklet in French & English. A massive, four side-long drone-epic masterpiece “Shânti” (1972-73) for electronic and concrete sounds, in a spectacular double CD digipack issue. A hundred-and-thirty-five minute piece of "meditation music" for a four-track magnetic tape by Jean-Claude Eloy, produced in the Electronic Studio of the Radio of Cologne “The term “meditation music” triggered many conflicting comments including positive ones (“... let us say that Shanti belongs to those very rare works that change you after listening to them. You are not exactly the same before and after.” - Gerard Mannoni, Le Quotidien de Paris, 1974). Others, wondering at the strong sound presence of the piece, consider such aspect as hardly helpful to their own meditation... Let us be clear: “what meditates” here (”that” who meditates) is the composer. He is the one who takes you on his journey and guides you through his work like in a classic or romantic symphony. As a listener you are invited to follow “his” meditation... The composition is the meditation.”
A work of genuinely monumental proportions. Jean-Claude Eloy's Gaku-No-Michi - subtitled "Tao of Music" or "Ways of Music" - stands among the towering achievements of 20th Century electroacoustic practice. Produced at the electronic music studio of NHK Radio in Tokyo between 1977 and 1978, its four hours of concrete and electronic sound unfold as what the composer called "a film without images" - an immense, spiraling architecture of sonic transformation that remains, nearly five decades on, as radical and absorbing as the day it was conceived. Born in Paris in 1938, Eloy belonged to the great second wave of post-war European composers. He studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, winning First Prizes in Piano, Chamber Music, Counterpoint, and Ondes Martenot, and worked on composition with Darius Milhaud. Summer courses at Darmstadt brought encounters with Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen; he then entered Boulez's master class at the Music Academy in Basel. Yet Eloy was never content to remain within the European serialist orbit. A professorship at the University of California, Berkeley during the late 1960s opened his ears to Eastern aesthetics - to the vast, unhurried perception of time in Asian musical traditions. From that point forward, his trajectory diverged sharply from his contemporaries, carrying him toward India, Japan, and a singular practice in which the boundaries between Occident and Orient dissolved into sound itself. After the 135-minute electronic meditation of Shânti (1972-74), realized in Cologne, Eloy traveled to Tokyo. There, working inside the NHK Denshi Ongaku Studio, he produced Gaku-No-Michi - a composition of staggering ambition, structured in four linked parts. The first, "Tokyo", draws on the raw acoustic fabric of the city - subway announcements, factory hum, political speeches broadcast from loudspeakers in public squares - and subjects it to a slow, spiraling metamorphosis, pulling the concrete toward the abstract. "Fushiki-e", the longest section at nearly 80 minutes, reverses the trajectory: electronically generated material absorbs fragments of Gagaku court music, Nô theater, and Shômyô Buddhist chant, drifting toward a sustained "sound of immobilization" - an immense organ point of contemplative stillness. "Banbutsu no Ryûdô" works an endlessly metamorphosing weft of daily and extraordinary sound, where a nationalistic speech dissolves into the buzzing of insects, where the hollow strike of a bamboo Shishi Odoshi against stone emerges only after long electronic transformation. "Kaiso", the final movement, condenses reminiscences of all that preceded, built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, leading through gravity and lament toward an infinitely sustained tone of peace. What distinguishes Gaku-No-Michi from so much electroacoustic work of its era is the sheer physical presence of its sound world. Eloy does not merely manipulate material - he inhabits it. The timbral palette is extraordinarily rich: electronically fabricated Tibetan bells more haunting than their acoustic counterparts, iridescent spirals that diffract into divergent lines before converging into vast harmonic masses, crackling meteorite trails, low-pitched resonances swept by winds both violent and majestic. The experience of duration is central to the work's design. Four hours is not a provocation but a necessity - the time required for the listener's perception to shift, for ordinary awareness of passing minutes to give way to something closer to immersion, to what Eloy described as a "psychophysical acoustic" encounter with sound. This 4CD set on Hors Territories represents the first complete publication of the work in its digitalized and revised version, dedicated to the memory of Wataru Uenami. Packaged in a 10-panel digipak with a 16-page booklet in French and English, it is an essential document - not only for admirers of Eloy, but for anyone drawn to the outer reaches of what composed sound can achieve. A bridge between worlds, between concrete and abstract, between the noise of the living city and the stillness at the heart of contemplation. CD 1: “Pachinko” introduces “Tokyo” in a deliberately stiff, regular, almost mechanical and untranscended way while the big spiral of long successive waves, which further develops through Tokyo, becomes more and more varied in its material ending in the surpassing and searched-for transubstantiation taking place throughout the fi nal part. CD 2: The second disc, “Fushiki-e”, takes us (through varied, complex, contrasted and sometimes violent sound episodes) towards the four “stages of contemplation” including the last one, “Mokuso”, which represents the ultimate stage of the contemplative. It is the longest part of the whole piece, lasting almost 80 minutes. CD 3: “Banbutsu no Ryûdô” is a boundless continuous “weft” travelling so to say through all sorts of daily or exceptional « sound scenes » continually metamorphosing, going from political speeches to a Shishi Odoshi, transformed for a long time well before its pure, direct appearance. CD 4: “Kaiso “ is a moment of gravity innervated and built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, which however leads us beyond the evoked drama to a place of surpassing with peace through the « Han » sound, extending the work to infinity…”
A wave of global critical reappraisal is building around Japan's definitive techno label, TRANSONIC RECORDS. To mark the occasion, a two-disc compilation album showcasing the dawn of Japanese 90s techno is set for release.
TMZ stood out as a fiercely unique presence on TRANSONIC COMPACT DISC 01 and 02, the compilation albums that marked the first standalone releases from the newly reborn TRANSONIC RECORDS. An existence that could well be called an out-of-place artifact in techno history, this debut album bridges the gap between a hidden past and the present.
01.Skylark on 303 / Masaaki Kikuchi
02.The Acid Coming / ACIDWHITEHOUSE
03.Sevnwn / Yuri Suzuki
04.Got Drunk / CHERRYBOY FUNCTION
05.Freq Out / Sigh Society
06.Screaming Bassline (distortional addict) / AcidGelge
07.GROTTO / QUEER NATIONS
08.Cut the Midrange Drop the Acieeed Bass / MUTRON
09.BOWWOW / ACID TAMIYA 346
10.Victim Kid / kuknacke
11.Do It / NASCA CAR
For the 30th birthday of INA, the GRM has decided to present in this CD box some of his archives. CD1 “les visiteurs de la musique concrète” : André Hodeir – Pierre Boulez – Jean Barraqué – Darius Milhaud – Roman Haubenstock-Ramati – Henri Sauguet – Edgar Varèse – André Boucourechliev – Claude Ballif – Iannis Xenakis – Olivier Messiaen. CD2 “L’art de l’étude : Pierre Schaeffer – Monique Rollin – Michel Philippot – Philippe Arthuys – Luc Ferrari – François-Bernard Mâche – Mireille Chamass-Kyrou – Ivo Malec – Philippe Carson – Akira Tamba – Beatriz Ferreyra – Alain Savouret. CD3 “Le son en nombres » : François Bayle – Dieter Kaufmann – Jean-Claude Risset – Ivo Malec – Denys Smalley – Gilles Racot – Yann Geslin – Bénédict Maillard – Jean Schwarz – Francis Dhomont. CD4 “Le temps du temps réel” : Bernard Parmegiani – Åke Parmerud – Denis Dufour – Horacio Vaggione – Alain Savouret – François Bayle – Gilles Racot – Daniel Teruggi – Ramon Gonzales-Arroyo – Michel Redolfi. CD5 “Le grm sans le savoir” : Bernard Parmegiani – Robert Wyatt/F. Bayle – François Bayle – Alain Savouret – Jean Schwarz – Michel Portal/J. Schwarz – Boris Vian/B. Parmegiani – Robert Cohen-Solal – Guy Reibel – Edgardo Canton – Christian Zanési.Pour marquer et fêter les trente ans de l’Ina, le GRM a choisi de réunir en un coffret exceptionnel de cinq disques compacts quelques unes de ses archives musicales parmi les plus remarquables. Souvent inédites ou alors dispersées au gré des publications, ces œuvres originales ont marqué par leur nouveauté et leur audace la seconde moitié du XX° siècle.Un coffret de 5 CD augmenté d’un album de 101 photos.CD1 “les visiteurs de la musique concrète” : André Hodeir – Pierre Boulez – Jean Barraqué – Darius Milhaud – Roman Haubenstock-Ramati – Henri Sauguet – Edgar Varèse – André Boucourechliev – Claude Ballif – Iannis Xenakis – Olivier Messiaen.CD2 “L’art de l’étude : Pierre Schaeffer – Monique Rollin – Michel Philippot – Philippe Arthuys – Luc Ferrari – François-Bernard Mâche – Mireille Chamass-Kyrou – Ivo Malec – Philippe Carson – Akira Tamba – Beatriz Ferreyra – Alain Savouret.CD3 “Le son en nombres » : François Bayle – Dieter Kaufmann – Jean-Claude Risset – Ivo Malec – Denys Smalley – Gilles Racot – Yann Geslin – Bénédict Maillard – Jean Schwarz – Francis Dhomont.CD4 “Le temps du temps réel” : Bernard Parmegiani – Åke Parmerud – Denis Dufour – Horacio Vaggione – Alain Savouret – François Bayle – Gilles Racot – Daniel Teruggi – Ramon Gonzales-Arroyo – Michel Redolfi.CD5 “Le grm sans le savoir” : Bernard Parmegiani – Robert Wyatt/F. Bayle – François Bayle – Alain Savouret – Jean Schwarz – Michel Portal/J. Schwarz – Boris Vian/B. Parmegiani – Robert Cohen-Solal – Guy Reibel – Edgardo Canton – Christian Zanési.Album “archives grm en images” : album photos noir et blanc de 80 pages et 101 documents. Une suite poétique de photographies jalonnant l’aventure des chercheurs, compositeurs, musiciens et techniciens, qui animent les cinq disques du coffret.
Milestone Reissue! The three discs collected here - housed in a lavish cardboard boxet (+ Includes a 116 page booklet in French and English with biographical notes, essays and program notes for each work, and a 52 page booklet with photographs) - cover the bulk of Pierre Schaeffer's concrète works, beginning with his pre-tape days when he composed using multiple turntables mixing sound effects recordings direct to lathe. The earliest recordings here were created in 1948 during Schaeffer's days as radio engineer for Radiodiffusion Française and are built from sounds ranging from locomotives and whirligigs to pots, pans, piano, and percussion. Each of those collages eventually made their way onto the air. His Suite pour 14 instruments is an amalgam of orchestral sounds rendered far beyond their original context. Where these early works clearly function as experiments for Schaeffer, once Pierre Henry joins in as his assistant, the music takes on both a playfulness and a refinement of detail that eventually became landmarks of the French approach to musique concrète. The processes became increasingly laborious, and those who once flocked to Schaeffer's studio to work in this new medium became disillusioned by the demand and patience that the work required.
The decision to assemble a boxed set titled Luc Ferrari, l’œuvre électronique [Luc Ferrari, Electronic Works], defining the word electronic in the widest sense possible, meant bringing together an essential part of the composer’s work: tape music without any classical instruments.
From Étude aux accidents (1958) to Arythmiques (2003), the 31 works in this compilation will help the listener to discover all the facets of his art based on “captured” sounds. He tried and tested all the different techniques of studio work: brilliantly elaborated electroacoustic works, radiophonic story-telling or Hörspiele, which he particularly relished, or other semi-improvised works.
This editorial choice is not a way of drawing a hierarchy between on the one hand so-called mixed music (with instruments), which he excelled at, and on the other hand the type of music published here, which only includes recorded sounds. On the contrary, what we aimed to do was to show the strong links he drew between natural sounds and the way he scored them. On this subject, Pierre Schaeffer often talked of the necessary balance between sounds and musicality. The power of recorded sounds alone (voices, landscapes, strange sounds, everyday scenes, etc.) without formal mastery is not enough to hold the listener’s attention for long.
From that point of view, each work of Ferrari’s is a discrete lesson in music. Ferrari was always very lucid when he claimed that a composer was a little like a “journalist” who, through his compositions, witnessed the state of the world while at the same time creating a work of art.
This is another aspect of this edition: as we listen and in filigree, half a century unfolds before us. A committed artist bears witness to technological progress, political awareness, reports and crucial encounters. More than an essential compilation, this boxed set reflects the personality of a diverse, inventive and extraordinarily musical man.
Daniel Teruggi / David Jisse, 2008
Kevin Drumm’s The Mild Temper gathers over six hours of work shaped by gradual change, fine detail and sustained tones. Across six discs, he explores density, resonance and space through small, deliberate shifts rather than overt movement. Sounds emerge, recede and recombine, holding a careful balance between stillness and motion. There’s no narrative push here—just close attention to texture, duration and the physical presence of sound. The result is a cohesive, absorbing body of work that reflects the precision and focus of Drumm’s long-standing practice.
Blues in the Mississippi Night documents a remarkable 1947 session recorded by Alan Lomax in New York, shortly after performances at his Midnight Special concert series. Featuring Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson—originally credited under pseudonyms for their safety—the recording pairs intimate performances with candid conversation. Prompted by Lomax, the musicians speak openly about racism, labour and life in the Jim Crow South, tracing the blues back to lived experience. The result is a powerful blend of music and testimony, grounded in the realities that shaped the form. Remastered from the original tapes by Lomax Archive, this edition restores the clarity and presence of the session. It stands as a vital historical document, capturing three defining voices in direct, unguarded form.
Reverend Baron’s singular troubadour soul may best understand the capacity music has to span the distance between points on a map and pages in a calendar. Daniel, the acoustic instrumental follow-up to 2022’s Karma Chief label debut, From Anywhere…, expands the world beyond LA’s concrete canyons and overpasses to the bustling, churning sea of life that is Mexico City, to the sparse, rolling landscape of Red Cloud, Nebraska. In each locale, the constant companion was a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar — with a well-traveled history of its own. “It was my father’s guitar,” recalls Danny Garcia, the man behind the Reverend. “I found out a few years ago that it was my grandfather’s as well.” Ever-present since his childhood, the Mexican acoustic has taken on increased meaning for Garcia with each passing year. Hours upon hours spent playing, traveling, and breathing meaning into its fretboard have made it both a tool and talisman. “There’s the obvious bloodline and family and link…that link through history,” confides Garcia. “It’s kinda the only family heirloom I have.” Over the last while, all this playing (or “noodling” as Danny puts it) had Reverend Baron chasing a sound — one which belies the guitar’s origins. It’s a sound he would hear from time to time, and when it came to record Daniel, it would be his true magnetic north (or south as it were). Spinning through Daniel, and you will hear echoes of Antonio Bribiesca and Luiz Bonfa's guitar tones. Dig deeper and you’ll see the bones of Townes Van Zandt and Nick Drake guitar textures as well. While not claiming their virtuosity in his playing, the soul and vulnerability that have become calling cards for the first two Reverend Baron albums complement these influences. There is a warmth in Daniel that takes center stage in these acoustic meditations. From brief, fluid moments like “El Monte” and “How Glad” to the high-lonesome “Muchacho,” the songs drift like cumulus clouds over a deep blue skyway. Their graceful float is in stark contrast to the album’s origins. The studio Garcia was using for his intended second release on Karma Chief was a victim of the LA wildfires in January of 2025. “[The fires] halted work on my record,” says Garcia. “So I ended up leaving and went to Mexico City for a few months, and so worked quite a bit [on Daniel] there.” With his striped-down set up -- featuring his guitar, a few microphones, and a laptop -- the time in Mexico City set the tone for the project. “I just came into this space because it seemed like I could just do it…it seemed like it was time, and I didn’t have to force anything.” After leaving CDMX, Reverend Baron spent a few weeks in Red Cloud. While all the traveling and miles energize Garcia, this small midwestern village’s peaceful and unassuming nature was the ideal spot to focus and create. “LA is home and has its own cultural juice, which I love…Nebraska is very quiet. No one disturbs you, and I can just work and concentrate for weeks [there].” Daniel’s 11 tracks criss-cross the laylines of border music and folk, but categorizing them along a fault line or genre tag misses the point. These acoustic numbers move with a deliberate ease, never overstaying their welcome. The songs respond to time and distance with equal parts reflection and transparency; both mirror and window to the soul. Daniel is Reverend Baron’s conversation with his bloodline, influences, and the stops along the way. By the album’s closer, “Velasco,” Daniel’s conversation becomes your invitation to search for a path along that great sonic continuum housed within a song.
Joyce & Tutty Moreno, the legendary architects of Brazilian sophisticated samba, have partnered with Adrian Younge to complete JID027—a deeply emotional album born from tragedy. Set in motion by the endorsement of their late friend João Donato, the project became a tribute to him following his sudden passing. The result is a breathtaking collection of improvisation, poetry, and resilience.
On revelations of divine love, jason calhoun’s fifth release for Dear Life Records, Calhoun has assembled an especially potent album of work that whirrs, hums, and glows. Unlike his recent output centered around extended, hypnotic compositions, the fourteen tracks here immediately request your attention and curiosity. Their concision only underscores one of his greatest strengths: the ability to capture an evaporating, fleeting moment, and hold it close. The title is a nod to British Anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose collected writing of the same title is the earliest of any woman written in English. Here it serves as a unifying theme for Calhoun's particular palette of restless textures and tentative melodies. This is personal music, to be sure, but it also feels tactile, almost taffy-like in its presentation—and with such a potent combination, it is hard to resist a smile while listening. Like when the insistent pulse grounding 'last one' suddenly changes color as yawning tones reveal themselves, or how 'eye dilation' tiptoes into the room with each note sounding like a carefully chosen step. Though never precious or fussy, the album remains resolutely intimate. Calhoun puts it plainly: “Julian of Norwich says “‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them--in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess. Don't ask me what they mean-I'm still figuring that out myself. Maybe we can figure it out together.” It is from this place of doubt, searching, and openness that the album finds its footing. When asked about the origin of the album's cover art, Calhoun explained, "I see this spot all the time on my commute home from work". A true statement of how the mundane and meaningful are interwoven, from someone who celebrates that union better than most. Unlike Julian of Norwich, Calhoun is no hermetic mystic himself-but in his daily life he works at an oncology center, doing routine but necessary work to provide treatment for those in need of it. While he might resist any analogizing, it is sincerely easy to say that Calhoun's body of work, which is only fortified by revelations of divine love, also offers care and company.
William Basinski's epochal four-album box of slowly decomposing memories gets its long-overdue deluxe reissue, with liner notes from Laurie Anderson and a fresh mastering job from Josh Bonati.
Undoubtedly one of the greatest "ambient" albums of our era, 'The Disintegration Loops' is an enduring aesthetic touchstone. It didn't exist in a vacuum when it appeared in the early '00s, as the dust settled after 9/11, but Basinski's prescient meditation on decay in the wake of tragedy felt like a musical mark in the sand - a body of work that changed the way we think about repetition and tape saturation. The story goes that the composer, who'd been recording loop-based, minimalist experiments since the '70s, inspired by Brian Eno's 'Discreet Music' and Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain', was going through his archive of reel-to-reel tapes when he realized the ferrite was flaking away from the plastic. Not willing to give up on the material, he recorded the output, letting the tape head destroy his pieces irreparably and adding reverb to the output.
Now, this would have been good enough without the additional context, but Basinski finished 'Disintegration Loops' on the morning of September 11, 2001, and played the first piece to his friends as they sat on the roof of his apartment block, watching agape as events unfolded. He used the footage he shot at the time for the covers of each disc, and the suite's solemn, thoughtful decline served as the unofficial soundtrack of our collective grief, an unfussy reminder of tragedy that plays out its haunted remnants of the past until they die, quite literally. There's been plenty of music that's aped Basinski's method since, and we don't doubt there'll be plenty more, but there's nothing quite like the original, and this latest remaster is the definitive version.
アルバムについて Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018. Sub re, in Latin, can mean “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” It's precisely this direct approach to music, drawing on the extraction of raw sound material, that forms the basis of this album. Under the matter thus signals the concrete aspect of music, but not the concrete that is transfigured, becoming vapor and form, the substrate of an idea. Rather, it signals the concrete beneath the concrete, in the immanence of sounds, in their becoming, as a driving force, like a tide, like a vault of imperious and powerful matter. To achieve this, Bonnet draws on a multitude of sound sources (acoustic, electronic, natural or artificial, created on purpose or found by chance) and a multitude of contexts and occasions to give them form. The movement, a shell, a bell, a spell, for example, was heard for the first time during a concert organized in Venice in connection with Latifa Echakhch's contribution to the Swiss Pavilion at the 2022 Art Biennale, while the last movement on the record, signalmirror, concluded a piece presented at the first Sound Biennale in Sion (Switzerland) in 2023. These elements, formed and detached from their original context of appearance, of the places and people who made them possible and listened to them, contribute to a complex layering of climates and sonic worlds and help create a contrasting album, where density and tenuity coexist in a succession of moving waves, sometimes laden with memories, sometimes filled with regrets, always set in motion by their own morphology. Sub Re also refers to a chapter in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, a key passage in which the main character, faced with a colossal task, finds himself alone in the middle of the sea, beneath a gigantic shipwreck caught in the jaws of an isolated reef, surrounded by water, currents, and winds, alone to face the impossible. It is indeed beneath the surface that actions arise, decisions are made, and intuition guides us.
To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.
2025 edition. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code is the 2019 breakthrough album of the acclaimed composer’s pipe organ pieces. Her temporally informed studies of harmonics and intonation breathed life into a suite of compositions which leaves the heart moved and mind still. This 2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track Sacrificial Code III.
Pitchfork praised the album for its "time-stretching properties" and "clean minimalism". Resident Advisor described the album as an "exercise in concentration, restraint, and focus". Tiny Mix Tapes emphasized the "intensity and intimacy" of the album, pointing out how Malone's close miking technique brings out every textural detail of the organ, creating a highly focused and immersive listening experience.
48k/32bit master by Rashad Becker
