MUSIC
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Originally released in 1978, Music By William Eaton is a private-press album from the accomplished experimental stringed instrument builder. The atmospheric recording techniques, mixed with a hint of Fahey/Takoma-lineage make for a listening experience akin to the mountainscape drawing represented on the album cover. The experience may seem simple at first, but like any great trip in nature, new details consistently reveal themselves upon each listen.
“When I started building instruments, playing guitar took on a whole new dimension. From the conception to the birth of each instrument, new layers of meaning unfolded. Cycles, connections and interdependencies became apparent as I contemplated the growth of trees from seed to old age, and the transformation from raw wood to the building of a musical instrument. I sought out quiet natural environments to play and listen to the “voice” of my 6 string, 12 string, 26 string (Elesion Harmonium) and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar. Deep canyons contained a beautiful resonant quality and echo. A starlit night with a full moon provided all the reflection and endless space by which to project music into the cosmos. The sound of a bubbling stream and singing birds added a natural symphonic tapestry to a melody or chord pattern. As I perceived it, everything was participating in a serendipitous dance. Everything was part of the music.
During this time, I decided to record an instrumental album of music. The idea was simple; it would be a series of tone poems with no titles or any information attached, only the words ‘Music by William Eaton.’ While some of the songs evolved out of composed chord progressions, most of the songs were played spontaneously, only on the occasion of the recording. These improvised songs haven’t been played since.” -- William Eaton
Official Mr Bongo reissue. Replica original artwork, including the insert with listening instructions, in Spanish and English.
A1. Culto Solar - In Altepetl Tonal / A2. Suite Al Culto Solar - Xochiyaoyoloh / A3. Suite Al Culto Solar - Ketzalkoatl Yauh Miktlan / B1. Ipan In Xiktli Metztli
Luis Pérez was born in Mexico City on July 11, 1951. From 1971 onwards he dedicated much of his time to the research of the pre-Columbian instrumentation of Mesoamerica. This research allowed him to travel the Mexican territory and study musical traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. He learned directly from the living sources of the music and collected samples of musical instruments and the songs of different native speakers including Maya, Nahuatl, Mazateco, Yoemem, Comcaac, Raramuri, Wixarika and more.
His personal collection of native Mexican instruments includes ethnographic instruments still in use by ethnic groups, along with archaeological artifacts some of which are more than 2,000 years old. He continuously utilises these instruments in performances, concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and recordings, keeping them alive.
‘El Ombligo de la Luna’ delves deep into the past but also exists entirely outside of time, as Luis Pérez ‘Ixoneztli’’s offering to the world – the soul of Mexico channeled through the hands and heart of a master musician.
Huge thanks to Carlos Niño for his assistance on this very special project. Copy adapted from original copy written and supplied by Jesse Peterson (2017), used with thanks. Licensed directly from Luis Pérez.
Official Mr Bongo reissue. Replica original artwork, including the insert with listening instructions, in Spanish and English.
A1. Culto Solar - In Altepetl Tonal / A2. Suite Al Culto Solar - Xochiyaoyoloh / A3. Suite Al Culto Solar - Ketzalkoatl Yauh Miktlan / B1. Ipan In Xiktli Metztli
Luis Pérez was born in Mexico City on July 11, 1951. From 1971 onwards he dedicated much of his time to the research of the pre-Columbian instrumentation of Mesoamerica. This research allowed him to travel the Mexican territory and study musical traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. He learned directly from the living sources of the music and collected samples of musical instruments and the songs of different native speakers including Maya, Nahuatl, Mazateco, Yoemem, Comcaac, Raramuri, Wixarika and more.
His personal collection of native Mexican instruments includes ethnographic instruments still in use by ethnic groups, along with archaeological artifacts some of which are more than 2,000 years old. He continuously utilises these instruments in performances, concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and recordings, keeping them alive.
‘El Ombligo de la Luna’ delves deep into the past but also exists entirely outside of time, as Luis Pérez ‘Ixoneztli’’s offering to the world – the soul of Mexico channeled through the hands and heart of a master musician.
Huge thanks to Carlos Niño for his assistance on this very special project. Copy adapted from original copy written and supplied by Jesse Peterson (2017), used with thanks. Licensed directly from Luis Pérez.
Greta Lindholm is an absolutely unique personality in the contemporary dance scene. She toured in India, Mexico, Japan, Scandinavia, Italy and France, during the '70 and '80 making known her synthetic and experimental approach in the choreographic field. Her art explores new boundaries and is essentially pure celebration of the body language and voice in its intimate relationship with the fluidity of movement. Using mainly foot drumming and vocal rhythms, she makes her body the only instrument of continuous exploration, halfway between traditional songs and rhythmic-gestural improvisation. Greta seems to treasure different vocal cultures and give them an avant-garde reinterpretation: from Scandinavian folklore to jazz scat singing, from baroque arias to the African Pygmy. Particular influence is given by the metric-vocal spelling of Karnatic and Hindustan music. All these differents suggestions serve to reinforce and accompany her plastic movements. Greta's performances are studded with imaginary phonemes, onematopeic patterns, rhythmic phrasing, phonetic articulations, breathing, spiral structures, frenetic drifts, clap handings or feet like timpani or snare drums. In this way her dance becomes "silent music" and can have analogies with other noteworthy vocal explorations, such as those of Meredith Monk. For the first time an audio document is a available on LP and CD, a co-production with our beloved friend: Sing a Song Fighter.
The Morton Feldman Piano box set is the most extensive survey of Feldman’s piano music to date. Released exactly 20 years after John Tilbury’s long unavailable 4-CD set, the new box includes several pieces which weren’t included there, and has three works which have never been released on disc before.
Philip Thomas has been playing Feldman’s music for 25 years and is one of the foremost interpreters of his work with an extraordinary gentle touch. He and John Tilbury combined forces to produce the highly acclaimed Two Pianos double CD, which featured Feldman’s music for multiple pianos. The Feldman Piano box set is the culmination of decades of study, and is accompanied by a 52-page booklet in which Philip Thomas writes about Feldman’s music from a pianist’s point of view:
“Playing Feldman’s music inevitably changes aspects of one’s technique. The orientation is towards the vertical aspects of piano playing - the attack - rather than the horizontal - the line. Yet Feldman made much of his desire for instrumental sound devoid of attack, which is hard for the piano, whose action is fundamentally percussive. Yet knowing this affects how one treats the instrument: pressing the keys serves to release the sound, setting strings in motion.”
The box set also contains artworks by the English painter David Ainley
Transamorem - Transmortem (1973)
ARP Synthesizer
“Before the greatest achievement
Before the greatest detachment.
At the limit of the frontier space of the unconscious - tuned waves - "consonant things vibrate together".
Where does the change happen? In the inner field of perception or the exterior reality of moving things in the course of becoming.
"And time is no longer an obstacle, but the means by which the possible is achieved".
Eliane Radigue - June 20, 1973
"Transamorem - Transmortem" was premiered on March 9, 1974 at The Kitchen in NYC, where the music programmer at the time was Rhys Chatham - this was right before his guitar phase. During this period, "Transamorem - Transmortem" was presented along with other compositions by Eliane Radigue in a linear mode of listening, although the piece had originally been conceived, during its composition, as a sound installation. Of course, both modes of listening are possible, and each works marvelously in its own way.
In their original form, Eliane Radigue's works are magnetic tapes. After being played a few times in public, the tape disappears to its case until a release proposal makes it available again through a disc.
During this period Eliane Radigue's compositions became fairly long, some lasting over an hour. Because the tracks could not be edited for some obvious reasons, a vinyl release was unthinkable. It was only in the 90's, with the advent of the CD format, that the long compositions of Eliane Radigue were made available (with the exception of the "Song of Milarepa" LP on Lovely Music, a work already divided into multiple movements and thus able to be fit onto two sides of an LP). For these reasons, the work of Eliane Radigue remained virtually unknown for twenty years - from the 70's to the 90's.
It was in 2004, when she accepted my aid in digitizing her archives, along with Lionel Marchetti, that I discovered "Transamoren - Transmortem." Immediately, I was awed by the majestic grace of this very long tangle of frequencies, this set of seemingly unchanging tones, whose variations are of a delicate subtlety. "Transamoren - Transmorten" is recognizable as one of the most radical of Radigue's compositions, comparable to the first "Adnos," the work that follows "Transamoren - Transmortem" chronologically. Very few transformations, an apparent formal aridity that is then contradicted by the physical play of the frequencies as the listener turns her head gently from right to left, or better yet as the listener moves slowly throughout the music space. Moving through zones of specific frequencies, the listener's body experiences localized zones of low, medium and treble frequencies which vary according to the acoustic properties of the space. As Radigue wrote of "Adnos": "to displace stones in the bed of a river does not affect the course of water, but rather modifies the way the water flows." Here, we find the same meditative tension proposing a peaceful movement through the spaces created by the different frequencies that compose "Transamoren - Transmortem."
Very well-organized, Eliane Radigue's archives are a pleasure to explore, and "Transamorem - Transmortem"'s case contained a mine of information. What excited me most was the short text entitled "Inner Space", which described the ideal conditions under which "Transamorem - Transmortem" should be presented. That is to say as a sound installation.
"Inner Space -
This monophonic tape should be played on 4 speakers placed in the four corners of an empty room. Carpet on the floor. The impression of different points of origin of the sound is produced by the localization of the various zones of frequencies, and by the displacements produced by simple movements of the head within the acoustic space of the room. A low point of light on the ceiling, in the center of the room, produced by indirect lighting. Several white light projectors of very weak intensity whose rays, coming from different angles, meet at a single point".
Eliane Radigue - 1973
I immediately felt that it was necessary to make "Transamoren-Transmorten" available once again, and this time in its ideal form, in trying to follow Radigue's recommendations word for word. It was with this idea in mind that the Cumulus collective (also responsible for the contemporary music festival Why Note) organized the Continuum festival in Dijon along with the art space Le Consortium (one of the founders of which had persuaded the goup Circle X to record their first, mythic EP in Dijon in 1979 - but that's another story!).
The goal was to correctly present some of Eliane Radigue's sound installations, an aspect of her work now completely forgotten. And yet, between 1967 and 1971 her work was often exhibited in galleries of contemporary art, mostly in Paris (Lara Vincy, Yvon Lambert ... ), a reflection of the fact that French people have had a harder time than Americans placing the work of Radigue. She herself hesitated for quite a while to use the word "music" to describe her work, a complex that is familiar to this very generation of musicians, and which is now no longer really a problem. Who would claim that the work of Eliane Radigue is not musical? That would be strange ...
The 2006 Continuum festival in Dijon saved four sound installations from the dust (an expression that Radigue uses to describe her archives): "S=a=b=a+b" (1969), "Omnht" (1970), "Labyrinthe Sonore" (1970) and "Transamorem - Transmortem" (1973). The first two installations are composed with feedbacks, the two others with the sounds of the ARP 2500 synthesizer. Each one is based on a strategy of specific spatial presentation, but that's also another story ...
Now it's your turn to enjoy this enveloping electronic space ...
The contact between electronic sound and live instrumental sound, and the contact of the moment 'now'.
Contacte means contact. It is the contact between the electronic sound and the live player (instrumental sound), and also the contact of each moment of what Stockhausen calls the 'instant form'.
Regarding the 'momentary form,' Stockhausen said in a late-night music program on West German Radio in Cologne on January 12, 1961: "In recent years, a lot of music has been composed that is far from a form with a dramatic finale. There are no climaxes, no signs of climaxes, and no stages of development in these works. Rather, they suddenly and violently build up and try to maintain the 'peak' until the end of the work. It is always at a maximum or minimum, and the listener cannot predict how the piece will progress. It is not a moment that is part of a passage, nor is it a part of a constant duration. The concentration on the 'now' creates a vertical line that breaks the horizontal concept of time and leads us to the timeless..."
As the listener listens to the booming sounds coming from various directions, dark noises, percussion instruments, piano sounds, etc., the listener is freed from this world dominated by time flowing inexorably, and has a very dense and mysterious musical experience.
There are two versions of "Contacte": one for electronic sounds only, and the other for electronic instruments, piano, and percussion.
NTsKi is a Kyoto-based artist and musician. She began making music while living in the UK and began working in earnest in 2017 after returning to Japan. She works seamlessly to create tracks with gentle but somewhat eerie vocals and a mixture of diverse musicality. In 2021, she was selected by Bijutsu Techo as one of the newcomer artists who will open up the 2020s. Her collaboration with 7FO, released through EM Records, was selected as one of the best of the year by Shintaro Sakamoto. In addition to her self-produced works, she has participated in the works of Giant Claw, CVN, Shokuhin Matsuri a.k.a foodman, Dengaryu, KM, etc., and has released through overseas labels including TAR and Orange Milk. Also, she has contributed music to the Japan Pavilion hosted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry at SXSW 2019, where Yoichi Ochiai was the general director, virtual singer te'resa, and an Australian bag brand. On August 6th, 2021, her debut album "Orca" will be released via Orange Milk / EM Records.
The album also features remixes by Kuniyuki, Bartosz Kruczynski, Knopha, Yoshiharu Takeda and more. The album "We hear the last decades dreaming" (SAGCD035) is the first release under the Chari Chari name in 18 years and marks the return of the independent label "Seeds And Ground" by Kaoru Inoue, who has been active as a DJ and producer for over 25 years. In addition to a series of remix EPs (three analog releases) from "We hear the last decades dreaming" (SAGCD035), the first album under the Chari Chari name in 18 years, a new album with additional unreleased tracks has already arrived.
The fascinating team of remixers includes Kuniyuki, a treasure from the north (Sapporo) who has been active overseas, and Chida, a veteran house DJ who has opened up DJ gigs overseas on his own. Chida, a veteran house DJ who has been active in the underground scene for a long time, and Mamazu (Hole & Holland), a DJ/producer who has been very active in the underground scene in recent years. The album also includes two tracks of self-rework by Kaoru Inoue himself.
Also based in Warsaw, Poland, Takeda's rave-revival sound production under the name Earth Trax has become a hot topic, and under his own name, he has been releasing excellent new music on the popular German digger label Growing Bin. "Bartosz Kruczyński, who is based in Warsaw, Poland, and has released two excellent New Age-style albums under the name Earth Trax, and Knopha, a popular underground DJ in Xiamen, China, whose two previously released analog EPs sold out in an instant. The album also includes a number of reworks by overseas artists.
Four Pianos (1979-80): It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too. Includes 12-page booklet.
Julius Eastman: There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers: Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer; Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist; Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music; Wilhem Latchoumia, embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma.
Here is a portal to a vast and relatively unknown world, the Japanese cyber-occult underground media scene of the early 1990s; our guide is the late Henry Kawahara, a media artist and electronic music producer whose expansive and visionary conception of digital technology merged with a desire to break free of the constraints of mere rationality. This collection, the first-ever archival release of his work, is drawn from recordings released during the period 1991-1996, an exceptionally fertile time for Kawahara. Originally released on CD by a few Japanese independent labels including Hachiman Publishing, a cyber-occult/new-age book specialist, the releases were available mainly in book stores, so this sumptuous and prescient music has remained relatively unknown. The original titles and tag lines of the CDs give clues about Kawahara’s interests and the music itself: Digital Mushroom, Subtropical Illusion, Never-ending Asia, and so on. This 15-track gateway compilation is available on double 12” vinyl and DL; the CD version has two extra discs featuring sound from two art installations entitled "Dysteleology - α" and "Dysteleolog - β" from the 1990s. All formats feature extensive English liner notes.
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Henry Kawahara has been called “the Jon Hassell of Japan”, but upon closer inspection one finds that his work operates on very different terms. Like Hosono's forays into computerized Ryukyu folk “sightseeing music” or Tsutomu Ōhashi's Ecophony trilogy, Kawahara's world projected ancient musical traditions and notions of cultural identity onto the modern digital plane through a fusion of cybernetic thinking and pan-asian cultural introspection that makes Western attempts to do the same seem quaint in comparison. Kawahara's omnidirectional sound “illusions” were constructed not as albums but psychological experiences, billowing with a then-nascent notion of early 90s cybernetic spirituality that was proliferating on both sides of the Pacific as the hyperlinked state of global connectivity we know today was just beginning to crystalize. Through digital representations of folk instruments, shifting MIDI sequencing and custom binaural recording technology he aimed for psychoacoustic effect as much as artistic, all via a countercultural form of distribution untethered from the commercial expectations of post-bubble modes of artistic production. This EM collection draws out the best of his fruitful early-mid 90s period into a revelatory sequence, generously opening Kawahara's world to all. —Spencer Doran (Visible Cloaks)
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Henry Kawahara's deal is Intimate, Intuitive, Adventurous, and Acidy! Spice is added to all, whether its ethereal guitar, nature effects, gamelan club trance, or LSD experimentations. In the vibe of Coil's “Love Secret Domain” and out there clubgamelan. The creative force of the jungle is mutated and interchanged with further sound palettes, and his effex palette has the schwing of a 90s grunge guitarist. His musical tendencies are natural and his scope and variety are dangerous. —Spencer Clark (The Star Searchers / Pacific City Discs)
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and pursued a line inwards, towards Catalan traditional music, idiosyncratic technique, and a spiritually clarified instinctivism inspired particularly by Erik Satie. The four books of pieces are considered by some to be Mompou’s masterpiece. Música callada creates a sort of musical negative space, in which presence (of external references) creates lightness, and absence (of formal complexity, of counterpoint, of thematic or harmonic development) creates weight and substance.
Metaphors such as these also lie behind James Rushford’s See the Welter, composed as a companion piece to Música callada in 2016. In See the Welter, Rushford introduces a concept of ‘musical shadows’. The aim is not a recognisable transcription or recomposition of Mompou’s twenty-eight pieces, but a sort of Proustian ‘sieving’, in which memories and sensations – such as finger pressures, resonances and harmonic rhythm – are projected across a new surface, in new forms, and as new memories. Just as a shadow both intensifies and diffuses the form of the object by which it is cast, so Rushford’s piece transforms and scatters the details of Mompou’s collection while intensifying its essence. Compositionally, the piece is the inverse of Mompou’s: a single block in place of a multitude of fleeting impressions; its long shadow. Expressively, however, See the Welter explores the same territory, if seen through the other side of the glass: resonances and absences, silences within sounds, luminosity and intensity, bodies within spaces.
"Arthur Russell's most extraordinary work, World of Echo is reissued in this remastered vinyl edition by Audika Records. 18 tracks are featured including drumless versions of his disco classics 'Let's Go Swimming,' 'Tree House,' and 'Wax The Van' along with four previously unreleased tracks. Originally released in 1986, World Of Echo is a deeply intimate and meditative work of awe-inspiring grace and remains a timeless work of sublime beauty. Arthur's aim was to achieve what he calls 'the most vivid rhythmic reality,' with just cello, voice, and echoes. Arthur achieved all of this and more on one of the most incredible albums you will ever hear."
"Pentimento" means "in a painting, the original image, format, and brush flow that has been modified or overlaid reappear." The term accurately describes his innovative style of "painting", creating a new, indescribable, addictive palette by layering subtle differences.
Given the traditional Hassel, this title can be interpreted in many ways. But perhaps the most plausible interpretation at this point is the human instinct to sing and have fun in the face of repeated difficulties. It's the future blues that sang uncertainties and ever-changing shapes. On this album, Hassel is once again adventuring to create new forms and variants of music, incorporating elements of the "fourth world" of the past. It's a thrilling window-like work where you can see what the world's music will be like in the future.
"Jon Hassell is the most influential composer of the last 50 years. His invention, called'Fourth World Music', gives a deep respect to the music of different cultures around the world. He paved the way. His work had a great influence on other artists, through which his musical tastes changed dramatically. His unique intellectual contribution is also noteworthy. He is a patient and eloquent theorist and a great musician. "-Brian Eno
Jon Hassell's greatness in contemporary music history is comparable to Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, or The Velvet Underground. --The Wire Magazine
