MUSIC

More than any other of Ranta's releases this album shows his multiple roots and ideas as a composer, percussionist and concrete/electronic musician, building a seamless bridge between Eastern and Western avantgarde. Ranta is one of those rare composers able to organically melt his wide artistic span into a singular but yet diverse universe morphing his rich vocabulary as a percussionist with the Oriental esoteric tradition, the psychedelic underground and the realm of electronic minimalism.

Atlas, the latest album from renowned electronic artist Laurel Halo, is a suite of sensual ambient jazz collages, designed to take the listener on a roadtrip through the subconscious. Blending both synthetic ambient textures and acoustic instrumentation, the album is a series of endlessly listenable maps, rife with hidden detail. “Belleville” - the first single on Atlas - is a disarming piano ballad, recorded in one take during the spring of 2021. It's embellished with undertows of processed vibraphone, as well as a sudden, gorgeous stack of vocal harmonies featuring Coby Sey.

music and design by buttechno vocals and graphics by Triš © Psy X records, Berlin, 2023

My Strong Will is a new album of "Ethiopian Classical Music" by Girma Yifrashewa. Recorded with Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria, the album is a return to where Yifrashewa completed his own conservatory training in the late 1980s and early 1990s, across both sides of the fall of Communism. Guided by Yifrashewa's piano, these chamber works bring the music of Ethiopia into a Western Classical format, uncovering meditative and emotional new vistas for both traditions.

Sublime recordings from rural Niger. Two very different sides of Tuareg music – dreamy ishumar acoustic guitar sessions, and the hypnotic polyphonic tende that inspires it. Guitarist Fatou Seidi Ghali and vocalist Alamnou Akrouni lead their collective, named after the village. Recorded in the open air studio of the desert.

The Medicine Singers groundbreaking debut LP on Stone Tapes, produced by Yonatan Gat, embodies decades of musical genres influenced by Native American music, offering what Pitchfork called a "vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum, highlighting the debt that rock music owes to Native American music." This monumental album connects experimental music and traditional powwow in previously unheard ways, acting as a guided tour de force, taking listeners through the many different musical styles with roots (still being discovered) in Native American music. From psychedelic punk to spiritual jazz, from minimalism to electronic music. Their live show is the stuff of legend – the Medicine Singers set up, often in-the-round with the audience encircling the band, and go into a trance-inducing set where the walls between band and spectator, as well as between psychedelic rock and shamanic chants, are blurred. Or in the words of Canada’s Exclaim Magazine “the border between audience and performer had all but been dissolved by the sheer power of music. By letting the audience in on the action, [Medicine Singers] evoked a type of bodily experience that transcended mere observation.” Bridging multiple dimensions of sound, on their debut LP Medicine Singers expanded into a remarkable supergroup that also includes ambient music pioneer Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, “No Wave” icon and former DNA drummer Ikue Mori, trumpet player jaimie branch and guitarist/producer Yonatan Gat. Half a decade after the spur-of-the-moment story of how the musicians first met and unraveled their sound on an unsuspecting audience during SXSW 2017 when Gat saw Eastern Medicine Singers play on the street and invited the band to spontaneously join his show – the collaboration between the musicians reaches a climax with this breathtaking debut album as Medicine Singers, helping pave the way to this year’s rising wave of Native contributions to experimental music – shining a spotlight on guest vocalists representing indigenous nations from outside of the Northeastern Woodland tribal area. “Where else can you get all these different native people singing together on an album?” Jamieson asked. “On this album you have east, west, north and south all coming together. That’s why we say it’s medicine.” iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3001077196/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless>Medicine Singers by Medicine Singers

オリジナルは$4,000で取引されたエチオピア産ジャズの77年金字塔的傑作『Tche Belew』を残したことでも知られるレジェンド中のレジェンドによる最新作！エチオピークの重鎮Mulatu Astatkeとも仕事を共にした伝説的ジャズ・キーボード奏者のHailu Mergia。2016年に録音していた秘蔵ライブ・レコーディング音源『Pioneer Works Swing (Live)』が〈Awesome Tapes From Africa〉より堂々アナウンス。2016年7月1日、ブルックリンの由緒ある非営利文化センター〈Pioneer Works〉で行われた彼らの激しいライヴを美しく捉えています。エネルギッシュかつ遊び心たっぷりに、エチオピアの様々なレパートリーから、ハーモニーとリズムの面白さを次々と引き出した現代のエチオ・ジャズの新たなる金字塔！

Have you heard of the Nurse With Wound List? If you are a fan of creative-experimental-unlikely music, certainly. You would therefore be aware that amongst the recommendations that Steven Stapleton slipped into the first album of his group Nurse With Wound, were to be found a few restless frogs: Jef Gilson, Luc Ferrari, Jacques Thollot, Urban Sax, Horde Catalytique and last… … but not least Jean-Jacques Birgé and Francis Gorgé. Stapleton admired their album Défense de. The two Frenchmen just had to conceive of a fabulous precursor to the channel tunnel (check out the inside of the record, you’ll see) to enable Stapleton to come to France in 1980. The Englishman was looking for contributions to a compilation to be released on his United Dairies label that he had created with John Fothergill, and he naturally called on Birgé and Gorgé, who were then playing with Bernard Vitet in ‘Un drame musical Instantané’. It was a done deal and the compilation would be named In Fractured Silence. Alongside Nurse With Wound and Un drame musical instantané, could be heard Hélène Sage (whom Birgé introduced to Stapleton) and Sema, a project from the experimental British musician Robert Haigh who had participated in key records in the Nurse With Wound discography, such as Homotopy to Marie and Spiral Insana. The curtain is raised and it is Un drame musical instantané who start the ball rolling. Mystery abounds; synthesisers lurk, percussion clatters and the sounds (creaks, whistles, vocal insertions…) fire in all directions. For the piano, it’s a debacle, the Drame won, Hélène Sage can take over. Heading up a quintette including Gorgé and Vitet, she creates a cushioned chamber music with strings and many silences. On the B side, it’s the other side of the channel. Sema’s piano first off, which dares everything, even melody, before spilling out its darkest ideas in a raucous requiem. Finally, Stapleton appears, delving into his collection of female voices to devote himself to an iconoclastic transformation and concoct a song which collapses under the assault like Marianne at Agincourt. After having listened to In Fractured Silence, you will simply have to choose sides.

New soundscapes inspired by the architecture of V&A Dundee, the first ever dedicated design museum in Scotland. Midori Takada Legendary Japanese Ambient pioneer Takada was specially commissioned by MSCTY and one of UK's leading art institutions, V&A Dundee, to create a soundtrack to the museum itself. Sympathetic to the architect Kengo Kuma's use of natural materials in the landmark building's construction, Takada bases the compositions around huge wood marimbas, creating atmospheric, hypnotic beauty inspired directly by Kuma's organic vision. This album contains the complete works, constituting 3 connected compositions. Midori Takada plays a special live show at Kings Place, London in September, the month of the album's physical release. Her recently reissued 1983 work 'Through the Looking Glass' was hailed as "mesmerising" and an "ambient minimalist masterpiece" by Pitchfork who awarded it their best reissue of 2017. SHHE SHHE is the alias of Scottish-Portuguese artist, musician and producer, Su Shaw. Her work is influenced by environment and ecology, exploring themes of identity and connection at the intersection between sound, space and liminal states. SHHE's eponymous debut album was released by One Little Independent Records and was shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year 2020. This new album features an exclusive 45 minute composition specially commissioned by MSCTY and V&A Dundee, which is located in her town. Based on the sounds of the water around V&A Dundee, with the music reacting to the movement of the pools and the tides, the piece is inspired by the rugged exterior of the museum architecture and its location by the River Tay.

Distributed in 1984 by Sound Process Design, a company founded by Satoshi Ashikawa, a pioneer of environmental music in Japan, the entire body of work that has remained shrouded in mystery to this day is finally revealed. A thoughtful response to the works of great artists such as Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Haruomi Hosono, and King Crimson in the early 1980s. The album features seven tracks, three from the original LP, a reprise of the album's key piece "Nocturne," and a previously unreleased recording and chamber music arrangement version of the sequel "Nocturne II.

Ecological Plantron" (1994) is a radical installation that uses sound to experience the ecological chain that surrounds our bodies from the perspective of plants.
This is a reprint of "Ecological Plantron" (1994), a radical installation that uses sound to let us experience the ecological chain that surrounds our bodies from the perspective of plants.

Bio-artist Yuji Dohkin researched and developed an epoch-making system in the early 1990s to create a device that speaks to plants and is spoken to by plants, which is "Plantron" (*I have a related doctoral thesis).
(*There is also a related doctoral dissertation.) This device, which extracts ecocurrents from plants (orchids) and converts them into physical phenomena that can be perceived by humans, is primarily intended to explore whether humans can perceive the intelligence of plants, and is not intended to entertain physical phenomena themselves. Ecological Plantron" is the "sound" record of the first installation of this "Plantron" in operation.

In this work, the copper-plated "Plantron" is constructed by composer Mamoru Fujieda into a sound system for installation, and the ecological current generated by the communication between plants and the human environment is programmed and converted into electronic sound, emitting irregularly shaped and irregular electronic sound particles.
(*Note) If I were to use a strong analogy, I might imagine an atmosphere somewhat similar to that of Xenakis or Penderecki's graphic notation music. Ecological currents remind us of the experimental music of Rosenboom and Lussier, who used human brain waves, but this work is not human-centered but plant-first, and it should be noted that it is not presented as a "musical work" in the first place.

For this reissue, we have remastered the independent recordings made at the gallery and included two works derived from Ecological Plantron, "Mangrove Plantron" and "Pianola Plantron," on a bonus disc. The first LP version is also available.
Since the experimental release of this device in 1991, pseudo-similar attempts have appeared, but it should be noted that the original was "Plantron". The commentary includes the latest contribution by Copper Gold, which reexamines the story of this experiment and its development, as well as the intentions of this work.

Note: Fujieda rediscovered the "melody" that modern music had left behind in the process of trying to extract some kind of regularity from this uncontrollable mass of sound, and this led him to compose and publish a series of works called "Plant Patterns.

Top Boy is the British television crime drama series, created and written by Ronan Bennett. The story follows two seasoned drug dealers return to the gritty streets of London, but their pursuit of money and power is threatened by a young and ruthless hustler. It stars Ashley Walters, Kane Robinson, and the 2020 BAFTA Rising Star Award-winning Michael Ward. The first two seasons aired between 2011 and 2013, but following interest from rapper Drake, Netflix announced in 2017 that it would revive the series. Co-produced by the Hotline Bling-rapper, the third and fourth season of Top Boy launched in 2019 and 2022.

In the captivating Netflix series Top Boy, Brian Eno's transcendent music serves as a vital companion, molding the narrative's essence with its ethereal power. With a masterful touch, Eno's atmospheric compositions effortlessly transport us into the gritty world of crime, friendship, and survival in East London. From delicate ambience to pulsating beats, his sonic tapestry envelops every scene, elevating the storytelling and evoking a range of emotions. Eno's singular ability to capture the struggle, hope, and inner strength of the characters accentuates the raw authenticity of Top Boy, leaving an indelible mark on its viewers. His haunting melodies and intricately crafted soundscapes symbolize the unyielding resilience amidst chaos, making Brian Eno's music an integral and unforgettable component of this groundbreaking series. This album represents Eno's contributions across the entirety of the Series with music from every season and will be released alongside the final season launching on Netflix in September.

“From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer,” says Brian, “making music and atmospheres and then giving it to the film makers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about and from that I produce a lot of music, and say, ‘Here it is. Use it as you wish.’

“If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.”

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of Juana Molina’s breakthrough album Segundo (2000), here’s a very special reissue, remastered from the original tapes, and augmented by a rich booklet recounting the eventful start of Juana’s musical career, and containing numerous notes, anecdotes, original drawings and previously unreleased pictures.
Segundo is the album which started Juana Molina’s international trajectory as a musician, and its making was a wild story: after dropping her highly-successful career as a TV comedian, and signing with a major company who got her to record her debut album, Juana set out to find her own direction in music and started working on a new record (aptly titled Segundo). This journey took four years, and included sessions in Argentina and in several houses where she lived on the US West Coast, the involvement of several possible producers and of four successive record labels, who each had their own idea of what Juana should be doing... Juana remained untamed, forged ahead and, during the course of this sometimes complicated process, developed her own method and her own characteristic sound. She writes:
From the moment “Segundo” took shape, I began to walk a path that I have not yet abandoned. That is why it’s so important to me. I feel that this was the seed of everything I have done ever since. I discovered the flair of composing in real time, the charm of discarding the very idea of demos, the grace of documenting these moments of searching and finding. Everything else became dispensable.

In 2000, Juana finally self-released Segundo in Argentina. The album semi-accidentally made its way to Japan where it very spectacularly took off, and was eventually picked up by the Domino label in 2003. The reception of Segundo set Juana Molina on course for starting to perform around the globe, garnering a large, devoted fan base, and going on to record five more extraordinary studio albums (including the widely-acclaimed Halo in 2017) and a live record (ANRMAL, 2020).
All this and much more is narrated in the lovely booklet, which includes notes by several people who were involved in these events (including Bruce Springsteen producer Ron Aniello) and by early adopters such as KCRW DJ Chris Douridas, Domino Recording’s Laurence Bell (who discovered Segundo by chance, in Will Oldham’s car), and David Byrne who, as soon as he heard the album for the first time, invited Juana to open for him on his 2003 US tour. 
 

From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now!

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear.

This is the first archival release of the great composer’s recordings since the Éthiopiques series reintroduced her music to the world in 2006. Drawn from original master tapes and a nearly impossible-to-find vinyl release, Jerusalem unveils profound new facets of Emahoy Gebru’s performance and compositions.

The record picks up where the last two Mississippi releases left off, with tracks from her 1972 album Hymn of Jerusalem, of which only a handful of copies are known to exist. These include “Home of Beethoven,” “Aurora,” and a true masterpiece that stands amongst her greatest compositions, the moving “Jerusalem.” “Quand La Mer Furieuse” is the first release featuring Emahoy’s singing voice, forshadowing a vocal album planned for fall 2023. The B-Side brings us the artist’s home recordings - tracks like “Farewell Eve,” “Woigaye Don’t Cry Anymore,” and “Famine Disaster 1974” mark a bridge from liturgical work to dark and intense classical material, a new mode.

This album is released in celebration of Emahoy Gebru’s 99th birthday on December 12, 2022. Mississippi is honored to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher to continue to introduce this visionary composer to the world.

Newly remastered recordings pressed on 160gm black vinyl, heavy jacket with reproduction of 1972 artwork, song notes by the artist. 

What is this ~~! One recommendation ... Wau Wau Collectif, an acoustic / cosmic West African / Senegal music group that is as beautiful as it can be. From the famous place that cuts into unknown music south of the Sahara Desert, something amazing beyond imagination appears again! Challenging and hybrid fantasy folk music inspired by West African traditions, Sufi hymns, spiritual jazz and dub rhythms that transcend national borders and music scenes. It seems that the theme of this work is "education", and it contains songs that directly address the social issues and immigration issues facing modern Senegal. However, it's calm and truly idyllic music, with call-and-response chants and children's voices, hypnotic percussion, cosmic pad synths, and even the alien saxophone with a Fourth World flavor. Full of. This is highly recommended for a wide range of listeners!

Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music. Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit. In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form. Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP. Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve. While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm. What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms.

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is a vocalist and composer internationally regarded for her spellbinding timbres and her in-depth study of oral traditions. Her work takes the form of sound installations, talismanic scores, music for film, electronics, and choir. She released the groundbreaking experimental gamelan album Atria (Sige) in 2015, and has collaborated with Lori Goldston, Holland Andrews, Niloufar Shiri, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Melati Suryodarmo, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others. Kang, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. In addition to creating a striking body of solo works that has traced its way across the last two and half decades - most recently including Sonic Gnostic (Aspen Edities, 2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (Ideologic Organ, 2020) - he has played on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, William Hooker, Animal Collective, and numerous others. Since beginning to work together as a duo in the early 2000s, Kang and Kenney have collaborated on sound installations, music for orchestra, choir, and mixed ensembles in addition to releasing numerous widely acclaimed full-lengths: Aestuarium (2005), The Face Of The Earth (2012), Live In Iceland (2013), At Temple Gate (2014), Reverse Tree (2016), Seva (2017), The Cypress Dance (2020). A hypnotic return to the duo’s unique expression of “unison music", Azure is among Kenney and Kang’s most pared-down efforts in more than a decade. Its five compositions are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporalities, producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal color. The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “eclipse…inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, Dictee. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions enmeshed with Kang’s delicate viola d’amore tones - the piece’s collective elements produce a remarkable tension bubbling within its spacious calm. The title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from her/him/them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhymes of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez, such as mâh az u, râh az u, and âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola d’amore weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echoes of lost moments in far off worlds. This is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of wide-ranging techniques into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, with inspiration from ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies, which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalizations play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, and the town names of ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 from the Divan of Hafez. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating photographs and words spoken within by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pizzicato tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues strong impressions of that landscape. As Suzanne Kite states in the album’s liner notes, with each of Azure’s discrete expressions Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang “ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies… [they] draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener’s breath

Before New Age hit terra firms at the dawn of the 1980s, the classically-trained Bay Area composer Jordan De La Sierra's consciousness soared with cosmic concepts. With cues and lessons from the great minimalists La Monte Young,Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and help from the venerable public radio program Hearts of Space, De La Sierra embarked on a journey in alternate tunings and resounding reverberations, transporting entranced listeners from the Golden Gates to the intergalactic. Take an interstellar ride on the sensory engulfing space piano with this lovingly recreated double LP set, complete with De La Sierra's India-inspired visual artwork and musings on the tableau of space.

The fourth release in Blank Forms Editions’s initiative to chart the ever-expanding musical practice of Catherine Christer Hennix, Solo for Tamburium captures the composer’s most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. This piece, documented in Berlin at MaerzMusik 2017, carefully draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. Densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtone collisions create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium or a distinctionless state of being. Since the late 1960s, Hennix has created a massive and innovative body of work spanning minimal music, computer programming, poetry, sculpture, and light art—pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of these media toward singular ends. She was part of the downtown music school in New York and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. In the ’70s, Hennix studied the nature and use of harmonic sound as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music. The exceptionally designed tamburas of Pran Nath were central to her intensive investigations, as was the devotional practice of carefully tuning and sounding the instruments in a continuous and even flow—both have guided her work with sound ever since. In 1976, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Hennix presented a pair of groundbreaking works that came to define her ensuing practice. With the Deontic Miracle—a group composed of Hennix, her brother Peter, and the Swedish percussionist Hans Isgren—she performed a series of modal compositions for Renaissance oboes, sheng, and harmonic feedback distortion. On this same occasion she premiered an equally significant body of solo work for keyboard, including the only public presentation of The Electric Harpsichord (1976), a piece that marks the beginning of Hennix’s characteristic style of playing, where dense sonic textures gradually emerge from the multilayered interplay of harmonic construction and dissolution. Solo for Tamburium represents a pointed revisitation of her endeavor to map the non-gravitational harmonics of modal musics—among them raga, maqam, and the blues—onto a tuned keyboard. Since the debut of this piece in 2017 she has continued to develop the work, reshaping and presenting it in a variety of contexts, including at Blank Forms in New York and the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris in 2022. For Hennix, to approach modality as a dynamic process is ultimately a contemplative practice. Through it, embodied attunement to harmonic vibration gives rise to epistemically transformative states, opening new ways of knowing and being.

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall. Described by Suzuki as the “culmination” of their sound, New Sense of Hearing features the two musicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radio transmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, and kikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention. Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city’s Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of “Sound Objects and Sound Tools,” an exhibition of Suzuki’s homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of the exhibition “MA: Espace – Temps au Japon,” organized by architect Arata Isozaki and composer-writer Tōru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before traveling with the exhibition to Stockholm and New York—critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice that he had “seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the same performance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be.” For New Sense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from their collaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observed in 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are “in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no direct relationships. . . . Only coincidence.”

Moritz von Oswald's latest solo album is his most startling, time-bending material since the Basic Channel days, a collaboration with a 16-voice choir that refracts techno and choral music into dizzying psychedelic traces, exploiting mind-altering xenharmonic synth tones, Ligeti-like operatic phrases and abyssal kicks with a veteran's cunning. We've been knocked sideways by this one - trans-dimensional afters music at its absolute best. We realise that there's been a lot of electronic music released recently saddled with these buzzwords. Choirs, unusual tunings, deconstructions of early music - elements almost mandatory for artists eyeing the lucrative Euro festival circuit. But to our mind that's what makes von Oswald's latest all the more astonishing. He's stepped in with an album that's so definitive, it reminds us just how foundational and game-changing his early material was, and how less can so often amount to more. Opening track 'Silencio' is a dazzling proof of concept that winds lilting, oddly-tuned synth tones around the barest percussion. There are no vocals on this one, instead the traces of early Detroit techno hang heavy around its frayed edges. Working like a scientist with the stereo field, von Oswald introduces familiar elements into the mix in unexpected places. Wormy,cascading synth tones are met by driving whirrs, and the kickdrum sounds so submerged that it's almost an illusion. When he does introduce noisier sounds, they color the track like drybrushed highlights, and he saves the best until the final moments, energising the mood with monumental Millsian stabs that reference the past without retreading churned mud. It sets us up for the album's biggest tonal shift, when Oswald presents the choir on 'Luminoso'. He's worked extensively with ensembles in the last few years, his own - the constantly-shifting Moritz von Oswald Trio - the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Kyrgyz ensemble Ordo Sakhna, and the experience has furnished him with the ability to treat the choir with just the right amount of reverence and distance. Here, the Berlin singers' voices swirl into ghosted tones, nestling beneath a layer of mixing desk noise that feels like von Oswald's little wink to the camera, an acknowledgement of past glories. Moritz also provides a more abstracted rework of the track (along with three other versions of the choral compositions) that deepens the narrative. Losing the vocals completely, this take references the original's framework while adding impalpable, off-grid beats and cottony, rumbling textures that pirouette between the speakers. The synths and voices meet somewhere in the middle on 'Infinito', and von Oswald's remix shuttles them further into outer space, fogging them into spectral impressions and building a lithe rhythm over the top that hiccups and stutters with poise and momentum. 'Colpo' is even more impressive, offsetting the suggestive chorals with mechanical oscillations and thunderous sub bass tones. Like the earliest Detroit experiments, it's material that positions electronic music as a way to speculate about the past's relationship with the future. Von Oswald has formulated a minimalist masterpiece that interrogates not just technology, but the conceptual technologies of cultural invention. It's a highly rewarding, engrossing listen, certain to become a classic for the most adventurous after-hours listeners.

Following "CITTA' '93," which has already been released worldwide to great acclaim, the performance at the Kichijoji Baus Theater on February 13, four days earlier, is now available as "BAUS '93. The performance, which was Raley's return to the stage after a five-year absence, is also known as a legendary performance. As in "CITTA '93," Makoto Kubota again put his heart and soul into mixing and mastering the 8-channel digital multitrack master, adding cassette recordings made at the venue and stereo outs from the tuning console. The result is a concert reconstructed by Makoto Kubota with a sound image that no one has ever heard before. The members of the band on that day were Takashi Mizutani (Vo, G), Katsuhiko Ishii (G), Kiyohiro Takada (B), and Toshiro Mimaki (Dr.) The lineup was different from the rhythm section at the concert four days later, and you can hear a performance with a different face from the previous "CITTA' '93". The first pressing of the CD will also include a DVD containing a video created by Akira Uji, who used to be in charge of visual direction for Raley's, based on a video he shot on the same day on stage. The commentary was written by Jennifer Lucy Allan, a writer for "The Wire" and "The Quietus" who also has a BBC radio show. In addition, Julian Cope, well-known as the author of "Jap Rock Sampler," the monstrous book that introduced the world to Japanese underground rock, including the Larrys, has made a special contribution.

The Black Dog's highly regarded album, Radio Scarecrow, is now remastered and re-issued on Dust Science, 15 years after its original release on Soma Records. Two years of constant development culminated in a masterpiece that flows delightfully and hits hard. Marking a true progression from the band's previous album, Silenced, the trio are keen to note: "The beats are faster and the bass is much heavier - so much so, that it was making us ill, working with the low frequencies for hours on end. We could only do 3 hours at a time on some parts." Tracks like Floods v3.9 and Beep are a testament to this. With throbbing basslines strong enough to make an impact on the Richter scale, these tracks are best played out on big sound systems. Radio Scarecrow unfolds gracefully, barely skipping a beat between tracks. The act have created an album that demands to be listened to in its entirety. With elements blending between tracks (the same kick drum being used to very different means in Short Wave Lies and Siiiipher for example) and with constant references to conspiracy theories and the supernatural, The Black Dog present more than a collection of tracks. Influenced heavily by their interest in Magick, Numbers Stations and Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), the act have hidden examples of these within their work. "These transmissions and recordings (and people's interpretations of them) had a strong influence on many of the final concepts and compositions, to the point where we've been embedding coded messages and curses deep inside the tracks". "These transmissions and recordings (and people's interpretations of them) had a strong influence on many of the final concepts and compositions, to the point where we've been embedding coded messages and curses deep inside the tracks".