MUSIC

CALAMITA = KARKHANA members TONY ELIEH, SHARIF SEHNAOUI and Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH join forces with the Egyptian singer AYA METWALLI - the result is the improbable meeting between free jazz / improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum! CALAMITA is the “rock project” of SHARIF SEHNAOUI and TONY ELIEH, two of the most active musicians on the Lebanese experimental scene (among others projects, both are members of the “free Middle Eastern music” collective KARKHANA). SEHNAOUI comes from a jazz and improv music background, ELIEH is primarily a rock musician and founding member of the Lebanese post-punk band THE SCRAMBLED EGGS whose work in the last decade has covered many directions from pop-rock to plain experimental. They are joined by Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH (WHO KILLED BRUCE LEE, ex THE SCRAMBLED EGGS). As trio they develop instrumental pieces that draw their inspiration from artists as diverse as Tony Conrad, Last Exit or Oum Kalthoum. AYA METWALLI is an Egyptian singer/songwriter, composer and sound artist currently based in Beirut. Grown up in Cairo, her father would play non-stop Oum Kalthoum songs on road trips to the beach and Aya’s mother; known to have the most beautiful voice in the family, she always sang at home and at family gatherings, so long before Aya was able to form her own music taste, immense amounts of Arabic classic songs and melodies already settled in her subconsciousness … After her first EP „Beitak“ in 2016, Metwalli (named “a musical enigma” by The Guardian) started to integrate more experimental and eerie sonic excursions into her avant-pop, so the collaboration with CALAMITA feels like a natural or logic step. The roots for „Al Saher“ („stay awake“) were laid when SEHNAOUI and METWALLI first worked together in “Night”, a dance piece by ALI CHAHROUR which included a wide collection of Arabic songs and ancient poems, later Sehnaoui invited her to work with CALAMITA. The four met in a recording studio in Beirut, using songs by "The Voice of Egypt" Oum Kalthoum as starting point. Together they aim to fully revisit the song format and explore the possibilities of classical Tarab songs, extracted from their origins and reframed within the music of the twenty-first century. The result is a mix of various styles and influences that often seek to stretch the contrasts to towering extremes - an improbable blend between free jazz & improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum!

CALAMITA = KARKHANA members TONY ELIEH, SHARIF SEHNAOUI and Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH join forces with the Egyptian singer AYA METWALLI - the result is the improbable meeting between free jazz / improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum! CALAMITA is the “rock project” of SHARIF SEHNAOUI and TONY ELIEH, two of the most active musicians on the Lebanese experimental scene (among others projects, both are members of the “free Middle Eastern music” collective KARKHANA). SEHNAOUI comes from a jazz and improv music background, ELIEH is primarily a rock musician and founding member of the Lebanese post-punk band THE SCRAMBLED EGGS whose work in the last decade has covered many directions from pop-rock to plain experimental. They are joined by Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH (WHO KILLED BRUCE LEE, ex THE SCRAMBLED EGGS). As trio they develop instrumental pieces that draw their inspiration from artists as diverse as Tony Conrad, Last Exit or Oum Kalthoum. AYA METWALLI is an Egyptian singer/songwriter, composer and sound artist currently based in Beirut. Grown up in Cairo, her father would play non-stop Oum Kalthoum songs on road trips to the beach and Aya’s mother; known to have the most beautiful voice in the family, she always sang at home and at family gatherings, so long before Aya was able to form her own music taste, immense amounts of Arabic classic songs and melodies already settled in her subconsciousness … After her first EP „Beitak“ in 2016, Metwalli (named “a musical enigma” by The Guardian) started to integrate more experimental and eerie sonic excursions into her avant-pop, so the collaboration with CALAMITA feels like a natural or logic step. The roots for „Al Saher“ („stay awake“) were laid when SEHNAOUI and METWALLI first worked together in “Night”, a dance piece by ALI CHAHROUR which included a wide collection of Arabic songs and ancient poems, later Sehnaoui invited her to work with CALAMITA. The four met in a recording studio in Beirut, using songs by "The Voice of Egypt" Oum Kalthoum as starting point. Together they aim to fully revisit the song format and explore the possibilities of classical Tarab songs, extracted from their origins and reframed within the music of the twenty-first century. The result is a mix of various styles and influences that often seek to stretch the contrasts to towering extremes - an improbable blend between free jazz & improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum!

The Blue Beyond is produced by Touch and Audemars Piguet following Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s commission of two new compositions by Jana Winderen in 2019. 

Edition of 1000 copies, the first 100 copies numbered and signed by the artist. 

The record offers edits of two sound compositions for installations, “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” (2019) and “The Art of Listening: Under Water” (2019). “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” was first presented at Art Basel in Basel from 13 to 16 June 2019. A live performance of the piece was given at HEK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) on 11 June 2019. “The Art of Listening: Under Water” (2019) was first presented in the Rotunda, Collins Park, Miami Beach, in the context of Art Basel in Miami Beach, from 4 to 8 December 2019. “The Art of Listening: Under Water” installation was made in collaboration with Tony Myatt. It travelled to the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, from 3 to 13 February 2022 Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary Winderen’s practice focuses on sound and knowledge production. The artist seeks to raise awareness of the environmental issues we face as a society. Audemars Piguet Contemporary collaborated with Winderen on two new sound installations compositions. The first, “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux”, was developed during two field trips to Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux, at the heart of the Swiss Jura, where Audemars Piguet has been based since 1875. On these trips, Winderen captured sounds in the waters of the Lac de Joux and in the Risoud forest. When Audemars Piguet Contemporary invited the artist to present a second composition for exhibition in Miami Beach, Winderen proposed a site-specific sound environment. For “The Art of Listening: Under Water”, Winderen used sounds recorded in the Atlantic Ocean in the Miami area, as well as sounds from the Barents Sea around the North Pole and the Tropical Oceans to expose the constant underwater presence of human-created sound today. In both pieces, the artist offers a unique opportunity to listen closely to the underwater inhabitants of a specific region and to reflect on how human activity interacts and interferes with aquatic and also terrestrial life in a seemingly beautiful and visually calm environment. Jana Winderen often draws the fish, amphibians and plankton she meets. This release also consists of a drawing of two fish that probably would never meet; the pike from the freshwater Lac de Joux in the Jura Mountains and the snapper from the saltwater environment by Miami. About Audemars Piguet Contemporary Audemars Piguet Contemporary supports contemporary artists who wish to explore a new direction in their practice, providing them with a platform to evolve creatively through a commission. Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s team of in-house curators support the artist along each step of the commission, from inception to development to exhibition, giving artists the freedom to experiment and develop a work that might not have been otherwise possible. The resulting artworks belong to the artists and contribute to their body of work.

When Billy Eckstine's band dissolved in the mid-1940s, adventurous drummer Art Blakey spent two years in Africa, where he briefly converted to Islam; back in New York, he gigged with Miles and Monk, before fronting his own Jazz Messengers. 1957's Orgy In Rhythm drew on the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East, Blakey's unfettered drumming accompanied by Latin percussionists such as Potato Valdez and Evilio Quintero, with Herbie Mann on flute. The musical arrangement is stunning, at times melodic or primordially rhythmic, but never short of pure brilliance. Overall, an excellent and astounding release!

Vinyl version. Edition of 1,000 copies. Includes hand-numbered certificate, 10 LPs in faithful replicas of the original covers and polylined inner sleeves, an 80-page LP-sized book in English, all housed in a custom lavish linen box. Over the last few years, the Italian imprint, Dialogo, has showed a remarkable dedication to the history of experimental music via reissues of seminal artefacts from the Cramps catalog, and important albums by Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Enrico Rava, and others. This initiative now takes on a towering scale with the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno's Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. A truly groundbreaking body of recordings - many of which have remained out of print and difficult to find for decades - it contains some of the most important, influential, and enduring music to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century, which collectively reconfigured the terms of minimalism and laid the groundwork for the emerging movement of ambient music over its short, three-year run. This historic collection marks the first time such a seminal series has received a complete repress and is certainly one of the year's most interesting, essential, and widely anticipated releases, stunningly produced with the complete involvement of all the artists or their estates. Includes texts / contributions by Gavin Bryars, Bradford Bailey, David Toop, Max Eastley, Richard Bernas, Tom Recchion, Carlo Boccadoro, Walter Rovere and Bruno Stucchi, and rare photos, including several by Roberto Masotti. When viewed collectively, the Obscure catalog reveals a remarkable, and previously unexplored counterpoint – bridging the United Kingdom and the American West Coast – to the dominant threads of minimal and experimental music, centered in New York that had long dominated the public consciousness. LP1 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic LP2 Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, Gavin Bryars - Ensemble Pieces LP3 Brian Eno - Discreet Music LP4 David Toop, Max Eastley - New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments LP5 Jan Steele, John Cage - Voices and Instruments LP6 Michael Nyman - Decay Music LP7 The Penguin Café Orchestra - Music From the Penguin Café LP8 John White, Gavin Bryars - Machine Music LP9 Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton - Irma LP10 Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams

Howling blasts of blackened metallurgy by Hamburg miscreants Scheich In China, chasing a killer mixtape for V I S with 13 blistered instrumentals sure to tickle the fancy of Bathory, Wold and Death Metal fiends. One of two hellish new Scheich in China albums, the malefic form of ‘Arschgesichter des Todes’ looms like a soundtrack to petrifying night terrors with a devil-baiting parade of ungodly pleasures. The harder hearing among you may be familiar with Philipp Meiers and Alsen Rau’s work in this guise from a number of LPs issued on local Hamburg labels since 2014, and should also recognise this one as closest to source, mostly ditching the drone and technoid elements in favour of pure death metal throttle and blizzard dynamics. Riddled with dread and venom, the album shells a cavalcade of enslaved drum machine and wiry guitars (ir)resplendent in typically lo-fi recording virtues and hungry to gnaw the nerves of any poor soul in earshot. Of course it’s an outright buzz if you like this stuff, shy of the sort of vocal theatrics that can put some heads off, but with steely, uncompromising focus on the textures, energy and an end-of-earth primordial thrust that makes Death Metal, proper, such a uniquely extreme proposition. At its longest, ’Nosebleeding Diarrhea Pus Mucus’ sums up the sound literally and viscerally, while the rest of it tends to more succinct assaults on the senses, spanning the heck-raising charge of ‘The Virgin Witch’ thru the inferno-in-the-next-room of ‘Deine Gebeine’, tape sodden squall of ‘Satan Needs no Forks’ and martial mini-epic ‘Postatomicwat Hookers’, with their sick sense of humour epitomised in the title and grindcore flay of ‘The eBook of Dead’.

Timeless atmospheres, hypnotic sonorities, minimal arrangements. And a composer gifted with a never ending passion for music, experimenter in his genetic code, innovator by vocation, at ease with various instruments in order to forge avant-garde themes. Piero Umiliani was already forward in building completely new sounds in the late Seventies. “Tra Scienza E Fantascienza” finds his alter ego Moggi experimenting with alternative grooves, electronic music, jazz tunes and soundtrack motifs. One of the most interesting music libraries in the Italian composer's discography, reissued with a new remastering by Musica Per Immagini, is in full harmony with its title. Science fiction has opened up our eyes to a variety of scenarios, possible or impossible, sometimes with a happy ending, sometimes apocalyptic, at times familiarly near, more often disarmingly far away, and always capable of inspiring our imagination. For the histrionic artist it took, perhaps, less of a cosmic leap to create this masterpiece. Centred on the cover, a strange creature with only one eye, its hands on a beaker containing a mysterious red liquid. To its right, a symbolic circle is imprinted on a sandy surface, and three bizarre constructions, similar to the volumetric flasks found in a laboratory, of differing heights and shapes. There is a strange blue planet in the distance. (Notes and images of a dystopian future according to Piero Umiliani)

2023.8.13 Recorded at Recording Studio, Acoustic Research Center, Ohashi Campus, Kyushu University.

Nicole Lachartre: “Mundus” 3LP box – Metaphon 012 - 2023 Hardboard linen LP box with silkscreened titles, 12 page booklet with track info and text by Vincent de Roguin and Mark Harwood, notes by Lachartre and a rare portrait photo from 1969. Edition of 200 copies Available through the La Scie Dorée webshop First ever release of French composer, musicologist and writer Nicole Lachartre (1934-1991). This 3LP set comprises most of her electronic music and musique concrète compositions recorded in the 60’s and 70’s, all previously unreleased. Lachartre had a classical formation, studied with a.o. Darius Milhaud, Iannis Xenakis and Michel Philippot. Her broad formation and interest as well as her profound commitment and singular vision created a solitary voice even within the field of electronic music and musique concrète, strangely enough unheard till this day. Her first tape composition from 1968 was recorded in Pierre Henry’s Apsome studio and most of her other electronic and electro-acoustic compositions included in this box set were recorded at the IPEM in Ghent.

Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais. Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

継続的な研究と探求の道を歩む、実験的な音響作品を出版するためのプラットフォームであるというロンドンの新興レーベル〈Titrate〉からは、同地の実験的ダンス・ミュージック・プロデューサー/レコードコレクターであるHenrique Matiasによるソロ・プロジェクトHemsによる2022年度デビュー・アルバム『Chaotic Affair』がアナログ・リリース。実験的なトーンを軸にしながらも、全体的に瞑想的な雰囲気を持つこの一枚では、リスナーを聴覚的没入へと誘う豊かなテクスチャーが含まれた先鋭的な電子音響/エクスペリメンタル・ディープ・テクノをたっぷりと堪能できます。

In 9 sequences ‘Fortune de Mer’ describes the power and beauty of dramatic fate, the irreversible. Like a clause of force majeure, an unforeseen one way trip to the desperate bottom. After losing the long battle nothing is left, only acceptance and resignation.

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.

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

Stuart Dempster created Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel in the same cistern where the legendary Deep Listening album was recorded. Reverberating with powerful, deep tones, this double LP is intended as a companion to the acclaimed Oliveros/Dempster/Panaiotis album Deep Listening. Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel is one of the deepest drone albums ever recorded. Nine trombones, didjeridu and Tibetan bells fill the massive two million gallon cistern with dense sonic reverberations that are both haunting and healing. Packaged in a heavy duty paper sleeve printed with metallic gold ink to match the Deep Listening design.

LTD stock from The Trilogy Tapes !! Adam Badí Donoval is the founder & curator of Warm Winters Ltd.

Industrial music pioneers and chaotic art terrorists Throbbing Gristle came together in 1975 in Kingston Upon Hull, a formerly industrial city then in the midst of a long spiral of decline. Very Friendly, aka The First Annual Report is the legendary ‘lost’ album the quartet recorded in 1975 as the group morphed out of its COUM Transmission beginnings, the shocking title track an epic confrontational dirge recounting the brutal Moors murders of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; elsewhere there are minimalist electronic deconstructions, episodes of distorted anti-music and droning chants of disturbing obscurity. In other words, essential TG!

Giant Swan's Robin Stewart returns to Trilogy Tapes with a new solo album and a new moniker, twisting warehouse techno into psychedelic, suspended bumps 'n grinds that never lose sight of the sticky dancefloor. RIYL Blawan, Regis, Rhyw or Rrose. Stewart steps up his solo game on 'When A Worm Wears A Wig'; he's been releasing material under his own name since 2016, but re-badging his productions as RS Tangent feels like an intentional line in the sand. The album appears on Trilogy Tapes, who released his dubby 2020 EP 'Time Travel', but where that set honed in on stifling vapors and cavernous reverberations, this latest long-form suite cuts back on the FX and focuses on bone-dry and unpredictable ADHD rhythmic pressure. Stewart makes techno, but refuses to take the easy route. On 'Manic Balance', the kickdrum is drowned out by galloping, squelchy synth vamps and distant vocal snips wrapped around Berghain-ready sine subs that sound as if they could level a small building. If you're searching for floor-filling, industrial pressure, 'Bovine Overbite' should convince you that you're in the right place. A thundering 4/4 that's interrupted by deliriously psychedelic percussion, it's a backroom jam that uses the language of big-room tech to challenge the status quo. There's parallels to be drawn with Batu and Metrist's cracked, controlled chaos too, but it's the pneumatic grind of Brummie techno that casts the longest shadow on 'When A Worm...', with Surgeon's scientific slop guiding tracks like 'Emperor Worm' and the itchy 'Swimmer's Ear', and Regis's pitch-black shuffle hypnotising 'Primitive Paste'. When Stewart careens off course, like on 'Youth Scene Butcher Dub', he lets his propulsive jams dissolve into the aether, bringing out the rhythmic texture of his machines in the same way Rrose did on this summer's brilliant 'Please Touch'. And on 'Touch the Tap', the producer imagines a reality where minimal techno and bassline exist in the same continuum, adding a low end throb that wouldn't sound out of place in deepest, darkest Deutschland. Hard, heavy, and winningly tongue-in-cheek - just the way we like it.

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.

Having already released 400+ tracks via the inception of www.mscty.space in 2010 ... MSCTY is now developing and launching a series of HIGHLY LIMITED EDITION PHYSICAL PRODUCTS! The first release: A collection of EXCLUSIVE MUSIC formed via musical artists’ responses to the UNBUILT + UNREALISED work of LEADING ARCHITECTS. Participants are LORAINE JAMES, BILL FONTANA, HANNAH PEEL, DANIEL LIBESKIND, RICHARD ROGERS, LILY JENCKS, YURI SUZUKI, MCCONVILLE, PIM.STUDIO, ELSIE OWUSU, NIETO SOBEJANO ARQUITECTOS, CHISARA AGOR, YUVAL AVITAL + AB ROGERS. The work was produced for MSCTY_EXPO’s first Zone, UNKNOWN PLEASURES, launched as part of the London Design Festival in 2020. It's presented as a lovingly-designed, specially-boxed, double cassette and 12-page booklet. IN A LIMITED EDITION OF 100!

Eaux proudly announces the second full length solo LP from Rrose, Please Touch, released on vinyl, CD, and digital download in June 2023. The LP follows 2019’s Hymn to Moisture in ways that are both subtle and striking: Please Touch further hones the artist’s tensile sound while exploring new aesthetic vistas and basking in an undeniably erotic sense of play. Moving with undulating power, the album’s nine tracks drift across tempos from a weightless 0 bpm to a crawling 100 to a lunging 140 and back, with a rich palette of sculpted noise and cross-talking microtones. Rrose’s compositional process, rooted in their studies with West Coast avant garde trailblazers at Mills College, centers on “seed” sounds being fed through elaborate webs of interrelated audio processing. The result is a world where changes in any one element have downstream implications for some or all the others. It’s a rich interdependence that lets the tracks breathe, grow and mutate with uncanny organicism. Please Touch addresses in equal measure the perceptual and the corporeal: these are sounds that sink into the body, exhibiting a tactility that pushes, pulls, bends and yields with fearsome vibrancy. The album splits its time between radical techno iterations and pieces which pare back the percussion, letting the synth textures uncurl in their own time and space. The quivering drone and rolling sub-bass of “Joy of the Worm’’ set the tone for the record, while “Rib Cage,” Spore" and “Spines ” swing with stepping rhythmic underpinnings. Building with finely calibrated tension, they use their few elements to startling, snarling effect. “Pleasure Vessels” is a rare moment of becalmed introspection in Rrose’s oeuvre, hinting at a melodic ambiance that is practically unseen in previous works. It glows with a soft, dawn-like light before dissolving into a tidal fizz. “The Illuminating Glass’’ brings the tempo down to a languorous chug, nodding its way through a field of glistening chirps and leaden gasps. “Feeding Time,” “Disappear” and album closer “Turning Blue’’ meanwhile nod to the cerebral psychedelia of Rrose’s forebears, with mesmeric, looping textures and long, magisterial tones not dissimilar to the spectral works of James Tenney (whose work Rrose regularly performs) and the deep listening pieces of Pauline Oliveros. The title of the album refers playfully to the tactile quality of the music while hinting at a forbidden sensuality that is only permitted within the confines of this microcosm. The phrase is also another nod to Marcel Duchamp, who gave this title to a 1947 exhibition of Surrealist art.

Originally released on CD as part of the 40th anniversary Henry Cow Box and reissued here for the first time on vinyl, these high quality Swedish Radio live recording, made in 1977, include previously unreleased material including Tim Hodgkinson's "Erk Gah", a long, epic, large scale composition considered as one of Cow peaks, a breathtaking rendition of Phil Ochs' "No More Songs"- in fact the only real song ever played by Henry Cow - and Fred Frith's "The March", plus the legendary "Ottawa Song" and other untitled free improvised pieces. Over an hour of outstanding experimental rock music performed by the Henry Cow original lineup.

Terry Fox was a first generation Bay Area conceptual artist. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked extensively with sound, especially the use of piano wires detached from their native instrument and anchored between opposing walls of the performance space.

Linkage, Fox's first album, was originally released in 1982 to accompany an installation at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. The record would mark Fox's first attempt to realize his groundbreaking and visceral piece "Berlin Wall Scored for Sound."

Side one links five ways of playing the piano wires: drumming, pulling, bowing, beating and scraping. The room itself acts as a type of natural resonator as Fox moves the wires with padded mallet, his bare fingers, violin bow, wooden shish kebab stick and rusted metal rod. The effect of such plain arrangements can be utterly hypnotizing.

The second half of Linkage was recorded in the attic of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, West Berlin, in May 1981. A thirty-three meter long wire was held in contact with a sardine tin. Over the course of 20 minutes, pulsating drones dissolve into rhythmic patterns that sound almost synthetic in origin. As noted in the original LP pamphlet, all these sounds were strictly acoustic; the only electronics involved was the recording equipment.

In an introduction for this edition, Marita Loosen-Fox and Ron Meyers write, "The desire to eliminate any barriers between the art and the viewer/audience connects all of Fox's situations/actions/performances. The ultimate goal is to communicate as directly as possible, which finds its most concentrated expression in the artist's works with sound."

This first-time reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with booklet.

Hilary Woods builds on the airy mystery of 2021's genius 'Feral Hymns' with the crepuscular 'Acts of Light', featuring nine creeping dirges played with double bass, field recordings and sacred choral chants that sound like mournful, Celtic ghosts wailing into a moonlit woodland. Brilliant, gaseous material for anyone into Deathprod, Sarah Davachi, David Darling or Antonina Nowacka. That last album married Wood's surreptitious hooks with Lasse Marhaug’s petrified, doomcore production, a highly distinctive marriage of cursed atmospherics and memorable songs that still sounds like pretty much nothing else we’ve heard since. Her followup ‘Isolation Tank’ for our Documenting Sound series was essentially a screwed audio diary, creating rhythms out of the clicking whirr of her old polaroid camera, her voice drifting into abstraction. In other words, Woods is no stranger to getting deep into her process, and on 'Acts of Light' she increases the contrast, bringing out cracks of colour to contrast her Vantablack striations. Voices are blurred against microscopic sounds on 'Wife Mother Lover Cow', as euphoric pads swelter into mist; like spying a midnight ritual from a safe vantage point, watching forest nymphs dance to the beat of their own drum. Ghostly, choral vapours gather on 'Where the Bough has Broken', recorded with the Palestrina Choir at Dublin's Procathedral, and with Galway City Chamber Choir in Galway, crashing into environmental recordings Woods gathered during travels across Spain. The title track plays pitched vocals against low, nauseating murmurs, while strings provide an ominous sustained drone. Voices chatter in the distance, and a rhythmic thud sounds like a march to the afterlife. Woods strips things back further on 'Awakening', giving us a short break from the crippling gloom with angelic chorals and gauzy cello, before the disorienting heartbeat 'Blood Orange' transports us into another lysergic reality. 'The Foot of Love' is the album's most emotionally resonant moment, all poetic curls of ornate instrumentation and fogged-out dark ambience that wouldn't sound out of place on an Akira Rabelais album, leading masterfully into Woods' brief, subtle denouement, the aptly-titled 'Vigil', freezing phantasmagoric vocals in a sodden mess of cello and captured rainfall. It's the ideal finale to an album that escorts us through a magickal, dusky wilderness that's never oppressive, always tender in its own way. Music that’s as creakingly baroque as it is verdant and folksy. Acts of Light is a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges. Vulnerability, majesty, and candour elicited with drone, double bass, cello, synth, viola, field recordings, electronics, noise, vocals, processing and sacred choral chant compose its private ritual. Following excavations and explorations in intuition and physicality through sound which culminated in her 2021 EP Feral Hymns, Acts of Light is a disquiet personal offering to wilderness, loss, absence, mystery and love supreme. Awakening hidden forms that emerge from the shadows with each listen, its rich and weighted lament is subterranean and chasmal whilst simultaneously detailed and tender. Textural dust and speckled light move slowly and expansively here through a deeply sonic and sensory rite of passage where Woods’ moving compositions confide in us feeling to be received with the entire body. Written, recorded, mixed and produced over a span of two years along the west coast of Ireland and Dublin, Woods recorded the voices of Galway City Chamber Choir, before recording the choristers of the Palestrina Choir in the Pro Cathedral Dublin. Strings were recorded by Jo Berger Myhre in Oslo, whilst field recordings were recorded nomadically throughout her time spent traveling through the north west of Spain.