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Upgrade & Afterlife stands as a pivotal and singular recording in the catalog of Gastr del Sol, the duo of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke. Originally released in 1996, this album is frequently cited as a landmark of post-rock and experimental music, praised for its blend of avant-garde abstraction, folk minimalism, and a restless, exploratory spirit. The album opens with “Our Exquisite Replica of ‘Eternity’,” a piece that has become emblematic for many listeners: a slow-building, cinematic soundscape that combines mangled drones, brassy orchestral samples (from Hans J. Salter’s The Incredible Shrinking Man soundtrack), and electronic textures to create a sense of alien strangeness and emotional depth. The track’s title, inspired by a sign on a Japanese perfume vending machine, hints at the band’s playful conceptual approach.
Throughout Upgrade & Afterlife, Gastr del Sol continually subverts expectations: “Rebecca Sylvester” begins as a sparse guitar ballad before dissolving into ambient abstraction, while “Hello Spiral” and “The Relay” explore fractured electronics, shifting grooves, and prismatic vocal layers. The closing track, a cover of John Fahey’s “Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw the Light Come Shining ‘Round and ‘Round),” features a guest appearance by Tony Conrad on violin, bridging American folk traditions with the avant-garde and providing a fittingly monumental conclusion.
Critics have described the album as “stark and minimalist at times, jazzy and far-ranging at others,” with a unique ability to make “background music that quietly asserts itself into the foreground”. Pitchfork noted its way of letting “folk and avant-garde abstract each other into something warm, minimal, and slanted”. The album’s cover, Wasserstiefel (Water Boots) by Roman Signer, further underscores its enigmatic and conceptual nature.
Upgrade & Afterlife remains a touchstone for listeners seeking music that is as immediate as it is strange, as spiky as it is immersive-a record that continues to reveal new layers with every listen, and a high point in the collaboration between Grubbs and O’Rourke
Tejiendo Nubes Contra la Muerte brings together poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña with Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo and the trio Hombre de Barro, featuring Ernesto "Teto" Ocampo, Urián Sarmiento, and Juan Manuel Toro. The album is rooted in a shared concern for the care of life, water, and the environment, finding in Vicuña's poetry a meeting point between contemporary creation and ancestral knowledge. The music was created collectively and spontaneously during the recording session. Gallo plays piano and synthesizers, Ocampo guitar, flutes, and harmonica, and Toro cello and flutes, while Vicuña's voice moves between spoken word, chant, whisper, breath, and silence. The result is an open, intuitive work in which improvisation becomes a space for dialogue between different forms of knowledge and sensibility. Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and visual artist based in New York. In the mid-1960s, she developed the concept of "Precarious Art" to name what disappears. The album features a selection of poems from Cloud Net, a book that addresses climate change through a perspective connected to Indigenous knowledge and dates back to the late 1990s. For the past decade, Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo have collaborated on poetic and sonic explorations encompassing recordings, live performances, installations, sound works, and videos. Gallo, a composer and improviser based in New York, maintains close ties to Bogotá's vibrant music scene. The members of Hombre de Barro combine extensive musical careers with research into Colombia's diverse musical traditions. Ocampo developed a profound body of research into Indigenous music; Sarmiento documents and records rural musical traditions through his label Sonidos Enraizados; and Toro has researched the music of the Inga people and other communities in southern Colombia. The album was recorded in La Calera, in the mountains outside Bogotá, in July 2022. A little over a year later, Teto Ocampo passed away; the album is dedicated to his memory. The session was supported by producer Julián Gallo and later mixed and mastered by Marc Urselli in New York. The cover features a work by Vicuña originally created for the Cloud Net exhibition, with the complete design by Raúl Zea. The LP includes an insert containing the poems performed on the album, in both Spanish and English translation.
Release 20/1/2023. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone’s experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s critically acclaimed records The Sacrificial Code [Ideal Recordings, 2019] & Living Torch [Portraits GRM, 2022]. Her collaborative approach expands from her previous work to closely include the musicians Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton in the creation and development of the piece. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the unique styles and techniques of O’Malley & Railton, presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a durational experience of variable length that follows slowly evolving harmony and timbre between cello, sine waves, and electric guitar. As a listener, the transition between these junctures can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s obscurity and unity in the instrumentation and identities of the players; the electric guitar's saturation timbre blends with the cello's rich periodicity, while shifting overtone feedback develops interference patterns against the precise sine waves. The gradual yet ever-occurring changes in harmony challenge the listener’s perception of stasis and movement. The moment you grasp the music, a slight shift in perspective guides your attention forward into a new and unfolding harmonic experience.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created between March and May of 2020. During this unsettling period of the pandemic, Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods. With a few interns left on-site, Malone was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus & MONOM to develop and record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends and collaborators Lucy Railton & Stephen O’Malley to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces. Hence, the foundation was laid for Does Spring Hide Its Joy.
In Kali’s own words: “Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight. Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing. Memories blurred non-sequentially, the fabric of reality deteriorated, unforeseen kinships formed and disappeared, and all the while, the seasons changed and moved on without the ones we lost. Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.”
Does Spring Hide Its Joy has since been performed live on many European stages, in durations of sixty and ninety minutes. Including at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, the Bozar in Brussels, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. Concerts are forthcoming at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Mira Festival in Barcelona, the Venice Biennale, and the Purcell Room at the Southbank Center in London.
In addition to live concerts, the Funkhaus recordings of Does Spring Hide Its Joy have evolved in parallel as a site-specific sound installation. Malone has also invited the video artist Nika Milano to create a custom analog video work that interprets and accompanies the musical score as a fourth player, creating a visual atmosphere inspired by the sonic principles of the composition. Eight sequential video stills from Milano’s work are featured in the album artwork.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy is packaged in a heavyweight laminated jacket with full-color printed inner sleeves with artwork by Nika Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering, the record is pressed in perfect sound quality by Optimal in Germany.
Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.
Recorded in 1997, upon The Shadow Ring’s return from their final US tour, Lighthouse captures the group at their most stripped-down and visionary. Graham Lambkin’s fractured texts conjure Folkestone’s haunted coastline—Vikings, the Morgawr, a fading Britain, the pull of the sea—under the sway of Alternative TV’s Vibing Up the Senile Man (Part One), the mechanical vernaculars of Robert Ashley and Mark Perry, and the deflated humor of Dad’s Army and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Originally issued in 1999 on Scott Foust’s Swill Radio, this lost masterpiece—a stark, lo-fi world of home recording and concrète capture—is once again available on vinyl. For fans of Alan Titchmarsh, David Croft, Harry Pussy, and Idea Fire Company.
Greek harpist and composer Sissi Rada interprets the music of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms with unfathomable levels of detail and charm, resulting in one of the most gorgeously executed records of the year. Trust - it’s fully essential listening FFO Joanna Newsom, Svitlana Nianio, Kate Bush, Delphine Dora, Nikos Mamangakis… Sissi Makropoulou has been pinging our radar for a while now, but especially hard since 2024's Stroom-released 'Aporia' and that dazzling ‘Demeter In Aexone’ album that properly locked us in to her brand of uncanny avant dream-folk, a highly distinctive signature sound she developed even further on the fantastic 'Nana Butu' earlier this year. She’s a serial collaborator - with Lena Platonos, Brian Eno, Christina Vantzou, Jay Glass Dubs - even Lee "Scratch" Perry - all the while composing chamber music on the side. And It's that latter practice that comes to the fore on ‘Serious Songs’ singing in German while attacking Wagner's chilly 'Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme' (Five Poems for a Female Voice) on the A side, and Brahms' pious 'Vier ernste Gesänge' (Four Serious Songs) on the flip. As you'd expect, it isn't just a simple recital; with harp and voice the focal points, packed out with winding, nebulous arrangements and perspicacious references to avant-garde musical history, integrating dissonant orchestral elements, prepared piano, opera, classical guitar, environmental sounds and foreboding oscillations - with an exquisite ear for detail. Oddly for music this tranquil, it benefits from increased volume - at least a level where you can marvel at the array of tiny, unusual production flourishes. And it's a suite that grows and grows. On 'Wesendonck 1’, she opens with voice and harp recalling Joanna Newsom's folk-inspired song cycle 'Ys'. But as the piece develops, she begins to slowly show her hand, introducing harmonic, hypnotic effects to blur the edges. The result is discombobulating in the best way, sounding as dreamy as Julee Cruise's 'Floating into the Night' while somehow still remaining true to the source material. The drama continues to build on 'Wesendonck 2', her delivery of the words - written by poet Mathilde Wesendonck who Wagner was famously besotted with - fittingly dramatic, assisted by brass and grinding drums broken occasionally by moments of ineffable beauty. On 'Wesendonck 4', Makropoulou augments the production with metallophone chimes, fixing sequences with growling synths and heavily processed cries. Sissi plays a remarkable sleight of hand on the flip. Beginning conservatively, she introduces Brahms' cycle of Lutheran biblical readings with a celestial harp and a gently experimental vocal, pitch shifted to a screwed conclusion. On 'Brahms 2', her performance is kinked by disorienting concrète-style operatic spools that pull us into another musical timeline entirely. She is so confident with her subject matter - whether it's the classical canon, folk, electronic or neue musik - that it all sounds like a natural extension of her practice, converging into something that fully defies categorisation. Anyway, words don’t really do it for this one. Just give it a spin and you’ll soon melt into it, one of the most quietly startling albums released this year.
After the wild Afro-jazz fusion of Trancedance (reissued as BT118) and the meditative solo Christer Bothén Donso n’goni (BT133), legendary Swedish multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén returns to Black Truffle as part of a dream quartet completed by the three members of Ghosted: Oren Ambarchi (guitar), Johan Berthling (bass) and Andreas Werliin (drums). Recorded at a rustic studio built by Werliin and Hans Fredriksson in the sylvan surrounds of Hamburgsund, Sweden across a few days in September 2023, Serpentine offers up four generous slices of hypnotic repetition and shimmering resonance, cut through with wild bursts of Bothén’s bass clarinet. The depth and ease of the quartet’s rapport is evident from the first moments of the opening title-track. Berthling’s resonant upright bass locks into a head-nodding ostinato that makes sensitive use of a prominent end-of-phrase rest, opening spaces through which Werliin’s continually shifting statements of the pulse shine through. Having worked together in various groups for many years, Berthling and Werliin are masters at playing subtle games of difference and repetition, creating a driving rhythmic flow animated by perpetually changing details: here, you can never step in the same groove twice. Weaving through it all is Ambarchi’s now-signature Leslie-cabinet guitar tone, sounding out long chords at times strikingly close to a Hammond, while also creating intricate cross-rhythms through the play of his tremolo modulations against the bass and drums. When Bothén enters five minutes in, the growl of his bass clarinet at first works deep in the collective brew, carving off brief staccato phrases and twisting them into fragmented melodies. As he moves into the instrument’s higher registers, Bothén’s playing becomes wilder, twinning with Ambarchi’s guitar in shimmering arcs like a 21st century update of the Garbarek-Rypdal pairing immortalised on Sart. Each of the four pieces explore different possibilities of a shared language. On ‘Antigorite’, another hypnotic bass riff emerges gradually from an atmospheric haze, eventually developing into a frenetic rhythmic workout propelled by Werliin’s cowbell. Berthling sits out for ‘Lizardite’, while Bothén moves from bass clarinet to the Donso n’goni, the sacred Wassoulou hunter’s harp he has studied for half a century; the resulting performance streamlines the approach heard on other tracks into pure modal propulsion, sparkling with harp-like arpeggios from Ambarchi’s guitar. On the closing ‘Chrysotile’, the bottom drops out, leaving a swampy, churning mass of wavering organ-like chords, roaming bass runs, and distant toms, over which Bothén floats bass clarinet figures by turns bluesy and abstract, the whole thing landing somewhere between classic ECM and the most blasted freeform moments of early Amon Düül II. Bearing a delicate calligraphic abstraction by Bothén on its cover and beautiful documentation of the recording sessions on its inner sleeve, Serpentine is a powerful reminder of the magic that can happen when inventive musicians just get together and play.
Last heard on Black Truffle as one quarter of the joyously anarchic Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett, Hans Reichel (1949-2011) is one of the great figures of experimental guitar music. Though perhaps lesser known than peers like Derek Bailey, Fred Frith and Keith Rowe, Reichel’s rethinking of the instrument was in some ways the most radical of all. Early on, he dispensed with existing guitars to build a series of his own that explored the use of additional strings and fretboards, moveable pickups, extra bridges, special capos, and other innovations documented in the extensive booklet accompanying this release.
What strikes the listener right from the opening selection on Dalbergia Retusa—‘Return of the Knödler show’, from 1987’s The Dawn of Dachsman—is the extraordinary beauty of Reichel’s music, at once alien in the shimmering sonorities and unconventional pitch relationships made possible by his invented instruments, and deeply lyrical, even romantic in its harmonic content. Growing up in West Germany in the 1960s, Reichel’s formative influences were mainly British and American rock bands, a background that shines through in many of the pieces included here: ‘An old friend passes by’ is haunted by the ghost of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar, and the wild closer ‘Heimkehr der Holzböcke’, taken from a rare 1975 7” and the only piece to use overdubbing, layers errant hammer-on and slide tones over a Canned Heat boogie chug.
Reichel was an important source for the development of Oren Ambarchi’s own extended approach to the electric guitar. Appropriately enough, his selection opens with the very first piece by Reichel he ever heard, on a flexidisc included with a 1989 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Though Reichel collaborated with others extensively in many settings and also performed on violin and his other major contribution to instrument invention, the daxophone, his music for solo guitar remains at the core of his oeuvre.
Focusing exclusively on solo pieces recorded between 1973 and 1988, the 23 pieces on Dalbergia Retusa showcase the range and consistency of Reichel’s work, allowing the listener to see how his performances developed hand-in-hand with his instrumental inventions. On a piece from his very first LP, played on an 11-string instrument (partly strung with piano strings and using a schnapps glass a slide), we hear his intensive exploration of fret-hammering to create zither-like, chiming tone, which Reichel would hone further in later years with a double fretboard guitar specifically designed to be hammered rather than fretted and picked. On a piece from 1979’s Death of the Rare Bird Ymir, Reichel uses two steel-string acoustic guitars at once, with beautiful results: ‘some even say too beautiful’, he jokes in the interview included here. Many of the pieces from the 1980s make use of varieties of the ‘pick behind the bridge guitar’, instruments of uncanny harmonic richness primarily designed to be played on the ‘wrong’ side of the bridge. At times the unexpected behaviour of attacks, resonance, and decay can almost seem electronic, conjuring up the technology-assisted work of Henry Kaiser or even Fennesz, but realised solely through Reichel’s unorthodox techniques on his invented instruments.
In May 1984 I appeared at a German festival called Pro
Musica Nova, organized by Radio Bremen. I then travelled to
Berlin by car with Rolf Langebertels, the owner of Galerie
Giannozzo who had driven to Bremen to hear me perform. I still
remember very vividly the experience of passing through the
checkpoint to enter West Berlin, a city that floated like an island
in the middle of the still socialist GDR. I had previously visited
Berlin in 1982 to perform at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien at an event
that Rolf had organized. This time too Rolf had organized a
concert for me at the Technische Universitat. Playing off the title
of the piece (“Study Time”) I had performed at Pro Musica
Nova, I titled the piece for this concert “Zeitstudie”.
I owe Rolf a great deal of gratitude, as it was him who
encouraged me by releasing my very first cassette tape,
“Zeitstudie von Akio Suzuki”. In recent years it has become
difficult for me to carry heavy instruments around with me, and
I have started to do simpler performances with objects
assembled on site. So it feels wonderful to have the sound of
the battery of instruments I used back then to be returned to the
light of day.
On “Zeitstudie von A.S.” I used an ANALAPOS, the echo
instrument I invented in 1970, and the Suzuki-type glass
harmonica that I created in 1975. The ANALAPOS resembles the
tin-can telephone that children used to play with: two metal
cans, open at one end and connected by a coil spring. You
play it by stretching out the spring horizonally and then
projecting your voice into the open end of one of the
cylinders. The second piece features a variation, where I
would suspend several ANALAPOS vertically and play them like
a percussion instrument.
The Suzuki-type glass harmonica is in a simpler form than the
pre-existing glass harmonica, and consists of five long glass
tubes of varying diameters suspended horizontally in a metal
frame. As well as rubbing the tubes with wet hands, I developed
my own style of playing it using sticks. Once when I was
practicing with it in the Netherlands, outside the window I was
surprised to hear a bird imitating my sounds. However, later I
discovered that the bird always sang that way, and as a token
of my regret for having ever doubted it, I borrowed the bird’s
Dutch name, De Koolmees, and I s till use it for my instrument.
Recently, as I listened back to the cassette of “Zeitstudie von
A.S.”, one of Hiromi Miyakita’s drawings was lying in front of me.
There was a sympathetic resonance between the sounds and the
drawing, so I decided to use it on the cover. This is a joyful music.
You can recall John Lurie from his amazing performances in Jim Jarmusch ‘Permanente Vacation’ or ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ (even his cameo in Paris, Texas and Desperately Seeking Susan), but the long & tall man from Minneapolis is essentially an outstanding musician. From 1979 onwards he was the leader of The Lounge Lizards, a band he put together in downtown New York with the help of brother Evan (piano, organ), Arto Lindsay (on guitar), Steve Piccolo (on bass) and Anton Fier on drums. Their music was ironically labeled as "fake jazz", being their style a combination of punk rock attitude and no wave with strong doses of jazz. Over time they became increasingly appreciated for their originality which combined musical experiences gathered from all over the world, welcoming new members in the crew such as Tom Waits guitarist Marc Ribot. Their music still stood the test of time and their first live appearances are set to be remembered as wild and sophisticated at the same time.
This compilation charts the unlikely link between Cologne’s DIY scene and the Ukrainian underground at the turn of the 1990s. Visual artist and producer Guido Erfen and sound engineer Michael Springer were central figures in SHM1, a Cologne collective who ran concerts and a studio space inside the vast, disused Rhenania grain silo. From this base, they built an independent network for recording and distributing music beyond the mainstream. In 1990, Erfen received a cassette from Ukraine featuring bands from Kharkiv and Kyiv, alongside an essay by Sergey Myasoyedow, co-founder of Kharkiv’s Novaya Scena rock club. The music—shaped by punk, avant-garde experiment, folk motifs and abrasive grooves—opened a window onto a scene largely unheard in the West. Further tapes followed, and Erfen travelled to Ukraine, eventually persuading Alfred Hilsberg to release the Novaya Scena compilation on What’s So Funny About, documenting 14 bands recorded between 1986 and 1992. In the wake of that release, musicians including Svitlana Nianio and Yewgeny “Yenia” Taran travelled to Cologne. From 1994 onwards, informal sessions at Springer’s Phantom Studio and the SHM space at Rhenania forged a new chapter in this exchange. Those recordings form the basis of this collection, capturing four distinct incarnations of the Ukraine–Cologne connection.
Jeux d’eau is the result of an exploratory collaboration between the experimental ensemble Copenhagen Clarinet Choir and Danish composer and performer Anders Lauge Meldgaard. At the heart of the project is Meldgaard’s compositions and performance on New Ondomo—a Japanese instrument modeled on the pioneering French electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot, but what makes the music truly shine is the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir’s vibrant energy and adventurous spirit, bringing Meldgaard’s vision off the page and into a living, breathing soundscape through their playful and imaginative ensemble performance.
The initial spark for Jeux d’eau was struck during Meldgaard’s visit to the gardens of Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy—a place animated by fountains that once inspired Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel to compose piano works of the same title. Echoing these earlier musical impressions, the project channels that lineage into a new sonic journey. Where some composers of the past often sought to define strict structures, Meldgaard’s work on Jeux d’eau instead offers an open framework—one that invites playful interaction and improvisation among the musicians. Recorded at The Village in Copenhagen, the album is a sonic experience where the organic resonance of the clarinet choir intertwines with the unpredictable textures of the New Ondomo and electronic landscape.
The work Jeux d’eau is open yet structured, forward-moving yet richly repetitive, drawing clear inspiration from American minimalists such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but rather than simply echoing the work of these pioneers, the music explores fresh terrain infused with a lyrical touch of late-romantic European sensibility, where flowing melodies and rich harmonies soften the rigor of repetition. At the same time, the music resonates with the clarity and delicacy that could be associated with Japanese composers such as Jo Kondo or Sueko Nagayo. The result is a sound world that is playful yet profound, one that continually shifts between pulsating momentum and delicate stillness. With each piece, the ensemble invites listeners into a captivating journey where tradition meets experiment, and where collective performance transforms composition into something vividly alive.
Conceived as a tribute to water and a reflection on the fragile bond between humans and the natural world, Jeux d’eau is both a sonic meditation and a quiet call to action. Through fluid forms and open notations, the work draws listeners into a space where music mirrors the dynamics of nature—demanding real-time awareness, collective sensitivity, and respect for balance. Like flowing water, the music adapts and transforms, reminding us that our environment, too, is ever-changing and in need of care. In this way, Jeux d’eau does more than celebrate nature’s beauty: it asks us to recognize our responsibility to protect the living systems that sustain us, and to pay caring attention to the world we live in.
Originally released in 1980 and long regarded as one of the most avant‑garde statements of its era, Hansten Klork captures Metabolist at the intersection of post‑punk restlessness and uncompromising experimentalism. The album’s stark textures, motoric rhythms, and hypnotic minimalism reveal a band equally indebted to kraut‑rock repetition, post‑industrial atmospheres, and the austere clarity of minimalism—creating a distinct, unsettling sound that still sounds contemporary today. This reissue restores the original record in full and adds six rare bonus tracks drawn from the band’s singles (“Drömm/Slaves,” “Identify”) and the split 7‑inch with Die Form. These extras expand the album’s narrative, showcasing Metabolist’s willingness to push structural and sonic boundaries—short, fierce sketches and elongated, trance‑like explorations that map the group’s experimental trajectory.
"I'm sitting in a different room than you are now. I'm recording my own voice. By the resonant frequency of the room strengthening itself, my voice is excluding only the rhythmic elements. Repeat recording and playback until completely destroyed. At that point what you hear is the very natural resonance frequency of the room expressed by my voice. I have this movement in my voice. I think of it as a way to smooth out band irregularities, and I'm not conscious of revealing this phenomenon itself. "
A repress of the classic "I'm Sitting in a Room (1969)" by contemporary musician Alvin Lucier (1931-), originally released in 1981.
By repeatedly recording and playing back the sound of voices echoing in a particular space until the voices become indistinct, the work explores the acoustical engineering of the space to reveal its specific frequencies. It is a work that can only be realized by actually being there, and although it can be perceived as a mere acoustic work just by listening to the recorded sound source, its original purpose is a groundbreaking content that allows the listener to embody a vast and infinite space.