MUSIC

Recorded during 1997 European tour. By this time O'Rourke already reissued Connors' seminal heartbreak album "In Pittsburgh" on his Dexter's Cigar label and produced the guitarist's big-band mash-up with Alan Licht, Hoffman Estates.

Inspired by the original Industrial Records release of William S. Burroughs's Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, Belgian record label Sub Rosa worked with Burroughs to release another album: Break Through In Grey Room. Originally compiled in 1986 by producer Bill Rich, the album features Burroughs's experimental recordings from 1961 to 1976, featuring field recordings by Burroughs of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, experimental collaborations with mathematician Ian Sommerville and painter/cut-up originator Brion Gysin.Break Through In Grey Room documents William S. Burroughs during his time in Europe and England, working with Ian Sommerville on recording with the 'cut-up' technique. Sommerville's technical background enabled him to contribute to the early development of sound-and-light shows in London, leading to work with gear provided by Paul McCartney in an apartment owned by Ringo Starr. Experimental in nature, the record is as much an exhibition of studio and composition technique as it is a document of underground culture at that time.For the 2023 reissue, Dais Records has collaborated with the Estate of William S. Burroughs on reissuing the album on vinyl and compact disc, fully remastered by mastering engineer Josh Bonati.

In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of (then-) Throbbing Gristle travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz. Genesis and Sleazy started the daunting task of compiling the experimental sound works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been widely heard. During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recorder experiments featuring his spoken word “cut-ups”, collaged field recordings from his travels and his flirtations with EVP recording techniques, pioneered by Latvian intellectual Konstantins Raudive. Over the following year, P-Orridge, Christopherson and Grauerholz spent countless hours compiling various edits, each collection showcasing Burroughs sensitive ear and experimental prowess for audio anomaly within technical limitations. In early 1981, Burroughs had relocated to Lawrence, KS to escape the violence and manias of New York City life. There, P-Orridge and Christopherson put the finishing touches on the record that would be known as Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. Released in Spring 1981, the album would end up as the final release on Industrial Records, brought about by the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. It was quietly out of print until 1998, when John Giorno and the Giorno Poetry Systems included the album on a retrospective CD box set, which compiled the majority of Burroughs's seminal recordings. In 2015, Dais Records worked closely with the Estate of William S. Burroughs to finally re-release, for the first time in 36 years, a proper vinyl reissue of William S. Burroughs Nothing Here Now but the Recordings to celebrate the centennial anniversary of William S. Burroughs. For the 2023 edition, Dais has remastered the audio with renowned engineer Josh Bonati, and restored the original artwork with a new dedication to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson. Releasing in tandem with Break Through In Grey Room

lack Truffle is pleased to present Radis, the first recording by the Oslo-based trio of Andrea Giordano (voice and organetto), Kalle Moberg (accordion) and Jo David Meyer Lysne (guitar and snare drum). Now based in Norway, Giordano is a native of Cuneo, in the Piedmont region in the north-west of Italy and her exploration of the Piedmontese language provides the starting point and conceptual anchor of the trio improvisations heard on Radis, which make use of the words of 20th century Piedmontese poets Nino Costa, Bianca Dorato and Oreste Gallina. As the musicians explain, the project is an attempt to preserve the beauty and singularity of a language at risk of extinction. Fittingly, the first sound we hear on the opening piece ‘Fiorìa’ is Giordano’s unaccompanied voice. She sings a poem from Oreste Gallina as a kind of floating cadenza, the accompanying silence sensitizing the listener to the pellucid quality of Giordano’s voice and the unique sound of the Piedmontese language. The voice dies away and into the silence swells a single tone, sounded by Moberg’s accordion and—special guest on this opening piece—the alto saxophone of Mario Gabola. Extended techniques and preparations create unexpected timbres from the acoustic instruments: Gabola’s saxophone is augmented with tin cans and springs and Moberg’s unorthodox techniques allow the accordion to generate wheezing, buzzing textures and patterns of microtonal beating. Giordano’s voice returns, picking up the thread of the languorous opening melody, coexisting for a while with the shifting drone before the piece takes an unexpected yet organic left-turn into a delicate saxophone solo of sorts. Recorded in several locations across Italy and Norway over the course of three years, Radis documents an ensemble who have developed both a distinctive sound-world and a remarkably sensitive group dynamic. Moving from folkish duets between accordion and Giordano’s organetto (the small accordion used in Italian folk music) to episodes of metallic guitar scraping from Meyer Lysne, the music is both quietly contemplative and gently chaotic. Ensemble roles shift with disarming ease. If on ‘Profij dëspers’ Meyer Lysne’s prepared guitar adds a haywire noise element to a lyrical episode of organetto and accordion, the next piece, ‘D’antorn a lor’, is grounded in chiming guitar chords of stunning beauty; once Giordano’s joins, the result calls up the most spacious moments of Maria Monti’s Il Bestiario. Throughout the seven pieces, the trio explore countless possibilities of group interaction and the margin between conventional euphony and pure abstraction: at times the voice floats against silence or seems almost disconnected from the gentle clatter of the instruments (sometimes reminiscent of Nikiforas Rotas’ haunting settings of Cavafy), while at other points the instruments touch on conventional harmonic accompaniment. What is perhaps most striking of all is the way that voice and instruments relate to each other, the extended technique reframing the voice as a kind of abstract sound object, while the melodic beauty of Giordano’s voice lends a contemplative, almost melancholic air to the wheezing and scraping of accordion and guitar. Captured in gorgeously intimate recordings, Jim O’Rourke’s careful and beautifully spacious mix highlights the wealth of textural detail in each element. Accompanied by notes, session photos and the text of the Piedmontese poems, Radis is a work of stunning beauty that demonstrates the vitality of exploratory music in Norway today.

Like on the early solo Haino album that shares the group’s name (released on P.S.F. in 1993), the instrumentation swims in reverb (the use of which Akiyama recalls as ‘a kind of point of the band’), often obscuring the instrumental sources. On the short opening piece, a distant reed instrument arcs long buzzing melodies over a bed of cymbals and gongs, like a psychedelic take on Tibetan music. The epic second part, occupying almost 50 minutes, begins as a splayed, near-formless cloud of electric guitar and bass, shadowed by bowed and plucked strings, the three elements working through twisting atonal shapes.

At various points in the recording, we hear what seems to be the sounds of musicians moving between instruments, their shuffling and bumps fitting seamlessly into this radically open music. Eventually, what sounds like electric guitar moves closer to the foreground, fixing on a repeated melodic cell around which hover mysterious clouds of long tones and a sporadic shaker. At the half-hour mark, the music begins to build to a violently emotive climax, Haino’s impassioned vocal cries punctuating a lumbering, bass-heavy murk, contrasted at points by what sounds like a tin whistle. Suddenly, the volume drops to a near-whisper, opening the way for the stunning final moments, which touch on the slow-motion balladry of Haino’s classic Affection, here given an eccentric twist by an occasional woodblock hit.

The third piece opens with a hazy trio of rumbling bass, bowed strings and abstracted slide guitar, the latter calling to mind some of Akiyama’s later solo work. Eventually joined by Haino’s voice, its fragile, haunted tone might remind the listener of the man in black’s documented love of the madrigals of the murderous Count Gesualdo, before the recording abruptly breaks off mid-note. In this new edition, the Nijiumu trio recording is supplemented by a piece recorded solo by Haino in 1973, a bracing electronic blowout stretching almost half an hour. Using a homemade electronics setup to unleash a barrage of crunching distortion and shuddering harmonic fuzz, it takes its place in the canon of extreme live electronics next to Robert Ashley’s Wolfman and Walter Marchetti’s Osmanthus fragrans, looking forward to extreme noise years before Merzbow. Taken as a whole, these four sides of music are a stunning document of some of the lesser-known waystations of Haino’s singular creative path.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (Black Truffle, 2022). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie’s long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell.The two short pieces that open the record could almost be the two sides of a wild 7” selected to show off what the Ensemble can do. On opener ‘Gerak Maju’, intricately skittering open-snare patterns bounce over clanging metal, chiming bell-like tones and deep gong hits, adapting the rhythm-register connections heard in traditional Gamelan musics—where the lowest pitched sounds are heard least frequently—to a cut-up breakbeat straight off Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Strollabout’ then moves into an entirely different realm of meditative repeating patterns, performed entirely on Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese gongs. The remaining seven pieces, ranging from three to twelve minutes, offer up a wealth of different percussive, compositional and arrangement possibilities. On ‘Ghostly Klang’, two drumkits mirror each other’s moves, bouncing hats and snares across the stereo field in a way that recalls On the Corner and the jittering hi hat patterns of trap, while slow moving melodies on the tuned instruments add a sense of majesty contrasted by scurrying details in resonant wood. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Uncle’, performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell’s dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal.Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois’ drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.

All the tracks on this release come from a live concert at Sharmanka, a beautiful and unique museum of kinetic sculptures in Glasgow, and throughout the record, the sounds of the sculptures moving and emitting noises are incorporated into the music performed. The four pieces presented are entirely improvised. There was no discussion beforehand of what instruments or what approach would be taken, and each piece evolved as a musical negotiation as the performers individually made choices about what instruments to play and how to support and meet each other within the unfolding musical narrative. While Macdonald and Ferlaino both share a lifetime of work with their chosen primary instrument, the saxophone, they also share a passion for exploring other instruments and objects for their sonic and socio-creative potential. This record foregrounds both these aspects of their work: they use saxophones, but also incorporate bells, toys, bagpipes, accordions, percussion instruments and voice. "Raymond MacDonald is a saxophonist and composer with an extensive career in music, cross-disciplinary arts and academia. He has played on and released over 100 albums, toured and broadcast worldwide and has composed music for film, television, theatre, radio and art installations. He is a founding member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and his work is informed by a view of improvisation as a social, collaborative, and uniquely creative process that provides opportunities to develop new ways of engaging musically. "Christian Ferlaino is an Italian saxophonist, bagpipe player, improviser, composer and ethnomusicologist. He composes for ensembles of improvisers, both from the jazz and improvised music scene, as well as for contemporary music ensembles. His work explores the relationships between composition and improvisation, and the expressive potential of improvised music. His musical research also focuses on creatively engaging with the sonic and musical realm of Calabria, with special attention to its performing techniques and approach to sound and music generation.

Okraina Records present an LP by Mauricio Amarante and Marine Debilly Cerisier as Amarante-Cerisier. "What if, alongside the mainstream history of music, with careers and discographies spanning ten or fifty years from album to album, there was an underground, minority history, that of artists and projects with only one record? A flash, a burst of brilliance, a gem, but no follow-up, no repetitions, no decline. This will most likely be the case for this album by Amarante-Cerisier, a duo formed by Mauricio Amarante (Radikal Satan, Équipage, travelling companion of Canan Domurcakli and Austin Townsend) and Marine Debilly Cerisier (dancer, performer, writer, co-founder of alternative cultural venues in Marseille and Brussels), with these eight poetic songs in French having more in common with the visionary essence of certain songs from the early 1970s (Brigitte Fontaine-Areski, for example) than with the post-modernism of the ‘nouvelle chanson française’ of the 1990s and 2000s."

Lasse Marhaug's arsenal of devices are fed through video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen’s volatile A/V system on this latest despatch from Smalltown Supersound’s ‘Le Jazz Non’ series, a fierce sequence of hard-as-nails sheet noise x outsider techno that’s essential listening if you're anywhere on the line from Pan Sonic to Merzbow or PITA. Some years ago, Kjell Bjørgeengen and Keith Rowe attempted to convert video signals into sound by setting up Rowe's pickups next to an old CRT monitor, turning its magnetic field into a sound generator. Rowe further developed the system with David Jones at Alfred University, slimming down the setup using a copper coil, a circuit board, a video input and a telephone pickup. Jones named it the "Flood Coil", and it's that instrument you can see on the album's front cover and that lies at the core of these recordings, made without any physical live input from the artists themselves. In essence, it’s generative music in its purest form. Bjørgeengen's video feed is generated by oscillators, then routed into Marhaug's pedals and then back into the Flood Coil, so any visual shifts alter the sound, and any modification to the sound change the video. The duo have played this setup live many times, but for this studio version they left the system to do its thing without any intervention for two minutes at a time before moving onto the next idea. They recorded hours and hours using this process and then selected 18 highlights for this album, extracting harsh noise, power electronics, lulling feedback drone and peculiar rhythmic snippets to show the scope of their technique. A wall of growling, hi-octane Pulse Demon-style noise opens the set, gradually exposing us to more asymmetric textures, shifting through unstable repetitions that transform Merzbow's metal-inspired screams into 'Aaltopiiri'-era rhythmic noise. It's remarkable, actually, how much Marhaug and Bjørgeengen can squeeze from the system, chancing on shivering, lower-case chugs and pops, galloping drums, soundystem-subs and grinding blast beats that sound like Napalm Death's 'Scum' piped through a broken amp stack. It ain't pretty, but noise/industrial freaks will revel in the fierce delights inside.

Carlos Giffoni reconnects with Thurston Moore for the first time in years, blazing through two sides of loose-limbed axe noise, oscillator worship and hard-phased, Spacemen 3-style feedback. Giffoni's been on a roll recently. Since the No Fun founder returned to the scene with 'Vain', a genius set of synth mutations that appeared in iDEAL back in 2018, he's been slowly ramping up the activity, dropping the celestial 'Dream Walker' on Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ in 2024 and following it with 'Pendulum', a bumper compendium of collaborations, just a few weeks back. For those who remember Giffoni's first trip round the block, he was always able to hold his own chopping it up in person, not just by mail. Just scrub through his early catalog and you'll see collabs with Nels Cline and Chris Corsano, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke and Lasse Marhaug, and of course, Thurston Moore. The two rekindle their thing on 'IGUANA', picking up where 2001's fabled '4 Guitars Live' performance left off. Here, Giffoni straddles a tabletop synth and FX while Moore attacks his signature Jazzmaster with a drumstick and a screwdriver - vibes fully intact. Moore is on blistering form, sounding as if he's taken a step back to refresh his approach since the early '00s when he could be spotted moonlighting on any number of basement-adjacent noise sides. Sawing at his strings and turning the guitar into a shrieking resonator, he leaves only faint vapours of the classic Sonic Youth sound as opiating accents on his animalistic wails and rumbles. On the opening half, his whammy-assisted shreds are balanced out by Giffoni's off-world whirrs and airlocked vibrations, building a dense wall of noise towards an unexpectedly elegiac conclusion. At some point, Giffoni's rasping churr transforms into a simmering shudder and Moore's into hymnal drones - squint a bit and you could almost call it pretty. Of course, they ramp things up on the flip, dissolving the melancholia with smokey white noise and twangy, post-Derek Bailey chimes that Giffoni accompanies with aggy oscillations. Like every great taped noise set, the recording quality is crucial - 'IGUANA' was captured from the pit by Guillermo Hernandez Avendano, the dad of Lia Miranda who provides the cover photo. It's that kinda show.

Soft Machine performing two continuous sets of compositions, improvisations and dynamisms. All instruments, except saxes, variously processed with electronic effect devices Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway, 28th of February, 1971. Stereophonic ambient recording technique to Studer A62 Reel-to-Reel.

Originally released in 1981, this is MIZUTAMA SHŌBŌDAN’s legendary debut album. A wild theatrical mix of avant-post-punk material worked out by one of the most uncompromising women’s brigades ever. An outstanding document from “another” Japan! MIZUTAMA SHŌBŌDAN were a force of nature – powerful and original and unapologetic. I saw them live before I heard the first record and was very impressed. I liked the way the group interacted, it was a very good atmosphere between everybody. I really liked the contrasting sounds and styles of Kamura and Tenko, two very different kinds of voices that really worked well together.

‘Fred Frith’

CONTAINS PRINTED INNER SLEEVE AND 4-PAGE FOLD-OUT INSERT

Tangerine Dream’s 1970 debut, Electronic Meditation. Standing in stark contrast to their later synth-driven ambient works, this is the chaotic ground zero of Krautrock and experimental rock. A primal, avant-garde departure that captures the raw energy of the Berlin underground.

Convergence is a new live album from William Hooker featuring guitarist John King. Recorded at the B10 Festival in Shenzhen, China on October 25, 2024, it captures an exhilarating set shaped by the audience’s energy and deep mutual connection. Hooker’s thunderous drumming meets King’s walls of distorted guitar in an expansive, hour-long performance of raw intensity, recorded direct from the soundboard. The music moves fluidly between intensity and restraint, structure and spontaneity. The album stands as a document of cross-cultural exchange and creative freedom, reinforcing Hooker’s decades-long legacy as a leading force in avant-garde music while showcasing a compelling collaboration with King.

Convergence is a new live album from William Hooker featuring guitarist John King. Recorded at the B10 Festival in Shenzhen, China on October 25, 2024, it captures an exhilarating set shaped by the audience’s energy and deep mutual connection. Hooker’s thunderous drumming meets King’s walls of distorted guitar in an expansive, hour-long performance of raw intensity, recorded direct from the soundboard. The music moves fluidly between intensity and restraint, structure and spontaneity. The album stands as a document of cross-cultural exchange and creative freedom, reinforcing Hooker’s decades-long legacy as a leading force in avant-garde music while showcasing a compelling collaboration with King.

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

Divine Comedy stands as a magnum opus crafted by two of the foremost composers of their era, boasting a musical ambition akin to Dante’s poem and its visual interpretation by Sandro Botticelli or Gustave Doré. For a long time, this triptych was presented as a two-sided work in which Bernard Parmegiani’s Hell and François Bayle’s Purgatory responded to and extended each other, guided by Michel Hermon’s voice through the listener’s imagination. Because Paradise, a mixed piece co-composed and performed live, had never been released on record before. Indeed, fifty years after its premiere, Paradise is unveiled to our ears, thereby rounding off the very first complete edition of the Divine Comedy.

« Labyrinthe ! » (2003), 56’41 Premiered on March 29th 2003, salle Olivier Messiaen de Radio France, Paris. Commissioned by Radio France. An expedition in sound in 10 sequences: Enfoncement [Deep Sink], Gouffre circulaire [Circular Abyss], Noyau secret [Secret Core], Apesanteur [Weightlessness], Entrailles [Entrails], Four solaire [Solar Furnace], Fissures [Cracks], Mer intérieure [Inner Sea], Éruption [Eruption], Remontée [Ascension]. Labyrinthe ! is not only a very unique piece in Pierre Henry’s masterful repertoire, but also a remarkable demonstration of his compositional skills and musical singularity. Indeed, for this piece, Pierre Henry was deprived of his own, otherwise essential, sonic material. Here, the sounds, provided by GRM collaborators at the time, carry their own distinct stories, sensitivities and qualities. Yet, despite this discrepancy, Pierre Henry’s voice, the breath and dynamics of his own music, quickly appear. Through this sonic maze, a music arises, utterly focused on sounds, their development and their use, which Pierre Henry applies with extraordinary clarity and determination.

Black Editions present the first vinyl reissue of Keiji Haino's stunning debut album Watashi Dake?, originally released in 1981. This first ever edition released outside of Japan features the artist's originally intended metallic gold and silver jacket artwork. Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances, Haino has staked out a ground all his own, creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. For all this, his 1981 debut album Watashi Dake? has remained enigmatic. Originally released in a small edition by the legendary Pinakotheca label, the album was heard by only a select few in Japan and far fewer overseas. Original vinyl copies became impossibly rare and highly sought after the world over. Watashi Dake? presents a haunting vision -- stark vocals, whispered and screamed, punctuate dark silences. Intricate and sharp guitar figures interweave, repeat, and stretch, trance-like, emerging from dark recesses. Written and composed on the spot -- Haino's vision is one of deep spiritual depths that distantly evokes 1920s blues and medieval music -- yet is unlike anything ever committed to record before or since. Produced in close cooperation with Keiji Haino and legendary photographer Gin Satoh. Coupled with starkly minimal packaging, featuring the now iconic cover photographs by Gin Satoh, the album is a startling and fully realized artistic statement. Housed in custom printed deluxe Stoughton tip-on jackets, including black on black inserts, extras, and hand-colored finishes; Remastered by Elysian Masters and cut by Bernie Grundman Mastering; Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI; Includes download code.

Junko Tange's second and final album is a minimalistic, phantasmagoric masterpiece of distant, dreamlike voices woven through pulsating, dubbed-out drum machines, synths and static, originally issued by Osaka's Vanity Records in 1981. Did this unassuming dental student (who vanished from the music world following this release) inadvertently invent dub techno? You be the judge. Label head Yuzuru Agi said this was his favorite Vanity release, and it's not hard to see why. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from brand new transfers of the miraculously well preserved original analog tapes, this fully authorized 2LP (@45rpm) is the definitive edition of this landmark electronic work. Packaged in a deluxe, gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket.

Kakuhan, a unit of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, has released a self-released CD, which has been sold exclusively at live venues, on "Nakid," a hot label run by Koshiro Hino, who is also well known for his activities with goat and YPY and for running "birdFriend," and has released such powerful artists as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Mark Fell & Will Guthrie. The CD is a self-released CD by Kakuhan, a unit consisting of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, which has been sold exclusively at live venues and has won critical acclaim!

The CD includes a live performance by KAKUHAN, a unit consisting of YPY, Hino Koshiro, and cellist Nakagawa Hiroki, at the "Feldman meets freq 2022" event held at Kyushu University in February 2022.
KAKUHAN's first album "Metalzone", released at the end of 2022, was voted the 5th best release of 2022 by Boomkat and the 5th best album of the year by Music Magazine in the best electronic music category. The CD contains a total of six songs, including the previous night's "Prototype," a song from the same album, and includes a song that can only be heard on this CD.
As the unit name suggests, the various elements of both artists' activities-"electronic music/strings," "contemporary/club music," "traditional/contemporary," "physical/metaphysical," "composition/improvisation"-are literally "stirred" in the performance. It is highly recommended to listen to it together with "Metalzone"!

For the exhibition “Flowers in 20th and 21st Century Art“, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O‘Rourke had created the installation ”Lifetime of a Flower“ in which they set parameters but allowed the process itself to grow uncontrollably. Literally: in the garden of their Japanese house, they planted seeds and filmed the plant growing and thriving throughout the duration of the exhibition. Visitors were able to watch the stream in real time - and they heard a composition in which Ishibashi and O‘Rourke reflected the organic process in sound. The eponymous composition now available on LP, is an enigmatic and sophisticated layering of sounds, melodies and rhythms, noises from everyday life, all of which are repositories of associations, memories and expectations.

Carrying on a string of stunning archival releases from major figures of Indian classical tradition (including releases from members of the Dagar family and Amelia Cuni), Black Truffle is pleased to announce an unheard recording from tabla master Kamalesh Maitra (1924-2005). For over fifty years, Maitra devoted himself to the rare tabla tarang, a set of between ten and sixteen hand drums tuned to the notes of the raga to be performed. While the tabla tarang has its origins in the late 19th century, Maitra was the first to recognise its potential as a solo concert instrument, using the set of tuned drums to perform full-length raags. Seated behind a semi-circular array of drums, Maitra produced stunning waves of melodic improvisation enlivened with the rhythmic invention of a master percussionist. Across his career, Maitra performed in ensembles led by Ravi Shankar, collaborated with George Harrison, and led his own East-West fusion group, the Ragatala Ensemble. However, it is in the solo setting that his remarkable artistry and the otherworldly timbral qualities of the tabla tarang are most strikingly on display. Recorded during the same 1985 Berlin sessions that produced Maitra’s self-released solo LP Tabla Tarang: Ragas on Drums, on Raag Kirwani on Tabla Tarang we are treated to Maitra stretching out for over forty minutes on the late night Raag Kirwani, accompanied by Laura Patchen on tabla and Mila Morgenstern and Marina Kitsos on tanpura. The performance begins with the traditional free-floating exposition section, where Maitra’s spacious melodic improvisation at times almost resembles a plucked string instrument (like the sarod, which Maitra also played). For the listener unaccustomed to the tabla tarang, the sound of these microtonally inflected melodic patterns played on drums has a magic quality. As Maitra begins to imply the rhythmic cycles more strongly, Patchen joins on tabla, beginning half an hour of rhythmic-melodic exploration, where virtuosity sits side by side with delicacy and meditative attention. Accompanied by beautiful archival images and extensive liner notes from Laura Patchen, for many listeners Raag Kirwani on Tabla Tarang will be the perfect introduction to the magical world of Kamalesh Maitra, released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the master musician’s birth.

First vinyl edition of the album Rhetorical Islands, originally released by Giuseppe Ielasi in 2012 as a limited-edition CD on his Senufo Editions label, with recordings made in 2011 as a commission for l’Audible Festival, Paris. The album’s ten tracks have neither titles nor accompanying text, standing for themselves as what Ielasi himself has called “isolated sound worlds”. They are nonetheless unparalleled in their plasticity, acoustic events with a rare degree of tangibility. Ielasi evokes physical objects, some of which seem to have been constructed out of paper and cardboard, others based on a mechanics of elastic materials. Of course these objects are hallucinations, and precisely because Ielasi constructs them so masterfully there’s no need for any further information. Here’s to everyone creating their very own sculptures while listening to Rhetorical Islands! The front and back cover features 0.058, a work on paper by the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius. They make sculptures whose form and artistic inspiration are defined by their materials. Like Ielasi’s acoustic islands, their impact derives from self-referentiality, resulting in paradoxical objects that embody both a detailed material study and a potential for free association.