MUSIC

recorded feb-mar at steamroom tokyo photo by mike watt

Recorded April-June 2013 at Steamroom Tokyo This one is for A. Clarke

Recorded 2014 at Steamroom Tokyo This one is for B.F.

Our sonic alchemist, Jim O'Rourke, receives a great deal of respect beyond the framework of the scene. We have received the undistributed dead stock of extremely rare CDs of works digitally released from his own label directly from the person himself! This work was produced as the soundtrack for the 2009 video work "The World" by Japanese artist/experimental filmmaker Makino Takashi. Contains over 50 minutes long song "The World".

“Eye Of Delirious” is a long-awaited debut Muscut release of Chillera’s band bass player Ganna Bryzhata — an Odesa-based artist. An ambient LP is a Smoothy Flow Sub Nautical journey that features elements of an industrial dub of Glowing Sirens of the Black sea. REVIEWS: Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe. A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space. Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams. The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens. Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. - Pitchfork, By Philip Sherburne From Odesa, sound artist Ganna Bryzhata evokes the hazy ambience of the "Black Sea Paris" The Muscut label, celebrating its 11th anniversary, describes its music of interest as ‘pseudo-archaeology’. On their website, you can see a fabricated photograph showing the uncovering of a cassette tape during excavation. Their releases focus as much on the music as the quality of the sound itself – how the equipment and methodology influence its texture and timbre, what are the side effects of the medium, and what the impact of analogue instrumentation would be. Looking at the catalog, you’ll find input on meditative structures, hunting loops, or specific archaic sounds. Nikolaienko uses a tape player and an old reel-to-reel recorder balancing musique concrète, loops, and pulsating motifs. Nikolaev makes mesmerizing synth passages, whereas Eyot Tapes incorporates cassette loops, spring reverbs, tape delays, and a modular synthesizer. As a result, they create hazy compositions packed with delay effects and reverbs, often based on swirling loops. Bryozone, the project of Odesa-based sound artist Ganna Bryzhata, follows a similar path. Until now, she released two EPs in 2016 but also plays bass guitar, creating psychedelic dub trips in the trio Chillera. Eye of Delirious offer transcends haunting and dreamlike landscapes to provide a peculiar tale. By its atmosphere, it’s difficult to disconnect it from Odesa, a sunny resort known as the Black Sea Paris or the ‘city of dreams’ as Charles King wrote. Bryzhata has recorded a heterogeneous album that sometimes draws a little on the ephemeral atmosphere created by William Basinski or Philip Jeck in their looping pieces. Her hazy ambient strands in ‘Smoothy Flow’ are reminiscent of the feeling of decay present in the music of the two mentioned composers, leaning towards monotonous impressionistic waves, as in ‘Ambiency’. In ‘Glowing Sirens’, the glitchy melody transforms into metallic ambient and creates a ghostly sound, mimicking something vaguely identifiable. ‘Sequence One’ reminds me of a stuttering record, a looped piece, an artifact that brings back memories. However, she does not fall into the obvious cliché of a hazy, indistinct, and impressionistic aesthetic – the neatly arranged compositions assemble into a diverse mosaic. She breaks ambient, dreamlike tracks with underlined beats. There is a moment of cracking the impressionistic suspension in the style of Deadbeat’s or Sun Araw’s dub synth beats, as in the pulsating trance of ‘Sub Nautica’. Sometimes it veers towards rhythmic, quasi-tribal forms as in ‘Ghost of Tribe’. Fortunately Bryozone is not singing and not going in a dream-pop direction – this is a non-obvious, evocative, in a way visual, and narrative soundtrack to the journey to the Black Sea coast. Or elsewhere in the middle of hot summer, as this album with scraps of rhythm, melodies, and hazy vision of sunny afterimages catch with a very impressive and suggestive story. - The Quietus, by Jakub Knera Ukraine’s Muscut keep ‘em coming with Odesa artist Bryozone’s bittersweet, subaquatic ambient fantasies for fans of Spencer Clark, Jürgen Müller, Pataphysical ‘Eye of Delirious’ is the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone, who hails from the historic Black Sea port city of Odesa, and also plays bass in the band Chillera when they’re not making this type of beautifully detuned dream-food. Following in the glistening wake of work by Pavel Milyakov, Stanislav Tolkachev and Nikolajev on Muscut, the album arrives with no mention or implication that Europe’s most tragic war in a century is occurring in the background, as Bryozone proceeds to project 40 minutes of transportive music as elegantly alien as jellyfish. The 10 tracks are defined by a taste for curdled silicon and and elusive ambient contouring that lends the lushest, disorienting listen. Slipping in head first with the silty early AFXian pads of ’Smoothy Flow’ the set vacillates strains of dub techno and impressionistic ambient in an effortlessly enchanting flow from he sliding pitches of ‘Sequence One’ and the seductive harmonies of ‘Glowing Sirens’, to limn Atlantean creatures with Spencer Clark-like animism in ‘Ghost Tribe’. They tease beautifully buoyant ambience into more quizzical, queasy space on ‘Ambience’, and the likes of ‘Liminal Tribe and ’Sub Nautical’ recalls Cru Servers weirdo club slosh, before it shores up in a submerged ‘Ground Floor’ like an imaginary soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’. - Boomkat A dubby, subaquatic journey into the Black Sea. Share Bryozone has not been chilling in Chillera. The Ukrainian artist is a bass player in the band, who create wonderfully breezy music in spite of their hard work ethic. The trio was formed in Odessa and takes inspiration from surf rock and lo-fi indie, channelling the experience and lifestyle of a smaller port city. They've put out two EPs on the renowned Muscut label and organised a festival to bring attention to Ukraine's south. The sea is a core part of Chillera's identity, as it is for Bryozone. On Eye Of Delirious, the artist's first solo venture in seven years, she nearly perfects a specific type of aquatic beat previously heard on Ifrit, her ambient techno and dub EP from 2016 that carried over Chillera's beachy vibes. Listening to "Ghost Tribe" on Eye Of Delirious, a visual association pops up from my memory—a moment in an Armenian cartoon where a mermaid stares into the camera with her wide eyes. It's creepy, psychedelic, and captivating. On this track, beats bubble and Bryozone evokes an underwater civilisation where this kind of character could live. With "Liminal Tribe," she makes this realm even richer with rolling, spaced-out beats that create a whole universe of creatures. It's as if she's painting a landscape. Her synths roll like waves on "Sub Nautica" and cut like frigid, winter seawater on "Sequence One." She uses field recordings—or, rather, sea recordings—to add ambience, but it's her supple rhythms that are visionary. The album's simplest track, "Ambiency," digs a deep valley to enjoy the peaks of more adventurous tracks. I wish there was more of this contrast on the title track and "Fateful Torment," which stumble into the LP's climax with weighty, post-apocalyptic drums. On "Smoothy Flow" and "Ground Floor," Bryozone uses a decaying filter, like a dying gramophone, that ties the LP to the rest of Muscut's releases and nods to the label's archival work. Eye Of Delirious is a dynamic portrait of life under the sea and it's worth diving into. - Resident Advisor

“Eye Of Delirious” is a long-awaited debut Muscut release of Chillera’s band bass player Ganna Bryzhata — an Odesa-based artist. An ambient LP is a Smoothy Flow Sub Nautical journey that features elements of an industrial dub of Glowing Sirens of the Black sea. REVIEWS: Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe. A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space. Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams. The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens. Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. - Pitchfork, By Philip Sherburne From Odesa, sound artist Ganna Bryzhata evokes the hazy ambience of the "Black Sea Paris" The Muscut label, celebrating its 11th anniversary, describes its music of interest as ‘pseudo-archaeology’. On their website, you can see a fabricated photograph showing the uncovering of a cassette tape during excavation. Their releases focus as much on the music as the quality of the sound itself – how the equipment and methodology influence its texture and timbre, what are the side effects of the medium, and what the impact of analogue instrumentation would be. Looking at the catalog, you’ll find input on meditative structures, hunting loops, or specific archaic sounds. Nikolaienko uses a tape player and an old reel-to-reel recorder balancing musique concrète, loops, and pulsating motifs. Nikolaev makes mesmerizing synth passages, whereas Eyot Tapes incorporates cassette loops, spring reverbs, tape delays, and a modular synthesizer. As a result, they create hazy compositions packed with delay effects and reverbs, often based on swirling loops. Bryozone, the project of Odesa-based sound artist Ganna Bryzhata, follows a similar path. Until now, she released two EPs in 2016 but also plays bass guitar, creating psychedelic dub trips in the trio Chillera. Eye of Delirious offer transcends haunting and dreamlike landscapes to provide a peculiar tale. By its atmosphere, it’s difficult to disconnect it from Odesa, a sunny resort known as the Black Sea Paris or the ‘city of dreams’ as Charles King wrote. Bryzhata has recorded a heterogeneous album that sometimes draws a little on the ephemeral atmosphere created by William Basinski or Philip Jeck in their looping pieces. Her hazy ambient strands in ‘Smoothy Flow’ are reminiscent of the feeling of decay present in the music of the two mentioned composers, leaning towards monotonous impressionistic waves, as in ‘Ambiency’. In ‘Glowing Sirens’, the glitchy melody transforms into metallic ambient and creates a ghostly sound, mimicking something vaguely identifiable. ‘Sequence One’ reminds me of a stuttering record, a looped piece, an artifact that brings back memories. However, she does not fall into the obvious cliché of a hazy, indistinct, and impressionistic aesthetic – the neatly arranged compositions assemble into a diverse mosaic. She breaks ambient, dreamlike tracks with underlined beats. There is a moment of cracking the impressionistic suspension in the style of Deadbeat’s or Sun Araw’s dub synth beats, as in the pulsating trance of ‘Sub Nautica’. Sometimes it veers towards rhythmic, quasi-tribal forms as in ‘Ghost of Tribe’. Fortunately Bryozone is not singing and not going in a dream-pop direction – this is a non-obvious, evocative, in a way visual, and narrative soundtrack to the journey to the Black Sea coast. Or elsewhere in the middle of hot summer, as this album with scraps of rhythm, melodies, and hazy vision of sunny afterimages catch with a very impressive and suggestive story. - The Quietus, by Jakub Knera Ukraine’s Muscut keep ‘em coming with Odesa artist Bryozone’s bittersweet, subaquatic ambient fantasies for fans of Spencer Clark, Jürgen Müller, Pataphysical ‘Eye of Delirious’ is the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone, who hails from the historic Black Sea port city of Odesa, and also plays bass in the band Chillera when they’re not making this type of beautifully detuned dream-food. Following in the glistening wake of work by Pavel Milyakov, Stanislav Tolkachev and Nikolajev on Muscut, the album arrives with no mention or implication that Europe’s most tragic war in a century is occurring in the background, as Bryozone proceeds to project 40 minutes of transportive music as elegantly alien as jellyfish. The 10 tracks are defined by a taste for curdled silicon and and elusive ambient contouring that lends the lushest, disorienting listen. Slipping in head first with the silty early AFXian pads of ’Smoothy Flow’ the set vacillates strains of dub techno and impressionistic ambient in an effortlessly enchanting flow from he sliding pitches of ‘Sequence One’ and the seductive harmonies of ‘Glowing Sirens’, to limn Atlantean creatures with Spencer Clark-like animism in ‘Ghost Tribe’. They tease beautifully buoyant ambience into more quizzical, queasy space on ‘Ambience’, and the likes of ‘Liminal Tribe and ’Sub Nautical’ recalls Cru Servers weirdo club slosh, before it shores up in a submerged ‘Ground Floor’ like an imaginary soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’. - Boomkat A dubby, subaquatic journey into the Black Sea. Share Bryozone has not been chilling in Chillera. The Ukrainian artist is a bass player in the band, who create wonderfully breezy music in spite of their hard work ethic. The trio was formed in Odessa and takes inspiration from surf rock and lo-fi indie, channelling the experience and lifestyle of a smaller port city. They've put out two EPs on the renowned Muscut label and organised a festival to bring attention to Ukraine's south. The sea is a core part of Chillera's identity, as it is for Bryozone. On Eye Of Delirious, the artist's first solo venture in seven years, she nearly perfects a specific type of aquatic beat previously heard on Ifrit, her ambient techno and dub EP from 2016 that carried over Chillera's beachy vibes. Listening to "Ghost Tribe" on Eye Of Delirious, a visual association pops up from my memory—a moment in an Armenian cartoon where a mermaid stares into the camera with her wide eyes. It's creepy, psychedelic, and captivating. On this track, beats bubble and Bryozone evokes an underwater civilisation where this kind of character could live. With "Liminal Tribe," she makes this realm even richer with rolling, spaced-out beats that create a whole universe of creatures. It's as if she's painting a landscape. Her synths roll like waves on "Sub Nautica" and cut like frigid, winter seawater on "Sequence One." She uses field recordings—or, rather, sea recordings—to add ambience, but it's her supple rhythms that are visionary. The album's simplest track, "Ambiency," digs a deep valley to enjoy the peaks of more adventurous tracks. I wish there was more of this contrast on the title track and "Fateful Torment," which stumble into the LP's climax with weighty, post-apocalyptic drums. On "Smoothy Flow" and "Ground Floor," Bryozone uses a decaying filter, like a dying gramophone, that ties the LP to the rest of Muscut's releases and nods to the label's archival work. Eye Of Delirious is a dynamic portrait of life under the sea and it's worth diving into. - Resident Advisor

ロンドン拠点のプラットフォーム/レーベルの〈Titrate〉からは、Pagan Redなるミステリアスな同地の作家と思われるアクトによるデビュー・アルバム『Materia』がアナログ・リリース。微かに包み込んでいくようなドローン・サウンドに、無重力的なパーカッション、臨場感あふれる音の共鳴を特徴とする3編の実験的な作品が収められたエレクトロアコースティック作品に仕上がっています。名匠、Noel Summervilleの手によるマスタリング&デラックス180g重量盤仕様。

Across 8 concise vignettes, Chantal Michelle alchemizes acoustic instrumentation with a spectrum of layered feedback and field sounds, depicting fractured beauty amongst a precarious reality. Michelle’s work is characterized by intoxicating juxtaposition and enriched with an array of source material to construct immersive narrative. Much of the work here was recorded during her time in New York City, perhaps a pre-requisite to the heightened tension at play. Opening with lucid choral vocals, a mysteriously seductive anaesthesia disseminates before evaporating into surging feedback, vocals dissolving as quickly as they appeared. It’s this oscillation between states that permeates throughout the work. Whether it’s the esoteric rumbling of acoustic drones, or the radiant fusion of distorted chords amongst the warming sounds of tropical atmospheres, moments of serenity are conjured up in a space so bliss that their endings incite an immediate nostalgia. Fleeting melodies are pierced by shattering cries of feedback; gossamer tones engulfed in saturated noise. Amongst the instrumentation, buzzing field sounds tremor with hyperreal peculiarity and hallucinations shape noise into sounds of the familiar; the rumbling of an overheard aeroplane or the whirring of distant grasshoppers. Similarly, recurring motifs elicit a false sense of security in their subliminal familiarity, soon exposed as echoes, a reverberation of what was left behind. At the approaching climax, the blissful onset anaesthesia has worn off, interrupted by a powerful chorus of deep, gothic synthesis that fuels post-apocalyptic fever dreams, an unnerving and mesmerising symphony. The unresolved tension leaves us in a state of delirium, questioning if the tranquillity we experienced was ever really there. Michelle was immersed in Fleur Jaeggy’s 'The Water Statues' whilst recording, and its imprint is woven into the sonic fabric of 'Broken to Echoes'; a sublime liminal dream-state, pervaded by haunting visions. It’s a view of the world captured from inside the enclosure of a cell membrane. Through translucent mesh, we see the billowing tension of our surroundings, protected only by the most delicate walls.

Black Truffle announce the release of Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke, offering up two side-long realisations of Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko parlour. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves, creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles; snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko parlour. Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises d’Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari’s piece layers Luc Ferrari’s sounds into a dense new work that emphasises the insistently pulsing rhythms of the source material. In this realisation with O’Rourke, the piece becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape calls up Luc Ferrari’s classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the swarming electronics bring to mind O’Rourke's Steamroom work or even the vast expanses of Roland Kayn.

22/12/2017 GUILIN SYNTHETIC DAYDREAM 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream is a perceptual trap. Inspired by an experience of intense perceptive disorientation while crossing a market in China, Eve Aboulkheir reinstantiates, in the field of sounds, the swirling and anamorphic universe of thwarted perceptions, surrounding multitudes and shifted sensations. She thus constructs a dreamlike and artificial universe, suspended and hyperactive, which is both an electronic vortex sucking us in and a mechanical ballet developing its arabesques around us, caught and fascinated by these volutes of sound that fracture like a kaleidoscope in which our eyes-ears are immersed. 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream approaches the musical form in the most direct way possible, i.e. through its effects and its empire on our sensorium. 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream est un piège à perception. S’inspirant justement d’une expérience de désorientation perceptive intense lors de la traversée d’un marché, en Chine, Eve Aboulkheir réinstancie, dans le champ sonore, l’univers tourbillonnant et anamorphique des perceptions déjouées, des multitudes environnantes, des sensations décalibrées. Elle construit ainsi un univers onirique et artificiel, suspendu et hyperactif, à la fois vortex électronique nous aspirant et ballet mécanique développant ses arabesques autour de nous, piégés et fascinés par ces volutes de sons qui se fractalisent comme un kaléidoscope dans lequel sont plongés nos yeux-oreilles. 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream aborde la forme musicale de la manière la plus directe qui soit, c’est-à-dire à travers ses effets et son empire sur notre sensorium. — HOW TO AVOID ANTS Using concrète techniques to collect, transform and assemble sounds of various origins (sounds of tree branches, leaves, but also guitars or synthesizers), Lasse Marhaug elaborates a dense and subterranean work, which unfolds through the multiple dimensions induced by the great diversity of its sound material. There is a labyrinthine feeling in this work, a feeling that is better understood when the inspiration for the title of the piece How to avoid ants is revealed, a very practical and then poetic undertaking, that of avoiding the anthills lining the path to the forest camp in the kindergarten to which his little girl, who was then frightened of insects, was going. It is such an activity of circumvention, diversion and byways that Lasse Marhaug uses to create an exploratory and evasive music. Utilisant les techniques concrètes pour collecter, transformer et assembler des sons d’origines variés (sons de branches, de feuillages, mais aussi de guitares ou de synthétiseurs), Lasse Marhaug élabore une œuvre dense et souterraine, qui se déploie au travers des multiples dimensions induites par la grande diversité du matériau sonore. Il y a un sentiment labyrinthique dans cette œuvre, sentiment qu’on comprend mieux lorsque se dévoile l’inspiration du titre de la pièce How to avoid ants, entreprise très pratique et devenue poétique, celle d’éviter les fourmilières jalonnant le chemin vers le camp forestier du jardin d’enfant dans lequel se rendait sa petite fille, alors effrayée par les insectes. C’est une telle activité de contournement, de déroute et de chemins de traverse qu’emprunte Lasse Marhaug pour créer une musique exploratoire et évasive. — François J. Bonnet, March 2023

Having made his mark on these pages over the last few years with appearances as part of Japan’s cult entities Goat and YPY, Koshiro Hino’s turn last year as KAKUHAN took things to a whole other level with an album that felt like some alchemical mix of elements borrowed from Autechre, Photek, Arthur Russell and Mica Levi - a complete stylistic futureshock that worked as well in the club as it did fuelling extended flights of the imagination. For 2023, Hino takes us into a completely different headspace, assembling a cast of 11 players - the mighty Joe Talia and KAKUHAN’s other half Yuki Nakagawa among them - for a suite of untamed field recordings, clanging percussion, brass and synthesis that are about as far removed from the diaristic ambient de jour as you could possibly imagine. Instead, the ensemble conjure vibrant sound ecologies teeming with detail, mirroring the natural world and communal traditions to form shapeshifting, organismic soundworlds. ‘Geist II’ was written for 20 speakers, referencing François Bayle's acousmatic music and David Tudor's electro-acoustic environments. It paints a richly detailed scene of a nocturnal rainforest, replete with avian hoots and a skin-crawling patina of insectoid chatter that moves around the soundfield, stealthily growing in density with a more “musical” presence of super low end drone and drums converging form the peripheries to a ritualistic climax. In the second part, focus shifts to remarkably pure percussion-like tropical rain, invaded by swarms of scuttling and winged invertebrates that give way to a water music-like polymetric slosh, resolving to ringing tones and more mellifluous gestures that hark back to GRM’s most poetic, romantic urges. It’s a deeply psychedelic experience that harmonises tiny electronic fluctuations with bird calls and scraped, resonant drones that phase in-and-out of the mix. It's sound you can practically chew, and another crucial despatch from the contemporary Japanese avant-garde

MINOS CIRCUIT Minos Circuit is the resonance of a double exploration, that of an instrument, the bassoon - an instrument dear to Dafne Vicente-Sandoval - and that of a listening, of a gaze, almost. The first exploration deconstructs the instrument, tearing it apart, reducing it to an archipelago of sound bodies stimulated by an electro-acoustic device that generates feedback and infiltrates each part of the bassoon, in order to carry out a methodical, systematic examination. The second exploration is the inner one of attention and listening, the one that measures, at each moment, the necessity or not of an intervention in the very act of the musical work, of this subtle balance that is established between composition and observation, between action and contemplation. Minos Circuit est la mise en résonance d’une exploration double, celle d’un instrument, le basson — instrument cher à Dafne Vicente-Sandoval — et celle d’une écoute, d’un regard, presque. La première exploration déconstruit l’instrument, le met en pièce, le réduisant en un archipel de corps sonores stimulés par un dispositif électroacoustique générateurs de larsens qui vont s’infiltrer dans chacune des parties du basson, pour en faire l’examen méthodique, systématique. La seconde exploration, c’est celle, intérieure, de l’attention et de l’écoute, celle qui mesure, à chaque instant, la nécessité ou non d’une intervention dans l’agir même de l’œuvre, de cette bascule subtile qui s’établit entre composition et observation, entre action et contemplation. — TRANSFIGURATION 4 Both a “meditation on musical ruins” and “a study of the material of Richard Strauss’s Metamorfosen”, Transfiguration 4 works on the musical fragment as an expressive and poetic possibility that can be deployed below or beyond simple musical syntax, a syntax that is still too often equated with music itself. What Lars Petter Hagen highlights in this remarkable work is that the power of music lies at its fringes, that is, at the edge of its own disappearance. Transfiguration 4 floats in a particularly moving way in these troubled lands, where nothing is ever resolved, and where everything, however, is suspended, like a stream of blurred memories that memory would summon to form an intuition. A musical intuition. A la fois « méditation sur les ruines musicales » et « étude du matériau de Metamorfosen de Richard Strauss », Transfiguration 4 travaille le fragment musical comme possibilité expressive, poétique, pouvant se déployer en-deçà ou au-delà de la simple syntaxe musicale, syntaxe encore trop souvent assimilée à la musique même. Ce que met en lumière Lars Petter Hagen dans cette œuvre remarquable, c’est que la puissance de la musique se situe à ses franges, c’est-à-dire aux lisières de sa propre disparition. Transfiguration 4 flotte de manière particulièrement émouvante dans ces contrées troubles, où rien jamais ne se résout, et où tout, pourtant, se suspend, comme un flux de souvenirs flous que la mémoire convoquerait pour former une intuition. Une intuition musicale.

IS THERE ANYTHING AFTER NOTHING IF EVERYTHING IS ALREADY HERE IN A VIBRATION OF A FEEL STRING “SPACE IS AIR I BREATHE” SHE SAID BODY NARRATING MEMORIES THERE IS NO GOOD OR BAD ANYMORE ONLY WHAT IT IS HEAR ME HEAR THE WIND HEAR THE GRASS DANCING ONE BIG PAINTING CALLED LIFE FROM ONE TO ANOTHER GIVING FROM OTHER TO SELF CARE HOLDING FOAM OF DAYS IS PRECARIOUS CAN BE PRECIOUS FENCE UP AND WATER THE GARDEN LAST CALL LASTS FOREVER GROW GONE WILD INTO CRUMBLES OF TIME CAR ROOM WITH A VIEW REMEMBER HOW A NIGHT COULD BE A DAY … AREN’T WE ALL HERE TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T

Experimental musician John Also Bennett’s latest full-length emerged from a bicoastal pandemic road trip through the badlands of South Dakota. Moved by the scale and complexity of the landscape – “remnants of an ancient seafloor mixed with the ash of a volcanic eruption, eroded over millennia and now resembling the tangled folds of earth’s brain” – he sculpted a series of stark, microtonal arrangements using a 1940’s Oahu lap steel guitar, a Yamaha SY77 multi-timbral synthesizer, and field recordings. The following year, upon relocating with his wife (Kranky composer Christina Vantzou) to the cliffside village of Livaniana on the island of Crete, Bennett discovered a method of translating his minimalist lap steel phrases into live MIDI information, which he then used to trigger different waveforms to extend the resonance of the instrument. This multi-layered generative process resulted in a collection as vast and bewildering as the terrain that inspired it: Out there in the middle of nowhere. Opening with the desolate 15-minute “Nowhere,” Bennett’s playing is both glacial and geological, attuned to “the wonder and absolute emptiness” of the Badlands as “an infinite living sculpture.” Notes stretch, shift, and drift into vistas of twilit silence. Footsteps crunch across dry soil and rocky ravines, beneath skies stretching to the horizon. The use of extreme glissandos conjures a sense of windswept plains and winding canyons, primordial and unpopulated. Even outlier “Spectral Valley” – one of the few nods towards Bennett’s work in progressive kosmische trio Forma – unfolds with patient grandeur, rich swells of electronics gleaming in long golden arcs. Closing track “Embrosnerόs” (named for the verdant interior Cretan village where it was recorded) best embodies the album’s cinematic liminality, at the axis of barren and beatific. Gestural breaths of lap steel shimmer in sparkling air, with echoes of both the dusty West and some forgotten paradise. Bennett describes its creation as taking place “mostly during sunset hours, blanketed by waves of cicadas as sheep bells twinkled in the distance.” A micro-tuned DX7 radiates in the periphery while the guitar’s strings hang and reverberate like deepening shadows at dusk.

COMPUMA has released his long-awaited first solo album "A View" on his own label <SOMETHING ABOUT>.

This is an full-length album based on the music for the play "View" commissioned in fall of 2021 by the theater group "Blue Egonak" based in Kitakyushu. The album contains 9 original songs and 2 dub mixes, totaling 11 songs, newly reworked with co-producer hacchi (Urban Volcano Sounds / Deavid Soul).

In addition to his inexhaustible DJ and music selection activities, COMPUMA has released a number of collaborations and remixes, including a 2007 album
as Smurphies' Fearless Bunch [Smurph-Otokogumi] (reissued on vinyl in 2021) and its predecessor Asteroid Desert Songs [ADS], as well as duo works with Ken Takehisa (KIRIHITO)). COMPUMA has also released a number of collaborations and remixes, but this is his first album as a solo artist. Recently, his DJ trio "Akuma no Numa" with Dr. Nishimura and Awano, has been getting a lot of attention, and their performances have been introduced on radio shows overseas.

The sound, including electronic sounds, field recordings, and the space between them, evokes a variety of landscapes, and that quietly stimulates your imagination. It is a work that will have a unique presence in the next wave of the new age ambient/environmental music revival that has been emerging in the global ambient/IDM scene.

One of the two dub mixes included on the album, "Vision(Flowmotion in Dub)" is a re-work of "Flowmotion(IN DUB)" which will be included in  "Midnight is Comin'", a compilation curated by ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U scheduled for release in May on the Singapore label Midnight Shift. The other dub mix is a version of "View 2", done by Naoyuki Uchida who is known for his work on LITTLE TEMPO, Oki Dub Ainu Band and more recently GEZAN's "KLUE".

Album is mastered by Soichiro Nakamura of Peace Music, who has worked with Shintaro Sakamoto, OGRE YOU ASSHOLE, and countless artists. Artwork is by Tomoo Gokita, a world-renowned painter who is also known in Japan for his jacket art for META FIVE and TOWA TEI. Design is by Satoshi Suzuki. Gokita and Suzuki, both of whom have worked on COMPUMA's previous products.
(text by Yusuke Kawamura)

LIL MOFO

Includes Download Code for the live recording and a new remix "View 2 Electro" (remix of "View2" from the
album "A View").

Compuma : Electronics, Synthesizer
Naoyuki Uchida:Dub Mix
Kiyotaka Sumiyoshi:Movie

"A View" release party held at WWW Shibuya on Sept.30 2022 has been reproduced on video. Video footage
was added to the live recording from the show.

Mastered by Naoyuki Uchida ( except “View 2 Electro” by hacchi )
Produced by Compuma for Something About Productions 2023
Design : Satoshi Suzuki

The music on this recording is performed by a kind of fictitious chamber ensemble situated in an imaginary room outlined by textures that alternate between gestural foreground and passive landscape. The three pieces contained within this release are tied together by sharing similar harmonic material and instrumentation and could ideally be perceived as parts of one long performance stretching through the two sides of the record. The textural room in which this musical performance operates is unreliable, unstable, constantly shifting in size and activity from sparse and open to dense and claustrophobic. Inside this non-euclidean performance space a chamber ensemble made up of zithers expanded through analog tape transposition, harmonium and organ, double bass, digital FM, feedback-convolution and Serge modular synthesizer perform a music made from justly tuned intervals arranged in a way that blurs the distinction between traditional minor and major tonal harmony in favor of harmonic progression within an essentially modal framework. In terms of the material used to make these pieces, essentially all non-harmonic sounds are contaminated field-recordings. They have gone through a sort of feedback process between digital and analog, or acoustic, processing where field-recorded material has been edited, processed and re-amplified and recorded again in acoustic spaces that shape the character of the material and imprint acoustic identities on the recordings. The tonal instruments were treated in a process analogous to this - harmonic material built from recordings and digitally generated synthesis was recorded, transcribed, rearranged and overdubbed again with additional electronic or acoustic instruments to form a composite electroacoustic instrumental sound.

“The Concert” is the first discographic collaboration between percussionist Alexandre Babel and visual artist Latifa Echakhch. The record is intimately linked to the eponymous exhibition presented at the Swiss Pavilion during the 59th Venice Art Bienniale. For her exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion, Latifa Echakhch created an orchestrated and enveloping experience, a rhythmic and spatial proposal that allowed the visitor a complete perception of time and of his own body. What is the origin of rhythm? How does the body perceive time? How does the mind rearrange it? Can we substitute one perception for another, the visual for the sound? Can fragments of memory go back in time and recreate a different story? Her proposal entered a dialogue with the building around it, designed by Bruno Giacometti. The artist revisited its architectural programme as well as the prototypical progression of these exhibition spaces, originally defined for the display of classical art. She appropriated the entirety of the spaces, simultaneously exploring continuity, movement and sequence. Their relationship to light, and the different sounds that emerge from them. Yet the exhibition was entirely silent and the musical composition “The Concert” functions as its sound rendering, by following a similar path. This one-sided vinyl is a complementary and inseparable partner piece to the exhibition and its eponymous catalogue, the latter having been published in April 2022 by Sternberg Press. The music features field recordings made at the Swiss Pavilion itself as well as pre-recorded percussion sounds and significant contributions by the Berlin-based musicians Jon Heilbronn, Rebecca Lenton, Theo Nabicht, Nikolaus Schlierf. The record, available only after the closing of Latifa Echakhch’s exhibition offers a concluding phase to the project. The resonance of its sensory score. It reactivates the experience of the physical journey of the installation, without imposing itself as a transcription or an illustration. Through texture, temporality and its totality, the record stands as a resonance of the rhythms that have structured the pavilion, the harmonies that have composed it and the sounds that have inhabited it.

The decision to assemble a boxed set titled Luc Ferrari, l’œuvre électronique [Luc Ferrari, Electronic Works], defining the word electronic in the widest sense possible, meant bringing together an essential part of the composer’s work: tape music without any classical instruments.
From Étude aux accidents (1958) to Arythmiques (2003), the 31 works in this compilation will help the listener to discover all the facets of his art based on “captured” sounds. He tried and tested all the different techniques of studio work: brilliantly elaborated electroacoustic works, radiophonic story-telling or Hörspiele, which he particularly relished, or other semi-improvised works.
This editorial choice is not a way of drawing a hierarchy between on the one hand so-called mixed music (with instruments), which he excelled at, and on the other hand the type of music published here, which only includes recorded sounds. On the contrary, what we aimed to do was to show the strong links he drew between natural sounds and the way he scored them. On this subject, Pierre Schaeffer often talked of the necessary balance between sounds and musicality. The power of recorded sounds alone (voices, landscapes, strange sounds, everyday scenes, etc.) without formal mastery is not enough to hold the listener’s attention for long.
From that point of view, each work of Ferrari’s is a discrete lesson in music. Ferrari was always very lucid when he claimed that a composer was a little like a “journalist” who, through his compositions, witnessed the state of the world while at the same time creating a work of art.
This is another aspect of this edition: as we listen and in filigree, half a century unfolds before us. A committed artist bears witness to technological progress, political awareness, reports and crucial encounters. More than an essential compilation, this boxed set reflects the personality of a diverse, inventive and extraordinarily musical man.

Daniel Teruggi / David Jisse, 2008

Stephan Mathieu's FrequencyLib was originally released in 2001 on Mille Plateaux's Ritornell sublabel. A quintessential document of the late 1990s/early 2000s Pismo PowerBook era of digitally manipulated audio, FrequencyLib is an adept meditation on the entropic possibilities inherent in popular music. Included with this reissue is the complementary Sad Mac Studies EP - first issued in a run of 100 on Robert Meijer's boutique En/Of label. Exploring similar themes/processes as FrequencyLib, Sad Mac Studies reimagines and deconstructs the sonic world of Sesame Street.

FRACTALS (1981), 21’26

Composed at the GMVL from December 1979 to September 1981, this work was commissioned by Fnac.

Fractals are mathematical oddities that, when crossing our path, turn the smallest island into an immensity to be explored.
FRACTALS is a series of short studies, all based on the same sound source. Seeking in the sound and its very logic a proposal upon which a construction is elaborated, each Fractal remains open and is a mere fragment of itself.
FRACTALS, music pieces sculpted in four dimensions, are vast microcosms that can only be inhabited by the mind. Each Fractal can be approached from several angles, far, near, etc. Some can be listened to at different speeds, forwards or backwards.
FRACTALS: amorphous and endless music pieces whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
FRACTALS are available in stereo (34'32), in 8 tracks for concerts, and as "spare parts" (separate mixing tracks open to new combinations).

Brain Fever (2017), 18'00

Wherever you may be in the forest of South India, the Brain Fever bird, together with the Seven Sisters, literally gets into your head. Whether it be early morning, daytime, or nighttime, amidst the stridulations of insects, its song utterly reflects Indian life: sonorous, noisy, insistent, dense, overcrowded, mobile, swarming, frantic, overheated, deprived of rest and sleep.
Brain Fever echoes sonic images caught in the Aurovillian forest, near Pondicherry, and rich fragments of improvisations made in Lyon on analog sound synthesis or feedback devices, the kind I used to do in the first GMVL studios.

Brain Fever is dedicated to Sofia Jannok, a musician and sàmi singer.

I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind.
The sky and its forces: our ally.
A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined.”
Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves
François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

Luc Ferrari, a master who continues to influence and be evaluated. Held at the Palais Galliera in Paris in 1975, an unreleased work with four soundtracks designed for multimedia / audiovisual performances is now available in 2LP. It is a multimedia work that spans four rooms, each with the theme of Power / Profit / Violence / Pollution. Gatefold sleeve specifications. Limited edition of 500 copies from .

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Recital, we present Autumn Fair. A group LP comprised of 44 guest players (full list below), curated and edited together by Sean McCann. Autumn Fair aptly embodies the feeling of Recital as a record label; the infusion of abstract sound art and sentimental beauty – performed by both younger and older generations of artists. Oren Ambarchi - guitar, Ed Atkins - paper shredder, Jason Bannon - family, Derek Baron - keyboard, Karla Borecky - upright piano, Andrew Chalk - guitar, crys cole - birds, Loren Connors - guitar, Philip Corner - grand piano, Maxwell August Croy - whistle, Sarah Davachi - electronics, Aaron Dilloway - SFX, Delphine Dora - voice, Giovanni Fontana - voice, Scott Foust - trumpet, Peter Friel - impression, Malcolm Green - camera, Judith Hamann - cello / voice, Mark Harwood - speech, Forest Juziuk - voice, Johnny Kay - tapping, Kajsa Lindgren - hydrophone, Rob Magill - guitar, Lia Mazzari - whip, Molly McCann - flute, Sean McCann - editing / voice, Nour Mobarak - voice sampler, Azikiwe Mohammed - interview, Charlie Morrow - MIDI piano, Kiera Mulhern - SFX, Zachary Paul - violin, claire rousay - SFX, Michel Samson - violin, Troy Schafer - strings, Eric Schmid - tone generator, Ben Schumacher - SFX, Tom James Scott - keyboard / SFX, Asha Sheshadri - reading, Patrick Shiroishi - winds, Sydney Spann - voice, Matthew Sullivan - instruments, Flora Sullivan-Kelly - percussion, Connor Tomaka - SFX / synth, Alex Twomey - upright piano. I wont go into too much detail on the album itself, but after many twists and turns, the album concludes with “Recital Program,” an intense track that manically collages two-second excerpts from every Recital album to date. I extend a sincere ‘thank you’ for all the incredible support for Recital over the past decade.