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In Kasimyn's own words, the phrase "BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL" signifies a "Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice," encompassing the emotions born out of a deep dive into the Indonesian war archives. These archives include a trove of photographs documenting the era of Dutch rule, captured through the lens of the colonizers themselves. It is from this point of departure that the project HULUBALANG was born.
HULUBALANG's gaze is drawn to the peripheral figures populating these historical records. These secondary characters, devoid of individual significance, bear no names, receive no recognition, and serve as props in the broader narrative of history. Simultaneously, they become indispensable instruments in acquiring "lessons learned" from the perspectives of both the victors and the vanquished. Within this framework, the notion of TUMBAL, the non-belligerent "sacrifice," assumes a weight surpassing its translation. TUMBAL neither acts as a victim nor martyrs itself for its cause. It hauntingly reminds us of the systemic curse perpetually engendering disillusionment.
BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL is a personal act of catharsis stemming from a long lineage of anger. It stands as a tribute to a village whose ritualistic dance, one night, was disrupted by external forces, causing the tune to shatter and leaving the dance caught in a space between innocence and pain.
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Kusnah berjalan lamban di tepi gumuk pasir, di sebrang pesisir pantai. Di sini lebih aman pikirnya. Di garis horizon dia melihat hamparan fata morgana. Di pikirannya fata morgana jauh lebih baik sebagai tujuan ketimbang dia harus diam dan menetap di desa: tubuhnya diperlukan untuk persembahan, mungkin buat para dewa-dewa yang haus akan anatomi dan spirit dari human being atau buat pembangunan yang dibangun oleh darah dan konstruksi tulang-tulang. Mungkin juga sebagai tumbal politik. Pikirnya, di tempat dimana politik berkelindan dengan nyawa, disitu dunia betul-betul sedang bekerja.
Sambil menatap nanar tumpukan tiram di pesisir pantai, di kepalanya terdengar musik-musik pesta dengan dentuman nakal dan dawai berantakan. Sebuah umwelt. Lagu-lagu kemenangan yang sering ia putar keras-keras dipikirannya ketika ia merasa kalah. Bukan kalah, tapi mengalah. Dalam hidupnya, terlalu banyak waktu dia bagi untuk mengalah. Dia melihat tumpukan tiram dengan miris. Dia berpikir keras mengapa manusia melihat tiram sebagai makhluk rendahan dibandingkan species lebih advance seperti manusia, oh lebih tepatnya, dia mengingat perkataan Plato bahwa manusia hedonist sama saja dengan seekor tiram. Hidup hanya dalam momen hari ini dan saat ini.
Tapi Kusnah merasa ia adalah manusia hedonist. Dia hidup untuk hari ini dan saat ini. Dia hidup bukan untuk progress. Persetan dengan progress dan pembangunan pikirnya. Dia hidup untuk menikmati waktu. Dia hidup untuk bersenang-senang. Jadi baginya, Plato ada benarnya. Sambil melihat lagi si tiram dengan sangat teliti, lagu-lagu di kepalanya terdengar semakin nyaring. Dia bertanya pada dirinya sendiri: sebagai hewan hedonist yang hanya diam dan menikmati deburan ombak, apakah para tiram ini juga memiliki musik yang berputar dalam tubuhnya dan membuat merasa menang diantara lautan kekalahan?
Tatapan Kusnah semakin intense. Dari belakang terdengar bunyi suara langkah manusia-manusia berlari bergerombolan. Satu, dua, tiga, empat bunyi familiar sepatu lars. Lima, enam, tujuh bunyi derap sendal jepit. Fata morgana di gumuk pasir buyar seketika diterobos gerombolan haus darah. Semakin lama semakin ia dengar samar-samar suara teriakan. “Itu dia orangnya!” terdengar sayup-sayup tapi mengeras. Langkah-langkah itu semakin kencang. Musik di kepala Kusnah pun semakin kencang terdengar. Tak butuh waktu lama hingga ia mulai menari. Seperti orang kesurupan kalau kata banyak orang. Tapi dia tidak kesurupan, dia hanya menikmati musik yang berputar dikepalanya. Berpuluh-puluh orang mulai terlihat secara high-definition ketika Kusnah membuka kelopak matanya.
“Akan kami persembahkan kamu kepada para dewa pembangunan!” teriak para lelaki dengan parang dan golok ditangannya. Kusnah menari seperti kerasukan. “Ayo! Tangkap dia” para lelaki itu bergegas mendatangi Kusnah, membawa tali tambang untuk mengikat dirinya. Kusnah tersenyum lebar, sambil tidak bisa berhenti menari.
“Ambil tubuhku, tapi aku tidak akan pernah membagikan hulubalang yang mengaum di dipikiranku!”
Kepala Kusnah terpisah dari badannya, persis setelah dia meneriakkan kalimat tersebut.
Riar Rizaldi
Ditulis ketika mendengarkan album pertama dari Hulubalang.
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Aditya Surya Taruna (aka Kasimyn) is one half of the Indonesian electronic duo Gabbar Modus Operandi known for their acclaimed records PUXXXIMAXXX and HOXXXYA (out via Yes No Wave and SVBKVLT, respectively) and overwhelming, hyper-active and unprecedented live experiences which have made them a popular act on several festivals of experimental music. In 2022, Kasimyn contributed with beats on Björk's latest album, Fossora, featured on three tracks: "Atopos", "Trölla-Gabba", and "Fossora”, and appears in two of the album’s music videos Atopos and Fossora. After joining Björk on her Cornucopia tour in Japan, Kasimyn is announcing his solo album on Drowned by Locals under his new project HULUBALANG.
The tape Wildlife & it’s Results by Sue Fishbein, reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, captures a collage-based soundpiece from early 1980s San Francisco. A key figure in the mail art network, Fishbein constructs an aural patchwork where found sound, irony, and cultural debris converge into a sharp yet playful critique of everyday noise.
Counter Culture Chronicles unveils Wildlife & it’s Results, a rare sound collage by Sue Fishbein, recorded in the early 1980s when San Francisco’s underground scenes provided fertile ground for cross-disciplinary exchange. Best known as a central force in the mail art network, Fishbein used sound as another medium of correspondence—fragmented, suggestive, and defiantly anti-hierarchical.
In this piece, wildlife is less a subject than a metaphor for unruly activity: snatches of found recordings, cut-up voices, urban din, and unexpected silences intertwine in a restless composition. The results are both humorous and disorienting, echoing the anarchic spirit of mail art’s international dialogues. By treating sound as fungible material, Fishbein extends her cut-and-paste aesthetic into the aural domain, challenging notions of authorship and form.
Wildlife & it’s Results carries the immediacy of a cassette-era experiment yet resonates today as a prescient reflection on media saturation, excess, and play. More document than performance, more collage than composition, the work encapsulates Fishbein’s singular ability to twist fragments into a sonic correspondence that remains vital, unruly, and fiercely independent.
'TTT grip Reckless Records don and record collecting heavyweight Toru Yoneyama on a mad cosmic noise mission sparked off with bony dancehall and mutant tekno-electro pulses – think Conrad Schnitzler meets Jeff Mills at Heinrich Mueller's lab afterhours, it's that wild.
The 92 minute 'Rescue at SW4' is among the best of TTT's already deadly run of '25 so far. Toru's eight trax take all the time needed – nearly up to 20′, and more often at least 10′ – to work out unpredictable permutations of spiny machine rhythm and rudely activated arp leads that seem to have a jazz-noise-tekno mind of their own.
An ideal case in point is the opening passage '052 T.HOLE', which spends the first 10 mins coaxing analog machines to sputter like a Schnitzler-meets-Dilloway jam, overeasy on the curdled chromatic distortion, before crystallising into a gnashing dancehall and Kongo tekno drum pattern whilst the synth wheezes psychoactive spumes. The transition is as effective and it is unexpected, and sets the tone for a class session of strangely sidewinding treats.
'BITT 35ER' stays in the longform lane with a more direct, if wobbly, traction from the offing, recalling some noisy Drexciyan probe and Mills' offbeat jazz-techno treks, whilst a pair of acrid palate cleansers set off a 2nd half encompassing pulsating, kosmiche dub techno noise in 'SPKXXX042', to Ra-esque wormholer '254222 BC' resolving in coiled acid tekno, and the stewed 303 gunk of '052 T.HOLE (048 bottoms)'.' (Boomkat, June 2025)
"I don’t keep photographs, old letters, keepsakes or memorabilia.
I have sound-files, thousands of them, un-used, un-heard: folders of field recordings; sonic sketches; experiments that failed but weren’t deleted. The files are saved on hard drives or the cards of obsolete pieces of equipment replaced – bit by dusty bit – with something new, clean and shiny.
A remnant is what’s left over when the greater part it once belonged to has been used up, removed, or destroyed. I think of my sound-files like this, the remains of ideas, of a time too.
Remnants.
The sound-files that became this album were recorded through a particular period in my life when I found myself in flux, between jobs, flats, geographical areas; after the end of one thing, but before
the next thing had started. The recordings felt restless too…
They were packed up in boxes and moved across town.
Finding them again years later was disorientating. Background sounds that had been hum-drum were suddenly, even sickeningly vivid. The chatter of the crew who would turn up each day to drink beer in the square behind my building, the crows that would rattle and click in the tree hanging over
my small roof terrace, the thrum of aeroplane engines which ebbed and flowed without end.
There were sounds from excursions too: the street preachers of Brixton; some untypically groovy Hari Krishnas in Ramsgate; an orchestra tuning up in a church. There was something vertiginous and nauseous about the nostalgia I felt on the first listen, but I soon fell into a process of “fixing” all the loops and sketches, tugging them into shape, threading them into a whole tapestry.
Once this process came to an end they were put away once again…
Things have their time. I dug the project out for a late-night listening session with an old friend who’d known that place and that period in my life. Hearing them with him changed them. They were no longer the sonic equivalent of those old photos and letters I never wanted to keep; they became something else, more communal.
An album.
We hold on to all kinds of memories – bits and pieces, fragments, remnants we so rarely think to share.
Here are some of mine." - The Dengie Hundred
EM Records is proud to present “8 Automated Works”, the first full release by Componium Ensemble, an “indeterminate chamber music” ensemble helmed by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks. Situated in a lineage of automated music that traces back to the ancient Greeks, Doran uses the possibilities of digital technology and its ability to automate a huge range of virtual instruments to move beyond human impulses and limitations to allow “new shapes to emerge”. Dedicated also to Noah Creshevsky, pioneer of what can be considered cyber-human music, Componium Ensemble features a wide and intriguing range of instruments including prepared piano, bowed harpsichord, celesta, bass clarinet, flute, cello, bamboo tingklik and more, often in multiple groupings. Despite this variety of instrumentation and the seemingly formidable theoretical underpinnings, the music is very accessible and attractive, spaciousand fresh, with a light touch and a sophisticated melodic sense which will appeal to pop fans as well as classical/contemporary music listeners. The album is mixed by longtime collaborator Joe Williams (Motion Graphics, Lifted) and available in 10-inch vinyl, CD and Digital formats, with EN/JP liner notes by Doran and a hyper-realistic cover by Japanese visual artist/graphic designer Kai Yoshizawa, using 3DCG software. The CD and Digital formats also feature a Carl Stone remix bonus track.
“The history of automated instruments reaches back as far as Archimedes and his "organum hydraulicum”, but it was the Banū Mūsā brothers in 9th-century Baghdad who first perfected the concept of a programmable, automated musician: a mechanically controlled flute which performed using a cistern’s hydraulic water pressure and a system of arrangeable punchcards using a visionary proto-MIDI structure. As European clock-making and mechanical music caught up to the Islamic Golden Age a millennium later, automated instruments intersected with aleatoric composition in Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel’s “self composing” Componium, a mechanical organ with two irregularly-shifting barrels that is said to have been able to arrange upwards of 55 trillion variations of an 80 bar piece divided into alternating 2 bar sections of pins. It is this intersection of chance systems and musical automatons that forms the terrain for the pieces on this release.
These basic principles remain unchanged in the contemporary virtual studio, but the array of automatable instruments within our software systems has widened to a near-unfathomable degree (not to mention the speed and ease in which they can be summoned). Virtual players can be manipulated by far deeper aleatoric processes of note randomization, tempos modulated by the pseudo-naturalistic values of perlin noise, with even the physical properties of instruments erratically contorted and continuously in flux...” - S. Doran (from the album’s liner notes)
EM Records is proud to present “8 Automated Works”, the first full release by Componium Ensemble, an “indeterminate chamber music” ensemble helmed by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks. Situated in a lineage of automated music that traces back to the ancient Greeks, Doran uses the possibilities of digital technology and its ability to automate a huge range of virtual instruments to move beyond human impulses and limitations to allow “new shapes to emerge”. Dedicated also to Noah Creshevsky, pioneer of what can be considered cyber-human music, Componium Ensemble features a wide and intriguing range of instruments including prepared piano, bowed harpsichord, celesta, bass clarinet, flute, cello, bamboo tingklik and more, often in multiple groupings. Despite this variety of instrumentation and the seemingly formidable theoretical underpinnings, the music is very accessible and attractive, spaciousand fresh, with a light touch and a sophisticated melodic sense which will appeal to pop fans as well as classical/contemporary music listeners. The album is mixed by longtime collaborator Joe Williams (Motion Graphics, Lifted) and available in 10-inch vinyl, CD and Digital formats, with EN/JP liner notes by Doran and a hyper-realistic cover by Japanese visual artist/graphic designer Kai Yoshizawa, using 3DCG software. The CD and Digital formats also feature a Carl Stone remix bonus track.
“The history of automated instruments reaches back as far as Archimedes and his "organum hydraulicum”, but it was the Banū Mūsā brothers in 9th-century Baghdad who first perfected the concept of a programmable, automated musician: a mechanically controlled flute which performed using a cistern’s hydraulic water pressure and a system of arrangeable punchcards using a visionary proto-MIDI structure. As European clock-making and mechanical music caught up to the Islamic Golden Age a millennium later, automated instruments intersected with aleatoric composition in Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel’s “self composing” Componium, a mechanical organ with two irregularly-shifting barrels that is said to have been able to arrange upwards of 55 trillion variations of an 80 bar piece divided into alternating 2 bar sections of pins. It is this intersection of chance systems and musical automatons that forms the terrain for the pieces on this release.
These basic principles remain unchanged in the contemporary virtual studio, but the array of automatable instruments within our software systems has widened to a near-unfathomable degree (not to mention the speed and ease in which they can be summoned). Virtual players can be manipulated by far deeper aleatoric processes of note randomization, tempos modulated by the pseudo-naturalistic values of perlin noise, with even the physical properties of instruments erratically contorted and continuously in flux...” - S. Doran (from the album’s liner notes)
live during the 4th anniversary of Sagome at Cafe Oto, London - 20th January 2024 ( January Jenilek + Ottomani Parker Live)
Recorded in one straight take - no over dubbing.
Angus MacLise, the first drummer for the Velvet Underground, was a poet, composer, and a member of The Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young.
The "Tapes" 3CD Box is the first-ever reissue of a 3-cassette compilation that Pleasure Editions originally released in 2015, limited to only 100 copies. The 3CD box set comes with a miniature poster and track lists, and each CD has a paper sleeve that reproduces the original cassette card artwork. This comprehensive 3CD box set is over three hours in length and includes session recordings with Tony Conrad and William Breeze (of Coil, Current 93, and Psychic TV), mystical recordings from the filming of Ira Cohen's "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" (1968), shortwave experiments, and sounds of Tibetan Buddhist monks recorded by MacLise.
The "Tapes" compilation features excerpts from the archives of the Angus MacLise Papers, which are held at Columbia University Library. The archives contain over 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings of live improvised music, theatrical performances, and sound experiments created by MacLise and his associates during the 1960s and 1970s. MacLise produced the original recordings in his own unique style, characterized by rough and peculiar editing.
The release is curated and sequenced by Will Cameron and Mark Iosifescu.
Jim O'Rourke completed a new sound restoration and mastering of the recordings in 2023.
The 3CD box comes with a miniature poster, a sheet of track list, and each CD comes with a paper sleeve which reproduces the original cassette sleeve artwork.
SDK is the collaboration between Stano and David Kitt. Stano, a post-punk pioneer from Dublin, is known for his strikingly individual work. A recurring collaborator with All City, Going Back to the Unknown marks his first new material for the label and his return to vocal work after many years.
The project began after a chance meeting at All City led to a connection with David Kitt. In Kitt’s studio, guitars, pedals, tape delay, and synths combined to form dense, dreamlike textures. The music moves between ambient atmospheres, layered guitars, and fractured song forms. Stano’s words appear only where the music calls for them:
“I just turned the pages until the right lyric appeared — I like when the music dictates what the words should be.”
On the collaborative process, Stano adds:
“There wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just a reaction to what David was playing. It seemed to happen organically, we were really on the same wavelength. At the end of that day I knew we had something really interesting.”
The result is Going Back to the Unknown, a collection shaped as much by intuition and chance as by design. The album is completed by Kitt’s contribution “Fireworks,” which seals the record’s arc.
Originally released in 1987 on a private cassette - this is the first vinyl release of the absolute gem. Comes with obi strip.
Masahiro Sugaya is a Japanese composer with a prolific career in music for film, television, and the performing arts. Renowned for crafting soundscapes that invite deep contemplation, his music blends synthesizers, field recordings, and traditional Japanese instruments, achieving a delicate balance between minimalism, ambient, and folk influences.
In addition to his experimental compositions, Sugaya has been a pivotal figure in Japanese television and cinema. He collaborated with NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, creating soundtracks for documentaries and educational programs that explored both the everyday and the extraordinary. His ability to translate emotions and landscapes into sound has made him stand out in projects that connect the visual and the musical.
In cinema, Sugaya worked as an arranger for GONTITI, the iconic Japanese guitar duo, and contributed to soundtracks for renowned directors such as Hirokazu Koreeda. His work captures the stillness and subtleties of everyday life, resonating deeply with audiences.
The Pocket of Fever, originally conceived in 1987 as a soundtrack for Pappa Tarahumara’s avant-garde dance company, merges traditional Japanese elements with modern compositional techniques, reflecting the fluid and dreamlike choreography. The album shifts between nostalgia, as in Green of the Future, and the poetic hypnosis of Conversation with the Wind. These pieces invite the listener to explore deeply evocative and intimate sonic landscapes.
Now available for the first time on vinyl, this album was originally released solely on cassette and has been carefully remastered to preserve its delicate textures and vibrant sound. Presented in a limited edition, The Pocket of Fever remains essential for fans of ambient and experimental music. Inspired by figures such as Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada, and Brian Eno, this timeless masterpiece invites introspection and the appreciation of its serene beauty.
Ostinato as Resistance: Rafael Anton Irisarri’s Landmark Work Reimagined
Marking the tenth anniversary of the American composer’s critically acclaimed album, this new edition arrives renewed, both sonically and visually.
First released in 2015 during a period of personal upheaval and creative reinvention, it endures as a testament to resilience, transformation, and the connection we hold with the places that shape us.
Written in the aftermath of a devastating theft, A Fragile Geography was born out of loss. Just days before a cross-country move to New York, Irisarri’s entire Seattle-based studio was wiped out. Instruments. Recordings. Archives. Gone without a trace. He arrived on the East Coast to an empty room and the daunting task of starting over.
“This album wasn’t just a record; it was a lifeline,” Irisarri reflects. “It became a way to process the emotional chaos that followed: uprooting, instability, and ultimately, the slow, intuitive rebuilding of a life.”
Composed and recorded in the rural woods of the Hudson Valley, the album took shape in seclusion, surrounded by nature, and through a process guided by improvisation. Embracing limitations, Irisarri wove textural layers of field recordings with half-remembered melodies from his Seattle years, piecing them together like fragments of memory. Tracks like “Displacement,” “Hiatus,” and “Persistence” juxtaposed haunting stillness with restless momentum, mapping an inner terrain of grief, catharsis, and rebirth.
Among its defining sounds is “Empire Systems,” a monumental centerpiece built around a simple four-chord progression, organ textures, and guitar drones. Gradually, the track expands into layers of immersive loops and thick, enveloping distortion that wash over the listener like a rolling wave. Often cited as the album’s most majestic passage, it captures Irisarri at his most sonically ambitious. With a harmonically saturated structure crafted from restraint and repetition, it remains one of his most recognizable compositions: an exercise in the art of maximal minimalism.
From the outset, “Reprisal” received praise from BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs, who championed the track on her radio show. Her support played a key role in introducing Irisarri’s work to wider audiences and solidifying his place within the lineage of electronic, drone, and experimental sound artists. A slow-burning elegy, the piece emerges from a haze of distortion and sub-bass, with dense, unrelenting drones carrying a sense of mounting tension. Just as it seems to collapse under its own weight, flickers of guitar emerge like distant light through fog. It’s a meditation on dissonance, resolve, and the elusive possibility of release.
The closing track, “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” is steeped in saudade: a longing for Seattle’s dour grey skies, lush green landscapes, and desaturated sunsets. Through it, Irisarri mourns a vanished chapter of life bound to the city, a time documented in scattered mementos and cherished collections, now permanently gone. A reflection on what could never be recovered: an era lost to time. Julia Kent’s looped cello motifs added a melancholic warmth to the track, marking the first collaboration between the two artists and sparking a musical dialogue that would keep growing in the years that followed.
More than a career highlight, A Fragile Geography has laid the foundation for Black Knoll studio, which Irisarri rebuilt from the ground up. The studio has since grown into a creative hub for countless projects, with Irisarri engineering records for iconic music figures like Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt, Julianna Barwick, and many others. Carried by its lasting influence, the album has quietly captured the ear of a younger generation, its sound and emotional arc finding new listeners in unexpected corners.
The album’s new visual language was reimagined in collaboration with Mexico City–based designer Daniel Castrejón. Irisarri captured ghostly images at Gaztelugatxeko Doniene, a historic coastal site in Bermeo, Euskal Herria. Castrejón then treated the photographs with distressed textures and spectral overlays. The final artwork channels the rugged, elemental forces that shaped both the music and Irisarri’s aesthetic, renewing his ties to ancestral ground inspired by the Basque homeland of his bloodline.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with exceptional attention to detail, this anniversary edition uncovers every nuance in the sound design, enhancing clarity and presence. With each listen, new elements emerge, inviting discovery and reconnection.
“I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” says Irisarri. “I hear adaptation and I'm reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”
Sydney-based Korean drummer and improviser Chloe Kim considers New York's constant movement on this volatile solo workout, exploring heady rhythmelodic cycles, extended percussion techniques and unexpected textures. RIYL Milford Graves, Max Roach, Buddy Rich, Eli Keszler or Chris Corsano. Solo drumming albums are still a rarity, so 'Ratsnake' is already a pretty thrilling prospect, but this one's worth getting a little gassed over. Kim's a pro - a lecturer at Sydney's Conservatorium of Music and a seasoned performer who's played in improv trio Holopeak, alongside Aussie saxophonist Jeremy Rose and with iconic "avant groove" act Medeski Marin & Wood. And 'Ratsnake' is her chance to broadcast her own signature techniques in high definition without interruption; for a drummer who's best-known for playing solo for 100 hours in 10 days (seriously, check '100 Hours' on Bandcamp for the juicy edited highlights), that shouldn't be too hard. 'Ratsnake' is her fifth solo release, but Kim considers it her proper debut album - it's been recorded and mixed by Randall Dunn, after all - and on the title track, she shows us what she's capable of. Her tempo-flexing, circuitous rhythms are front and center, sure, but there's no shortage of tonal experimentation on show. She doesn't play melodies as such, but Kim knows her kit so well that the melodic outlines appear like ghosts, generated by her arsenal of tuned gongs, scraped cymbals and carefully balanced toms. Similarly, on 'Birth Dream' Kim balances out her courtly marches with ringing, regal resonances that she uproots with chaotic fills. The name of the album and some of its track titles relate to Korean folklore; the Korean rat snake is a symbol of abundance, and Kim's mother had seen one in a "conception dream" before Kim was born. So it's hard not to hear a link between the percussionist's living, breathing patterns and the tempo-fluxing rhythms that sit at the center of Korean folk music. She explored these essential beats in 2018 and there are still traces of that framework here; even though Kim's style has been shaped by jazz and free improv, there's still something personal and idiosyncratic in there, just like that rat snake.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra present a limited 12" drawing from 70s and 80s Italian horror & Black Sabbath. "UMO’s 'CURSE' EP reflects these cursed times we find ourselves in. Taking inspiration from Italian horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, the six songs on the release are as cathartic a listen as the band has ever recorded. Featuring both abrasive, Black Sabbath inspired riffs on “BOYS WITH THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WOLVES” as well as the laid back, intricate guitar playing UMO is maybe most famous for on “DEATH COMES FROM THE SKY”, the CURSE EP is the perfect soundtrack to your next confrontation with the void."
An important piece in the history of experimental music, Richard Maxfield's 1969 album “Electronic Music” has been reissued by PAROLE! The album contains electronic music/music concoctions created in the early 1960s while Maxfield was a member of Fluxus and deeply involved with La Monte Young, David Tudor, and others. Pastoral Symphony" is a soundscape of continuous electronic sounds, an innovative experiment at the time. Bacchanale" is a collage of disparate materials, including jazz, Korean folk songs, spoken word, and Terry Jennings' saxophone. Piano Concert for David Tudor" has an underground tension, mixing internal piano techniques with amplified metallic sounds. The “Amazing Grace” piece, which is a minimalist work that anticipates Steve Reich and Terry Riley by layering tape loops at different speeds, greatly expands the possibilities of electronic music of the 1960s, and is also connected to the origins of minimalism and contemporary music. It still has a stimulating resonance. The vintage equipment and hand-crafted collage textures that stand out only on analog vinyl are irresistible!
This work consists of 6 unreleased songs from the 70's and 80's and 7 songs of "Shing Kee" excerpted from the work "Mom's" released by New Albion in 1992. "Shing Kee" (1986), which is a sampling of Schubert's "Bodhi" sung by Akiko Yano, has a great sense of ambience for sustained sounds, and Seth Graham and Kara-Lis Coverdale are also surprised by the timeless three-dimensional electronic sound. , "Shibucho" (1984) and "Dong Il Jang" (1982) are also ambitious works in which cut-ups were attempted using sampling methods. Our Rashad Becker is in charge of mastering. An avant-garde electronics masterpiece that unfortunately demonstrated a strange soundscape like melting modern architecture. Even if I listen to it now, it doesn't feel old at all. Recommended for a wide range of people from DJ material to new age to ambient drone lovers. A gatefold specification & booklet & DL code limited track is also included.
Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like an universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans . This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition.
Wolfgang Voigt makes a return to Astral Industries, seeing the continuation of his long-running Rückverzauberung (Reverse Enchantment) series. In line with previous volumes, one may expect the unconventional, idiosyncratic sound Voigt is reputed for. ‘Im Tunnel’ however, takes a more concentrated viewpoint - a metaphysical transmutation that brings with it an experience of mind-melting drones and swelling intensity.
Entering the tunnel is like opening a portal, but as the fabric of time-space begins to collapse on itself, it feels more like a rude awakening. Pulsing undulations rise and fall like the turbines of a spacecraft, marked by dissonant chords and a simmering cloud of complex and ever-shifting textures. Pushing thresholds and expectations, the unearthly nature of the tunnel over time disintegrates any proposed state of completion. A treacherous voyage, and possibly bewildering for some, the work is both unrelenting and uncompromising. Should one decide to step into the tunnel, be sure to take all necessary precautions and procedures.
