MUSIC

Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.

This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.

Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.

This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

Sound Reporters was a Dutch publishing company that specialised in anthropology, religion, and history, releasing unique documents of the cultural multiplicity of human societies and their importance. These recordings were originally released on cassette in 1988, and consist of field recordings made on the Greek island of Amorgos, part of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. The release was jointly credited to the painter Harry Van Essen, who lived for several years on the island and recorded its soundscapes, and also to the ethnomusicologist and founder of Sound Reporters, Fred Gales, who mixed the recordings.

The recordings consist of sketched amalgams of local sounds from Egiali, a port in the northeast of the island. The first half is a soundscape deeply rooted in the island people’s daily lives, alternating sounds of the sea with popular music, recitations of poetry, the sounds of fishing boats, people playing boardgames, a party. The second half takes us out of the village and into the mountains, unveiling the island’s unadorned natural environment: the sounds of cicadas, the buzz of honeybees, the bells of the large herds of goats left out to pasture, etc.

"The Sound Leaves" began as an interactive sound performance and installation based around humans’ impact on the environment and how that impact is altering the sonic landscape of our world. As ecosystems change due to climate collapse, the sound of those ecosystems changes too. "The Sound Leaves" used an amplified collection of autumn leaves to encourage participants to listen closely to how their actions alter the sounds of the fallen leaves by walking on and through them for a period of time. By amplifying these sounds, processing and mixing them live, and playing them back via a set of speakers directed at the installation, the performance heightened the sonic changes participants’ actions create. From that performance, a sound piece by the same name was composed using the recorded sounds with additional instrumentation. It was installed as a temporary exhibition on site at Philbrook Musuem of Art during the winter of 2023, emanating from a grove of oak and elm trees. A year later, as the climate crisis worsened, those same sounds were reprocessed and reconsidered, creating a more ghost-like approach, "In Collapse."

It has taken me over 50 years to write these words. Since my initial successes in the 1970’s many have urged me to “release” unpublished works from the same period, pieces that featured the VCS3 synths or the amazing Serge (which I regret not having used enough) or pieces featuring soundscapes from my classic environmental composition style. For reasons of persistence and empathy, Lawrence English at Room 40 was the most persuasive; now, nearly 3 years after our agreement, a new publication composed with materials from that inceptive period has come to fruition. While I’m condemned to live evermore in the past, it is the future where I continue to put my remaining creative energies. Nonetheless, in the creation of these 2 “new” works I did all I could to avoid sentimentalism or get buried by my own history and the musical riches of the late 20th Century. Relistening to these forgotten fragments of old tapes included inspiring and useful surprises.

A note from Cleared Our approach to making records has always involved an exchange of individually created sounds, which are joined together through live improvisation, studio recording, and the use of diagrammatic visual scores. Over the last several years, we have been interested in expanding very small fragments of these discreet pieces of audio into long-form compositions. This process has resulted in a new approach to how we build tracks from the ground up. In this particular workflow, one of us is largely responsible for supplying the main cache of sounds, and the other is responsible for the processing and sequencing of those sounds. As we developed this kind of working relationship, the nature of the material has ventured into a palette that is more electronic. This is perhaps a result of the "collage" aspect of how the audio is arranged inside of a digital environment, as well as our continued discovery and use of new digital processing tools. We are constantly attempting to extract as much as possible out of an initial collection of audio, which typically includes field recordings, synthesis experiments, bits of acoustic instrumentation, and found sounds. In many instances the original sounds are manipulated far beyond their recognizable characteristics, which creates new and unexpected results. We also share a great personal interest in utilizing sounds with different levels of fidelity, as we both enjoy the unique traits inherent in various recording formats. The artifacts and destructive compression of antiquated digital recorders, and the pristine qualities of modern studio technology both contain, in different ways, our own intimate relationships to such devices and spaces. We believe this is reflective of how we associate and remember sound, which is through the peripherals of its delivery. In the context of Cleared, this interest is pursued to further the poetic and gestural features of our music, and to create records that are infused with visual imagery, memory, and the physical environments in which we find inspiration. Lustres is the most detailed and refined output of our studio practice using this method of exchanging sound material. The four tracks present a mood that, for us, is indicative of a kind of rolling celestial atmosphere. Simultaneously, there exists both a subterranean and starlit quality about the music. To us, it is not unlike the imagined terrain of a distant meteor or orbiting asteroid, alternating between the extremes of light and temperature as its path is slowly carved in a dark vacuum. It is music for contemplation and quiet reflection, as these are the states of listening we have come to greatly appreciate in our personal lives, and as the space in which we are most happy to have our music experienced. Lustres is a document being released as we near 15 years of the Cleared collaboration, and we hope it offers listeners a chapter of our story that, while rooted in our past material, advances the core discipline of what we have always pursued as our central theme: Patience.

Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano is a record that is very close to my heart. In fact, it is Akira’s work that was one of the drivers for Someone Good, one of the Room40 sibling labels, to be founded. Polaroid Piano marks the beginning of what would later become known as felt piano music, an approach to the piano which was picked up by numerous artists across subsequent years. It captures an essential and intimate rendering of the piano at close proximity, but it does more than that, it allows the piano to breathe within the places around it. Structurally, the record is a collection of piano-led vignettes. Each piece is a microcosm of lived in music, which is porous, and opens themselves outward, inviting a sense of time and ’the present’ to seep into the music. They feel instantly intimate and evocative, melodies imprinted with the world around them. In some of the recordings a siren calls out from beyond the immediate acoustic space of the studio, whilst in others birds seep in and the rustling of Akira’s clothing folds into the music itself. When we first discussed the recording, Akira had invited me to offer some sounds that might act as a leaping off point for the compositions. I collected a series of field recordings which were offered as simple and suggestive prompts, and as a means of imagining ‘other’ environments which might be simultaneously in orbit of the places Akira was recording in. Some of those field recordings are captured in the record, like a memory being recounted at a distance of time. Polaroid Piano is a unique record for many reasons. One is it manages to manifest an acoustic transcription of that ‘momentary' quality of its photographic namesake. The pieces are auditory snapshots and reflect a certain quality of harmonic light and timbral exposure that is unquestionably tethered to the aesthetics of the polaroid format. It is a record that celebrates the body of the instrument as a sound source and invites us to be proximate to the resonation, and the living qualities of sound, that make music so utterly profound, and gratifying.

cobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschach inkblot — rotated as if in a whirlpool, and three-dimensional imagery pulsed with strong flicker. What was weird was that the images did not adhere to the surface of the screen. They stood out, almost floating, like holograms. Then, my eyes started catching physical shapes in the depth of the abstract patterns such as faces, hands, the surface of an oil spill, and they appeared and disappeared like ghosts or doppelgängers. “How does Nervous Magic Lantern work?” I asked Ken. The inventor's answer was something unexpected: "I don't know! I dreamed it and found it through experimentations then stuck to it. I'm not that technical." Well, he is an artist who creates a phantasmagoria of mystery; let the neuroscientists explain the mechanism. The self-made apparatus contains a spinning shutter, a light source, and lenses set in a wooden frame. Ken inserts his hand-painted circular slides between the light and lenses and moved them gently with his hands. The lenses enlarged a tiny portion on the slide, while the spinning shutter gave the flicker effect. Compared to Ken's other works, which are often filled with unflinching political criticism, the imagery of Nervous Magic Lantern is patently abstract, and it examines how our brain regulates our perceptions. In Jonas Mekas' Movie Journal, Ken once said, “We’re stepping towards a deeper incline, something challenging our notion of the way things are. Something impossible.” Elsewhere he stated, “Eisenstein said the power of film was to be found between shots. Peter Kubelka seeks it between film frames. I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain. A whole new play of appearances is possible here.” Nervous Magic Lantern offers up this sort of play in stunning hallucinations, strange visions dancing on the screen. Ken's request for my music was to play “sounds of daily life.” He explained that the project “is an escape,” and that he felt “guilty not having any messages or reflecting the real world. By using environmental sounds to surround us,” he continued, “I'd like to be rooted in the real world." Around 2014, I noticed that Ken had a sizable collection of cassette field recordings he had amassed over the last several decades. Street noises in Chinatown, conversations with friends, or any sort of uncategorizable sound around him. I was fascinated and decided to use them as a springboard for composing. One of the unique aspects of Nervous Magic Lantern is that the visual stays abstract while the sound is able to adopt meanings or a narrative sense derived from the quotidian sounds. I wanted to emphasize that point and add almost a sense of documentary. More than that, I simply loved the aural depictions of Ken and Flo’s life. Those also trigger my memories with them. Over the years, during summer time, Ken, Flo, and my wife, Makiko, made a habit of going to their favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Other times, Ken and I had morning coffee at a Puerto Rican restaurant just below their loft. Life and art are inseparable, breaking into one another incessantly. Ken is an artist who always envisioned the impossible. I wanted to see if it's possible to present that vision as something universal, something whole, something running through everyone’s life. A soundtrack for life in the depth of illusion. That is perhaps what this album is. This album was recorded as a soundtrack for Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern at Spiral Hall, organized by Sound Live Tokyo, on November 3, 2015. It was probably one of our best performances. Before the performance, Ken explained to me the selected slides he uses and the ordering he employs, so that I would better understand the flow. Some slides are black-and-white and some color. For a given performance, Ken selects 10 slides or so. However, he might play with just one slide for the entire show or change the order — there was plenty of room to improvise. On my side, I also had a structure and the order of tapes, quite independent from Ken's visual. But I made the system easy to extend or shorten, duration-wise, in order to respond to Ken's ordering and mood. Lastly, I wanted to mention Flo's role, as she is deeply involved in Ken's creative process; as he says: “This is a mom-and-pop business.” From the first day of working together, she was always there with us and took care of all practical matters. Ken is a dreamer and thinks and works intuitively. But Flo — an exceptionally beautiful woman in and out — is rooted in the real world. Not just a pragmatist, however, Flo advises Ken on artistic decisions. Ken always asks to hear her thoughts, as I did as well. As film critic and their decades-long friend Amy Taubin once described it, "Florence Jacobs is nothing less than a producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema." What a perfect couple, and it was an extremely joyous journey with them!

Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha's death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians , languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.

The musicians on these pieces also are recorded live in a group setting listening to each other with a shared space and character I create and through this listening the connections that form the final piece are made.

The Heart Sutra which I read in the last piece of the 8 is a translation which has been collaged by many schools and cultures that adapted the teachings to their indigenous religions. Most likely first traded along the Silk Roads , and internet of its time 3000 years would have been written in Pali, a pan-asian language and transcribed from Sanskrit and Hindi sources and later translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and eventually Greek, Arabic, Latin and global languages in the 20th century.

The bonus track is a live mix (called a Metta Mix) of a performance and collage of all this material and other new pieces, performed in a virtual avatar world called Second Life for a live audience who listens and. attends in their own avatars, as I stream the concert. This music is closer to my personal experiences of meditation, with a collage of ideas passing through me, returning to the breath or vocal tones , distractions, physical pain , internal quiet, increased listening and sensory focus that moves from imagined , real and virtual connections with the technology. All pieces on this set of recordings are a version of this in some ways, with the mix being something both from me and for those that listen.

Meditations is both a document of practice, past and present and an experience of listening, both personal and the connective mix of us and all the things that are not us.

A note from Lawrence English
 In late 1975, Annea Lockwood realised her composition World Rhythms. It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was. World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into the world, and beyond. It expanded outward from many of the compositions and themes Annea Lockwood had been exploring since the 1960s. It sought to take those learnings and apply them to a new set of terrains and circumstances. Moreover, it suggested a sensing of sound that was drawn from profound curiosity, matched only by patience. In 2019, I reached out to Annea and started a conversation about a revisitation of World Rhythms. My initial proposition was a simple one: a re-issue that was remastered and touched up, reflecting Annea’s thoughts on the piece in this moment. The conversation quickly spun outward though, and before long Annea had asked if I might be interested to revisit the master tapes with the thought that the work could be revived and prepared for performance presentations going forward into this century. On listening to the materials, during the period of restoring the audio from the original master tapes, I was struck by the profound dynamism of the recordings. Each of the sound-fields held an attentive flux, a rhythmic pulse that was breathing. Each one a story of the pulses of the world, and our universe, that spoke to a possible reading of reality that sits in excess of our everyday capacities. A poetics of pulse if you like. Here then is the result of those conversations and also the presentations of the piece that followed - several of which Annea has overseen herself. On this newly rendered imagining of World Rhythms, new relations, listening paths and ways of exploring her sound-fields are brought into focus. The core of the piece remains, a prioritised zone of listening, but emerging from deep within it new sonic formations emerge, a reminder of the dynamism of our energetic world and its surroundings.

He was a member of the legendary psychedelic band “Hallelujahs” and “Idiot O'Clock” with Shinji Shibayama and others, which was praised to the highest degree by the late Hideo Iketsuzumi, owner of Modern Music, who presided over the prestigious “P.S.F. Records” that represented the psychedelic underground in Japan. Naoiki Toushi is one of the residents of Kyoto's famous underground music mecca, the rock cafe “Dragstore,” and is also a founding member of the famous Hijokaidan. Released on Shibayama's Org Records label, “III” is one of the most popular cult albums of his career, and has been eagerly awaited by fans and collectors alike for an official reissue, including a bootleg LP reissue from overseas.

Music From Memory returns with their penultimate release of 2016, this time bringing together a compilation of works by the Italian composer and musician Roberto Musci. While studying guitar and saxophone in his hometown of Milan, Musci developed a deep fascination for non-western music and set out to travel across India, Asia and Africa, which he would do extensively between 1974-1985. During his many journeys Roberto would become deeply embedded in each unique world of rhythms, scales and approaches to making and performing music. Throughout this period of travel he would make many field recordings as well as collect and study many traditional and indigenous instruments that he would then later combine with synthesizers and electronics on his return to Italy.

Combining personal documents of music and sounds deeply connected to the history and cultures of those lands, with his own explorations and experiments with cutting edge sound technology Roberto Musci would develop through his music a very unique and at times wholly mystical space, where ancient and modern would evolve into a new musical language.

As well as making his own music, during the 1980’s and 1990’s Roberto would also regularly broadcast radio shows of experimental and indigenous music on Italian radio stations such as Rai and Radio Popolare. Deeply connected to the arts he would also compose and perform numerous pieces of music for theatre, dance and performance art pieces as well as soundtracks for film and television.

‘Tower of Silence’ brings together a double LP of material from Roberto Musci’s solo recordings commencing with the Loa of Music sessions from 1984 up until later very recent works. The compilation also includes a number of collaborative pieces, many performed and written in collaboration with Giovanni Venosa, such as material taken from their ‘Water Messages On Desert Sand’, which as an album was Grammy-nominated in in the UK in 1987. A unique and at times intensely mesmerising musical world ‘Tower of Silence’ offers an introduction to the work of a unique and visionary artist.

Originally released on CD in 2009, Engaged Touches has been expanded from the original recordings for a 3LP edition, spanning 5 sides of vinyl, and a 3CD edition of the same expanded version, as well as the original single disc version. All have been remastered by Stephan Mathieu for this special limited edition. Please support artists by purchasing the digital album, not streaming in excess. Thank you.

Originally released on CD in 2009, Engaged Touches has been expanded from the original recordings for a 3LP edition, spanning 5 sides of vinyl, and a 3CD edition of the same expanded version, as well as the original single disc version. All have been remastered by Stephan Mathieu for this special limited edition. Please support artists by purchasing the digital album, not streaming in excess. Thank you.

Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert.7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As its title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along its entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.

Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the swiss mountains.

A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.

Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evokation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.

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.

Off-the-chain, polymetric & polystyle mixtape madness from Berlin-based French DJ, Marylou, on Bristol’s inimitable Accidental Meetings - FFO DJ/ rupture, Demdike Stare, Tutu, Marjai. Marylou, an affiliate of Morphine and Ominira, goes sick on ‘AMX008’ with 100 mins of dot-joining suss, tessellating futurist club styles with vintage breakcore, folk, dub, spoken word and ethnographic recordings via rudely disciplined, jazz-taught sensibilities. Trust, it’s a lot! For the duration Marylou plays deep into Accidental Meetings’ wide-open, rooted yet recombinant remit, following her nose where it goes with an extraordinary feel for the flow and juxtaposition of ostensibly, mutually exclusive styles and patterns. It takes some moxie to nail this sort of thing without sounding like a mess, and Marylou clearly constructs something properly beguiling that fucks with expectation at every turn. It will take at least a few goes to fully unravel, gauge this madness, and you’ll have a great time doing so.

When you’re creating something loosely referred to as “art” with another person, you’re mining the depths of minds and experience, searching connections with pasts, each of us producing from a different place. Communication exists as unspoken and simultaneous, more carnal than collaborative, and dwelling rather than saying. We all miss that, wrapped up fantasies of perfectness and lovesick doves. Youth, how fleeting and naive. "Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as a sound companion for an exhibition of 13 different 14th Century manuscripts. The original pieces existed as 13 different parts for each individual piece of art." Or so the origins of the original release in 2009 on Students of Decay state. What seemed real was a myriad liquor haze, fabrication, or imagination. Embellishment is equivalent to invention, and that moment when you can’t tell the difference between dreams or reality (I surely can’t remember which is which now) is important - and must be noted. I remember pouring over 14th century art, utilizing unauthorized library passes, and being witness to the trajectories of two individuals on divergent but somehow-crossing timelines. Originally recorded in 2007-2009 (?) by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, with backpacked gear, garage photography, sleepless nights and skipped work. I brought the tape and made the loops, she brought the laptop and the pen and paper. Try to look at it like this. Recorded in stereo, then split into two tracks for each left and right channel, reversing one side and adding reverse reverb, and the other long reverb and then reversing. Making each stereo again, then putting back together and blending each left and right together to make a stereo track again. This was an age of hybrid experiments between analog tape loops and digital processing, to render a new path, for better or worse. Somehow this correlated with a pad of scribbled poetry - whether original or quoted (one can never tell), a few random phone numbers, and the omnipresence of long-toed shoes in the 14th century paintings. “How befitting, like Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers.” What all comes down to is this - that sometimes those paths of yours and theirs cross for a time - and only for a time, and in that time, you’re there in that same place. It doesn’t mean that you know the other person, or that you ever will. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll be looking for the same thing at that moment, and that’s what you’ve shared, in many different ways, in different directions; backwards, equivocally.

Recorded live on location, this is a style of music unlike anything you have ever heard before and the first album of the Himba people's music ever released from northwest Namibia. From the album's producer and recordist, Ian Brennan: "The Namib desert is the oldest in the world. Therefore, the driest. Italian-Rwandan photographer, Marilena Umuhoza Delli and I had come to record with possibly the most photographed people on earth, the Himba— to listen rather than gaze at them as if on display. To share their voices as a counter to their visual objectification, particularly the inappropriate eroticization of the women who customarily go topless throughout daily life. We had to stress multiple times that we did not want the musicians to don touristic tribal costumes— quite possibly the first music project in history that urged performers to cover-up rather than pleading with artists to expose more flesh. But it was to no avail. When the assigned hour arrived, the men all ditched the baseball caps and soccer jerseys that they routinely wear. And for the women, the reality is that they almost without exception keep their torsos bare, even in winter. We had to acquiesce. Forcing the issue would have only been the flipside of inauthenticity. The featured, traditional instrument is the Cattle Gun. It’s rarely found these days and therefore, costly. Made from the lengthy horn of an Oryx and coated in mud, it is blown, resulting in a breathy, rattled tone. Via the use of live looping on three of the album’s tracks, psychedelic vocal tapestries were created as if snatched from the ever-shifting skies that enshrined the valley from all sides. But even more esoteric results arose from members cupping hands over mouth to create chorusing and flanging effects sans electricity or gear. Rather than "primitive" or traditional, the Himba music making is imbued with innovation and timelessness." Limited Edition Pressing of 500 vinyl copies with 4-page color insert including photos of the musicians and liner notes by Grammy-award winning producer and author, Ian Brennan.

West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” marks the arrival of a landmark record, documenting the last, snake handling church in Appalachia. Featuring hillbilly rock guitars, trance-like rhythms, and howling vocals, this album was recorded 100% live and without overdubs by Grammy-award winning producer and author, Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project).

The first release of American music ever by Sublime Frequencies, Brennan states, “As much as I’ve traveled around the globe to remote areas such as Comoros, the southeast Sahara or up-river in Suriname, few places have felt more foreign or ‘exotic’ than this part of Appalachia.

“The recording represents in many ways a companion and counterpoint— the other side of the Deep South, so to speak— to the music that was explored on the Parchman Prison Prayer albums. The Snake Handler album was an attempt to listen across that divide— a divide that’s never fully healed and continues to haunt and imperil the USA to this day.”

The recording took place during a two-plus hour Sunday service in the West Virginia mountains.

Brennan states, “I’d sworn to stay far away from the snakes at the service, but instead they were waved in my face as they coiled in the preachers’ hands, and I crouched down at the foot of the altar tending to the equipment. The pastor soon was bitten and blood splattered, pooling on the floor. The female parishioners hurriedly came to wipe up the mess, and it instantly became clear just what the rolls of paper towels stacked on the pulpit had been for. You can actually hear this moment transpire towards the end of the track ‘Don’t Worry It’s Just a Snakebite (What Has Happened to This Generation?)’.

“The congregation leapt to its feet and a mini mosh-pit formed. The tag-team preachers huffed handkerchiefs soaked in strychnine, as they circled like aggro frontmen and an elderly worshiper held the flame of a candle to her throat, closing her eyes and swaying. The church PA blew out from the screams as a bonnet-wearing senior whacked away at a trap kit that dwarfed her. It was the most metal thing I’d ever seen, rendering Slayer mere kids play.”

The flock claim to be the first church that merged Rock and Roll with firebrand preaching— that the music was stolen from them by Satan, that they are the originators. Given that snake handling ministries can be traced back to at least 1910, there might even be a faint something to the claim.

The pastor’s father and brother both died after being bitten by timber rattlesnakes, and the pastor himself suffered greatly from one a few years back— his forearm swelling to twice its size and turning slime green. As a result, he fell unconscious and his forearm had to be sliced open from wrist to bicep to relieve the pressure. Nonetheless, Pastor Chris steadfastly claims that “Jesus is our anti-venom.”

“Some people think we’re Devil worshippers, that we’re a cult. But snake handling is only a small part of what we do.”

In the 1970s there were reportedly five-hundred snake churches throughout Appalachia, but now there is only one— in West Virginia, the only state where serpent handling remains legal. It’s estimated that in the past century more than one-hundred preachers have died from poisonous snakebites inflicted while leading these services. This includes the founder of the first snake handling flock, George Went Hensley, who was illiterate and once convicted of selling moonshine during the Prohibition era.

His death was officially ruled a suicide due to his refusing medical treatment.

The local county’s population has dropped by more than 80% in the wake of the West Virginia coal industry’s globalization gutting, and the area now leads the USA in drug-related deaths per capita while also being the poorest in the state.

Within minutes of launching into trance-like states during the service featured on this album, both preachers became drenched in sweat. More than strict scripture, the preachers are gifted improvisers able to vent for hours at a time.

Brennan states, “Pastor Chris joked, “You definitely don’t want to hear me sing.’ But, in fact, he is a gifted vocalist with singular phrasing.”

Like so much of the most classic music ever made, it sounds as if it is emanating from the past and the future simultaneously— some parallel universe where instead of discovering amphetamines, The Damned found God (or maybe both) and became born again.

The vinyl edition includes a long 13-minute bonus track & features a 4-page booklet sporting stunning photos of the congregation’s rituals in action.

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