MUSIC

Finally reuniting all the music Marutti spontaneously created in a short period during the very first Amon recording sessions, and bringing it to vinyl for the first time, Akh is a ticket for a trip back in time, a musical universe rich with impenetrable scenarios, a driving, grey space of ever-increasing numbness resounding all around and inside the listener. In Ancient Egypt, Akh was most often used to mean a complete person, whether living or dead. While living, the Akh was composed of all five elements -- The Body, Ba (the personality: humor, warmth, charm), Ka (the life force unique to every person) which stayed, The Name, and The Shadow. When dead, the Akh referred to the reunion of the Ba and the Ka, which they also believed happened each night. In death and every night too, Akh is the reunion of the self. Mostly lacking any flash of light, the tracks featured on this collection open a subtly esoteric universe, which rises up out of the desert, leading through a profound and introspective path with their sonic stimuli, plumbing the depths of the unconscious with a hypnotic, mystical and arcane flavor. Perfect to listen to during the late hours when distracting factors are few and the music may join forces with the night itself. Will appeal to fans of Roland Kayn, Thomas Köner, Éliane Radigue, deep listening, minimalism, and isolationism alike. Edition of 250.

‘Beautiful Age’ is SSIEGE’s reflection on adolescence and the gauzy fidelity of memory, using an electro-acoustic array of piano, samples, tape loops, synths and field recordings to evoke feelings of longing for the eternal spring of youth.

A memorable 1982 masterpiece first album left by Hiroshi Yoshimura, a Japanese talent who is attracting attention from all over the world, on the label Sound Process sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Kita Shinagawa !!

Although Yoshimura was undoubtedly an important figure in the history of Japanese ambient music, Yoshimura was hardly known overseas because only the Japanese version was released, but the recent New Age re-evaluation. I have finally come to the point where I can see the light of day. The sound of the highest peak of creative and aesthetic Japanese ambient music that evokes the concept of "wave notation" contained in nine postcards. A mysterious sound world that connects the history of ambient music / ambient spun by Erik Satie, Brian Eno, Roederius, etc. in the dimension of Japanese emotion and spiritual cosmo. A miraculous recording of homemade ambient attempted with a minimal set of Fender Rhodes and keyboards.

SUMMVS IS THE FIFTH COLLABORATION ALBUM BETWEEN ALVA NOTO AND RYUICHI SAKAMOTO. THE RECORD WAS FIRST RELEASED IN 2011 AND IS THE FIFTH AND FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE ‘VIRUS SERIES’. THE TITLE SUMMVS REFERS TO THE LATIN WORD “SUMMA” (ENG. SUM) AND “VERSUS” (ENG. TOWARDS), AND SERVES AS A METAPHOR FOR THE WORK BEING ORIENTED TOWARDS A COLLABORATIVE RESULT. THE ALBUM FEATURES “MICROON” COMPOSITIONS CONTAINING RECORDINGS OF A 16TH TONE INTERVAL TUNING PIANO—PIANO METAMORFOSEADOR CARRILLO EN DIECISEISAVOS DE TONO. THE ALBUM ALSO FEATURES TWO COVERS OF THE TRACK “BY THIS RIVER” ORIGINALLY COMPOSED BY BRIAN ENO, DIETER MOEBIUS, AND HANS-JOACHIM ROEDELIUS IN 1977.

Ritmiche Italiane transports the listeners through an anomaly in the fabric of musical space-time, connecting the distant past with the modern era and the plains of a lost continent with the cities of the Italian peninsula. The artists featured in the compilation strongly believed in the absence of barriers and conventions between genres, fully able to effortlessly put together West-African influences, World music, Jazz and crime movie soundtracks to achieve a boundless, meditative and hypnotic kind of music that still feels relevant today.

Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music. Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit. In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form. Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP. Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve. While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm. What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms.

Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes. The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all." Dais-exclusive Lenticular Limited Editions : Come in lenticular plastic jacket that animates when tilted, using frames of projections from Coil's live performances during the era.

"Oscillation" of space and life.
A timeless masterpiece in the history of Japanese ambient/minimal music, reissued as a 2-disc set with unreleased sound sources!

Distributed in 1984 by "Sound Process Design", a company founded by Satoshi Ashikawa, a pioneer of Japanese environmental music, the full picture of the work, which has been shrouded in a mysterious veil to this day, is finally revealed. A thoughtful response to the work of great artists such as Eric Satie, Claude Debussy, John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Haruomi Hosono and early 1980s King Crimson. A re-performance of "Nocturne", which is the key to the album, and the unreleased recording and chamber music arrangement version of the sequel "Nocturne II" will be recorded for the first time on Disc 2.

・Limited Pressing for one time
・Including the liner notes
newly written for this reissue by Yuji Shibasaki
・Coming with Obi strip
・Remastered for vinyl by Kuniyuki Takahashi
・For fans of Ambient, Minimal & Modern Classical Music

■Track list (*Recorded songs are different from the original LP)
33rpm
A1. Homme
A2. Nocturne
B1. Circling Air

45rpm
C1. Nocturne - New Recording
C2. Nocturne Ⅱ - Take2
D1. Nocturne Ⅱ - Take1
D2. Nocturne Yakyoku

LP + 12inch 2 disc set specification

Caterina Barbieri is set to release a sister album of her 2019's acclaimed “Ectatic Computation”. “Myuthafoo“ will be out on June 2. Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears". Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini. "Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.

伊音響系名門レーベル〈901 Editions〉から久々の新入荷！公園にスピーカーを持って行ってまったりしながら聴きたいかも?? Nicola RattiとのBellowsやInventing Masksといった名プロジェクトでも活動、Kassel JaegerやAndrew Peklerとのコラボレーションや〈12k〉に〈Editions Mego〉などからの傑出した作品も知られるイタリア実験音楽界隈の首領、そして、大名門〈Senufo Editions〉の運営者Giuseppe Ielasiによる2021年ソロ・アルバム『its appearance, reflected by three copies』をストック！2017年に発表した口笛をデジタル解析/加工したサウンドアート作品『Even When They Speak Of Space』を思い出す、共鳴し合う花弁のようでもある、トリッピーなサウンドが織りなす電子音響の傑作！6パネル・デジスリーヴ仕様。小ボリュームでの再生を推奨！

"The Septuagint is the name in which the first Greek translation of the Old Testament is identified, datable to the 2nd century A.D. According to Aristea's letter to Philocrates, in which the genesis of this version is mentioned, 72 sages from Alexandria commissioned by Ptolemy II were responsible for the translation. Within the text, the term "prodigy" (τέρας, tearas) is never found alone but forms an inseparable binomial with "sign" (σημεῖον, semèion), thus forming the expression σημεῖα καὶ τέρατα (semèia kài tearata). Recorded in September 2019, Semèia Kài Térata is the first work by Ensemble Ektòs, a quartet of composers and performers based in Copenhagen. The work describes an austere yet imaginative path combining stillness with the use of silences. A ritual reiteration recalling the most extreme experiences of certain minimalism and microscopic attention to timbral stratification. Rigorous and evocative, with radical attention to the beauty of the whole sound set, Semèia Kài Térata well manages to identify that sense of mysterious inevitability evoked in the title, as well as the dark wonder that miracles often bear." Marco Baldini

A masterpiece of avant pop chamber music! The composer / pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny, who has been nominated for the Grammy Award and is known for his participation in numerous masterpieces and The Stooges works left in the prestigious Lovely Music of the US avant-garde music, and his allies. , Arthur Russell and The Flying Lizards are also involved in the works of New York avant-garde writer / multiplayer Peter Gordon's 1976 live recording at the Berkeley Art Museum. Plenty of avant-garde charm that can be said to be one of the answers to German rock from the bay area! A minimal rock jam with a clavinet, an electronic piano, a saxophone, a woodwind instrument, an RMI Synthesizer, etc., and a dense psychedelic groove with a focus on odd time signatures and repetitions. It is a mysterious piece that brings a kind of omnipotence with a mixture of lo-fi atmosphere, strange uplifting feeling, and unique humor. Recording & mixing by Maggi Payne. Taylor Deupree is in charge of mastering. Gatefold mini LP sleeve specification. Includes a 23-page booklet with new interviews and gorgeous photos of both parties.

To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls “the third ear”.

The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.

The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights, but in Tanpura Study they are embedded in a series of gestures, what I call signatures, on the melodic level.

In Tanpura and Harpsichord, there is an encounter of overtones with chords braided into pun-notes, what Gerard Grisey calls “degrees of transposition”. Taken together, this amounts to a non-spectralism in which, contrary to first impressions, there are no fundamental frequencies, even in the bass.

Ajaeng Ajaeng: with respect to European string instruments, the technique col legno affords the direct encounter of wood and string, opening the way to a more tactile conception of the sustained sound, while bringing the materiality of the bow and its practices into question. In violin, viola, cello bows, Pernambuco wood offers an ideal example of extraction, colonialism, deforestation.

With the Ajaeng, a Korean musical instrument, the situation is more complex. The dialectic of court to folk music, always political, always incendiary, may be heard here in the encounter of forsythia and silk, of Dae Ajaeng to So Ajaeng, and on a broader level of Dang Ak (Tang Dynasty music) to Hyang Ak (native Korean music) and their representations.

Alternating music and sound, overtone arrays mingled with noise, marked by the bow change, in flamelike patterns which flicker, emerge, and fade again. A slow down structure, also formalized in Time Medicine, seems to produce a long decrescendo, with the technique of the players drawing out the flicker patterns in a kind of game.

The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a “social hieroglyphic”, which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student.

The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target.

This music is made for meditation. On retreat in 2019 I had a revelation: there is no difference between the prayer, the hearing, and the void. There is nothing original in this idea; Wonhyo and many sages have thought it before.

—Eyvind Kang, April 2020 

A re-interpretation so often comes from an impulse, even if subliminal, of one-upmanship – let me do better, wait ‘til you hear it my way. Sometimes though, and it happens too rarely, the cover is an act of devotion in which a musician’s humility produces something more beautiful than bravura could. When Erik Hall undertook his painstaking reconstruction of Steve Reich’s 1976 masterpiece of minimalism, “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, it was as much an exercise in modesty as ambition. With its repetitions and complex constructions, the piece makes great demands on stamina and concentration, and Reich himself advised that these challenges meant it should probably be performed with more than eighteen musicians. Hall, however, recorded every part himself in his small home studio, playing instruments he had on hand, in live, single takes. Here, then is the ambition. But here too is the modesty: by doing one section a day, one instrument at a time, he made his way through this monumental piece, building a faithful and loving re-creation, one sonic brick at a time. Xylophone becomes muted piano, violin becomes electric guitar and so it is that music for eighteen becomes music for one. “I didn’t want it to be distracting, or a gimmick,” says Hall, who’s loved the piece for as long as he can remember. “I wanted it to be true to the timbre and spirit of the original recording,” and he thought a great deal about, “how I would shape the tone of each instrument, to come across with the same impact that we know the piece to have.” His methodology, as with Reich’s piece itself, is workmanlike, and it’s from this humble and steadfast undertaking that something honest and radiant emerges. – Hermione Hoby

Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the second the trio heard here. As Dreyblatt points out in the wonderfully informative and reflective liner notes written for this release, this was a collaboration across generations, reflecting the profound impact of Conrad’s pioneering minimalism on Dreyblatt and O’Rourke. Both Dreyblatt and O’Rourke came to this collaboration armed with a deep appreciation of Conrad’s music and the just intonation principles at its core, Dreyblatt having first encountered the incredible power of Conrad’s precisely tuned violin chords during his tenure as an archivist for La Monte Young in 1975, while O’Rourke had performed with Conrad in various settings since the mid-1990s (as well as admiring, reissuing, and performing Dreyblatt's music). The flyer for the concert promised ‘massive, ecstatic, pulsating overtones’, and the trio certainly delivered. From the moment this keening stream of bowed strings begins, it is clear, as Dreyblatt writes, that we are in ‘Tony’s sonic universe’, as massively amplified, slowly shifting combinations of precisely chosen pitches fill the room with complex beating patterns and ghostly difference tones. For more than twenty-five minutes, the music operates at a level of intensity comparable to classic recordings such as Conrad’s Four Violins, until the texture thins out slightly in the performance’s final quarter, allowing for the listener’s first recognition of the individual voices that make up this enormous, overwhelming harmonic edifice. The constant stream of bowed tones is broken by a beautifully rich pizzicato from Conrad on monochord, the sliding low tones and metallic shimmer of the other strings taking the set's final moments on an unexpected detour into spacious pastoral psychedelia. Though produced by three individuals known for their own distinctive bodies of the work, this is egoless music, the perfect expression of Conrad's desire 'to move away from composing to listening', to 'working "on" the sound from "inside" the sound'. Historically important and overwhelming in sonic impact, this release also serves as a moving tribute to Tony Conrad from two musicians profoundly marked by the example set by his art and life.

Tapping the driftwood, tapping the surface of the water, everything on earth becomes his instrument.
In 1990, NEWSIC, a leading Japanese environmental music label, released a work by a rare percussionist
The work released by the rare percussionist is now on LP record for the first time.

Listening to Mr. Ochi's Natural Sonic reminds me of the days when I used to go to the studio of St. GIGA (satellite music broadcasting station), which was then located in Jingumae.
There, this album was secretly played day after day.
After more than 30 years, "Chikyu no Chikugo" was finally released to the world.
- Yoshiro Ojima (Composer / Music Producer)

Yoshiro Ochi is a percussionist who has been active in a wide variety of fields, including composing and performing music for the Issey Miyake Collection from 1984 to 1990, producing music for TV and radio, participating in live performances by GONTITI and other artists, and conducting workshops.
He has collected colorful living tones by traveling, playing drums, and tapping on natural objects he encounters. They blend gently with computer sounds and repeat pleasant resonance.
A magical massage of sound and rhythm.
Following "Motohiko Hamase - Tree Scale," one of the most popular titles on the "NEWSIC" label, this long-awaited analog record pressing is now available!

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti, the second Recital album of composer Loren Rush (b. 1935), contrasts the orchestral grandeur of last year’s LP Dans le Sable with plaintive just intonation piano improvisations. Loren Rush has been active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Terry Riley, Robert Erickson, and Pauline Oliveros, and also co-founded Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Though few of Rush’s compositions have been published, he has garnered deep respect from his peers and colleagues over the decades. 
 The album is directly inspired by poems from “L’allegria” (The Joy, 1914-1919), the collection of poetry by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888, Egypt – 1970, Italy) written in the trenches of World War I. During these brutal years Ungaretti struggled to maintain his humanity by creating the most beautiful images he could imagine and by recalling experiences of his earlier life in Alexandria and Paris. By this, he both revolutionized Italian poetry and demonstrated that the creation of beauty is a most effective life preserver and political statement. 


Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. The 2017 reissue of his lauded debut, Music For Nine Post Cards, along with a slow building cult internet following has helped ignite a renaissance in his acclaimed body of work, much of which has never been released outside of Japan. Known for his sound design and environmental music, Yoshimura worked on a number of commissions following the 1982 release of Music For Nine Post Cards, including works for museums, galleries, public spaces, TV shows, video art, fashion shows, and even a cosmetics company. Originally released in 1986, GREEN is one of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s most well-loved recordings and a favorite of the artist himself. Recorded over the winter of 1985-86 at Yoshimura’s home studio, the compositions unfold at an unhurried pace, a stark contrast to the busy city life of Tokyo. As Yoshimura explained in the original liner notes, the album title in the context of this body of work is not meant to be seen as a color, but is rather used to convey “the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN”—which perfectly encapsulates the soothing and warm sounds contained on the album, although it was created utilizing Yamaha FM synthesizers, known for their crisp digital tones. This edition marks the first reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible to find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US). Additionally, this release is the first in our ongoing series, WATER COPY, focusing on the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Thank you very much for your patience ♥ M's first release in the first year of Reiwa is YPY's new album! I don't need a difficult theory now. A letter from YPY who has become faithful to the starting point again ♥

Last year, he started the studio and has projects such as goat, "GEIST" and "Virginal Variations", which are the bands that the world is waiting for.・ YPY that no longer needs explanation as a project. There is a legend that Mr. Hino used to be a green mohawk, but it is this work "Be A Little More Selfish" that expresses that the spirit continues to live in him.

YPY's greatest appeal is that it has a mixture of hard songs that are likely to be welcomed by European DJs, new frontier afro and ambient percussive tunes, home-listening BGM-like songs, and songs that are not well understood. The underground live feeling remains the same! This is YPY's latest self-questioning update issued in a world flooded with glitter names and glitter sounds, and it is a psycho-psychic blow that blends in with the killer binding picture by Mr. NAZE! YPY's premium full-length album, which is still rare even though the live performance has been overthrown, is still rare ♥

Composition / Performance: Koshiro Hino
Cello on "All Wounds": Yuki Nakagawa
Mastering: Takuto Kuratani (Ruv Bytes)
Binding picture: NAZE

12 "LP version: Uses quality lacquer / stamper cut by Dubplates & Mastering.
CD version: Spread paper jacket specifications

The long-awaited reissue of Wada's 1985 LP Off The Wall, recorded in Berlin and originally released on the esteemed FMP-subsidiary SAJ label. A minimalist yet majestic monsterpiece ("massive," as Tom Johnson declares in his perceptive liner notes), Off The Wall features Wada and Wayne Hankin on bagpipes, Marilyn Bogerd on adapted organ, and percussionist Andreas Schmidt-Neri. The original album consisted of two side-long pieces recorded on successive days by Jost Geber, who captured the power and dynamics of the quartet without losing the meditative delicacy of the bagpipes and the intricacy of their interplay with the homemade organ (constructed by Wada), resulting in a slowly-evolving mosaic of combination tones and overtones. Simultaneously static yet changing, rooted and ethereal, homespun and alien, ancient and very modern, the music is created entirely with acoustic instruments but has "electronic" textures at times, yet is very warm and human, always pulsing, shifting and mutating. Em Records is pleased indeed to release Off The Wall for the first time ever on CD, with the bonus track "Die Konsonanten Pfeifen," a slightly earlier recording with Wada and Hankin on bagpipes and Kevin Newhoff on percussion, originally released as a cassette.

Bastian Epple makes an eagerly anticipated return to marionette under his elusive MinaeMinae guise that imagines rich sonic architectures for the journeying spirit to voyage to. Räumlichkeit is Epple’s debut album and third release to date following Gestrüpp from 2020, venturing further into melodic electronic nostalgia and percussive beat oriented soundscapes. Spanning fifteen vignettes that trapeze through uncharted winding trails and familiar spaces, the album’s recordings evoke a scenic state of mind. The tracks simulate a room or nested rooms where the breathtaking views of nature and contrasting brutalist structures are explored with an equal sense of curiosity and wonder. Taking the listener down unpredictable paths that are rooted within the music itself, Epple is as much present in the creation as the listening experience which gives the recordings an immediacy and a live element of unfolding before your ears, unfamiliar each time. This novel viewpoint is very much at the core of Räumlichkeit, poetically contemplating the concept of spatiality and how that, in turn, influences the receiving of those fleeting moments. Apart from the world building qualities of the recordings, it's the speed of travel that also impacts the perception of the journey, and Epple tends to manipulate time at a fully immersive rate that grips the mind and body.

Having crested the west coast modular-ambient wave in just a few releases- including 2018's Sharing Waves on the influential LA experimental imprint Leaving Records- Sean Hellfritsch has swapped the mossy analog synth improvisations of his prior output for refined melodic arrangements dressed in sprightly dawn-of-digital textures. Big Earth Energy plumbs the depths of Hellfritsch's multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game MYST, and the work of Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. Inspired by the aforementioned, and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise, and a twist of psychedelic charm. In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog sixty-five-million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive hanges the planet has gone through over the eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable- or as the album's creator puts it- "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." Big Earth Energy is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on previous Cool Maritime albums has been fully replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s work by composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa- using true-to-period gear no less. Even given it's referentiality, Big Earth Energy comes off as forward-facing where so much reminiscent music remains fixed to a bygone moment in pop culture. Hellfritsch has created a musical world where the endless verdancy of the biosphere finds it's parallel in the golden age of early 1990s video games, and late 80s Japanese environmental music, all while pointing to a hopeful planetary and artistic future that vindicates the motives of all of these muses.

XKatedral proudly presents the split full-length album Four Works by Stockholm based composers Linus Hillborg and Theodor Kentros. Four Works consists of two pieces by each composer with music written and recorded during 2019-2021. Two pieces for organ and electronics, a piece for violin and electronics and a piece for bass clarinet and electronics. Since both composers on this release mainly operate within the field of electroacoustic music these four pieces deviate from the composer's ordinary practice to a certain extent. However, they still retain an imprint shared with both composers' larger body of work.

“Timeless minimalistic approach to composition braced by repetition and playfulness. Alberto’s music reflects calm, focus and intimacy. Ethereal and atmospheric, his pieces operate within the digital as well as the analogue realm in equal measures. Sampling, Midi sequencing and field recordings are the instrumentation used in these 15 songs recorded on a four track reel to reel tape. Highest possible recommendation for fans of Suso Saiz, Jon Hassel, Eno or Harold Budd” “Haizetxe” which stands for wind house, is the first ever record consisting of unreleased material recorded between mid 80’s and 90’s by musician Alberto Lizarralde in Zaldibia, Basque Country. One of the founders of the first school of Improvisational jazz and contemporary music (Jazzle) established in San Sebastián in the early 1990s,Alberto is a well-known figure among Basque musicians but not so much amongst the general public. In his professional curriculum we find the direction of the Plaza Festival, the Zirrara record company, his work as a producer, editor (editions 3e argitalpenak), the direction of the audiovisual installation JA Artzeren Unibertsoa, the arrangements and composition for the Iparraguirre 7 project, etc...And even so, he has managed to stay away from the spotlight. In all this time he was composing and recording music, but the right circumstances never arose for its release.Thus, it has remained stored in a drawer all these years. Finally the music of Alberto Lizarralde sees the light on Hegoa label in a limited run of 300 LPs.