MUSIC

Resolve acts in dialogue with the minimalist inspirations of the first Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings release, 1982’s Nodal Excitation – in effect, looking beneath the hood of several decades of progression to review and renew the revolutionary intent of their microntonal foundation credo. This new Orchestra – Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger and Joachim Schütz – combine effortlessly to explore new scalar dimensions. PLAY LOUD.

Boston/Tenor/Index presents for the first time some of the earliest works by the American composer Phil Niblock, including the three never before released "Index" (1969), "Tenor" and "Boston III" (both from 1972), thus making it possible to discover Niblock's starting point as a composer. Until now, it's been impossible to encounter Niblock's compositions from earlier than the '80s, a reality thankfully rectified by the long overdue publication of this Boston/Tenor/Index, now on CD from Alga Marghen. "Tenor" (1972) represents the first evolution of Niblock's musical thought towards the aesthetics of microtones, overtones, and drones which the composer would develop in following decades. The piece was recorded by the photographer Martin Bough on tenor saxophone and gradually dubbed back and forth by the composer in his New York studio. The audio materials activated in "Tenor" through technologically de- and re-composed sounding textures, became a vehicle for those sound anomalies that would determine Niblock's audio poetics. Performing gestures are deconstructed though disseminating and editing processes by the imperceptible gestures of the composer. With its smooth flowing structure, "Boston III" (1972) stands at the very beginning of this illusion. It was recorded at the Intermedia Sound studio in Boston with Rhys Chatham (flute, voice), Martin Bough (tenor saxophone), and Gregory Reeve (viola, voice); the composer himself also contributed with his voice. "Index" (1969) is an improvised sound performance by the composer himself. The listener is lucky to listen to the movements of the artist's fingers hitting a guitar string and the soundboard in breathtaking tempo. The piece itself represents early minimalism in its virgin state, untouched by distancing technology. Guitar (both its body and strings), fingers and fingering fuse in a vehement action around which barely listenable sounds and resonances vibrate. This CD also includes "Boston I" (1972), or the first chapter of the "Boston" series. This 25-minute bonus track is less massive than "Boston III," but this version is much richer in dynamics and presents a more recognizable voice of each instrument. The music changes according to the loudness of playback. The interaction of the upper harmonics changes especially, with much richer overtone patterns being produced at louder levels. Edition of 300 copies in digipak sleeve, including an eight-page booklet with photos and liner notes.

Giovanni Di Domenico has now achieved a personal and unmistakable style within contemporary minimalism. His music always expresses a state of concentration, of recollection and contemplation toward a focal node. Repetition is experienced as alchemical state, as truth contained in the small nuances of change, in a crescendo that never reaches a climax. The atmosphere is intuition and is made up of a few compositional touches. To compose is to make synthesis, to unearth purity, simplicity and exactness. This new work for solo piano is almost an imaginary novel...the notes seem to tell of deserted streets, lonely walks in the night or runs down stairs. In this sense the musician is the writer of silence and the fleeting moment. And so, amid slow chords like Chopin or Satie, moods oscillate between brio and allegro, evoking the lightness of love, greater sadness and melancholy, as well as more restless and agitated ostinatos, the product of a more cathartic worldview.

It is highly recommended from electronic music fans to New Age !! The editing board that recorded the first recording (with Takehisa Kosugi) made in the 1980s by David Behrman, the most important experimental electronic musician in the United States, who is familiar with our long-selling store, is Italy. Announced by Alga Marghen, the prestigious musician!

David Behrman is also known for using "microcomputers" with "memory" used for live performances and installations, along with great figures such as Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier in postwar American experimental music. A writer who occupies an important position. On the A side, Interspecies Smalltalk commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham in 1984 is recorded, and it was formed as a collaboration with Takehisa Kosugi (violin) and completed as a minimalist masterpiece full of fantasy beauty.

On the B-side, starting with the early version of Leapday Night, "Circling Six," six synthesizer loop phrases were used, and German experimental writer Werner Durand was in charge of the saxophone, avant-garde jazz. It is finished in a strange minimalist refraction that crosses jazz. The final "All Thumbs" is a song for two mbiras, which George Lewis and David Behrman dedicated to the opening of the Paris Science Museum "La Villette" in the spring of 1986. The metal tip of was a sound installation that was connected to a computer music system through a sensor.

Why don't you pick up the excellent unreleased sound source of a rare writer who represents the history of American electronic music after a long time. Includes liner notes and performance photos by David Behrman. Limited to 400 copies.

«I met Simone through Dr. Richard Alpert, a professor at Columbia University who went to India to study with a Hindu guru and he himself became a guru afterwards called Baba Ram Dass. Coming back to US he brought Pandit Pran Nath with him. It was a time when everybody was experimenting. All came with a lot of orientalism because people were into timelessness, meditation and being stoned. It was in that atmosphere that I met Simone because she also knew Pran Nath. Around that time I moved from NY to California to work with electronic music at the newly invented school California Institute of the Arts. Simone was also living in LA and even though she was not officially connected to CalArts she knew many of the artists who were teaching there. It was in the halls of CalArts that Simone first approached me around the possibility to have Pran Nath invited to LA. In summer 1970 Simone was invited by Allan Kaprow (one of the Deans of CalArts) to do an evening of dance at the Pasadena Art Museum. One day she came to me and said “I’ve been given this commission to do a piece and I’d like to do it with music and I was wondering if you would want to do it with me?”. So I replied “Well why don’t you come to the electronic studio where I work and see how it goes? I’ll put on some sounds, we’ll make some space and see how you feel”. It immediately clicked!!!! So we decided to perform a duet together. In January 1971 in Pasadena we did our first “Illuminationss”. I played the piano, I sang a little bit, she moved a little bit when I was singing, I moved when I was singing. A Jewishy-kinf-of singing. Not only singing, but singing and running, singing and falling. I did all what eventually became my “Body Music”. Simone was also doing it but coming from a different tradition. All of a sudden we were doing a new kind of jamming together. Everybody in the audience loved it because it was so dreamy and they found amazing how a man and a woman can act in that strange, very dreamlike oriental way as in trance,,,,,together. This kind of collaboration between man and woman was uncommon at that time. Mostly other artists were doing very structural works while our performances were totally like we were on magicness drugs. Our performances had certain fixed elements like the piano or some electronics. It turned out we liked red lights so we started to always do it in red light. We liked to do it in a resonant spaces. It became more an approach than a piece, because there were never two Illuminations that were alike.» - Charlemagne Palestine «The aspect of Charlemagne’s music that most inspired my imagination was his melodies. Sometimes their texture of repetitions and evolving variations are so close that the term melody doesn’t seem to apply. What most determined our “Illuminations” was Charlemagne’s way of letting the elements in the music develop only very gradually. Once, just before a performance, Charlemagne sang to me, “Simoney don’t worry, you will dance and sing all right.” And of course I did as we walked arm in arm circling the wide-open space, a grand piano to one side shining black and covered with Teddy Bear deities, Charlemagne reflecting his childhood time as devotional cantor, and I, my childhood time striding along in the Tuscan hills, belting out Italian folksongs with my cousins. And sometimes when Charlemagne drew clear, high tones from his brandy snifter we would play our voices together more softly. Our recurring melodies were mostly Charlemagne’s. But I brought one too, with a song about not drifting away into the beyond.» - Simone Forti

Awesome Alga Marghen re-release presenting "Illuminations", or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Morton Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new “Dream School of the Future” endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange a California concert for Pandit Pran Nath. They decided to try an improvisation session together and Charlemagne invited Simone the first time to the electronic music studio where he worked regularly. Their medium blended as a play of interacting sound waves and solid matter in motion as Charlemagne and Simone shared energy and focus. The three previously unreleased recordings on this LP were made between October and December 1971. The first take titled "Illumination" is for two voices moving in the space with small bells and crystal glasses while Simone Forti plays the molimo, a corrugated tube meant for connecting the gas stove. The second take titled "Wed Oct 13th 1971" has Simone and Charlemagne in a song dialogue as animals do. It was also at Cal Arts that Charlemagne Palestine first encountered a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano of Vienna. He played it often as Simone danced during their "Illuminations". Take three is a song sang in falsetto while playing the Bosendorfer Imperial in an arpeggiated style that predates the "strummings". Listening to these "Three Takes" 40 years later they oooozza timeless carefree mystical magical dreamy atmosphere that evoked the times of the late '60s to early '70s in Charlemagne and Simone part of the California Art Scene. Illuminations were a unique open spontaneous form of performance, ritual and prayer. Edition limited to 365 copies with an essay by both Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, as well photos of the performances reproduced on the LP front sleeve.

fully remastered from the original tapes** A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. Moon On The Water were a trio of percussionists based in Italy - David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, both American tympani players in the Scala Philarmonic Orchestra, with the legendary Italian jazz drummer Tiziano Tononi, who worked with everyone from Roberto Musci, to Muhal Richard Abrams, Pierre Favre (who later joined the group), Andrew Cyrille, Barre Phillips, and Steve Lacy. Drawing on a diversity of experience, joined collectively by a unified love of rhythm and sound, they assembled a percussion record of the highest order - an unclassifiable work which should be legendary, and leaves you confounded that it’s not.

Within the history of efforts dedicated to percussion, Moon On The Water’s debut stands apart. A singular work, made remarkable by the diversity and range of its sonorities and structures. The scope of its ambition is startling. Utilizing the full intellect, experience, and talent of its creators, it employs field recording against a stunning array of instrumentation - seemingly everything from which rhythm and resonant tone could be drawn. The result renders a remarkable effect. From the delicate pulse of nature, deep resonances and carefully placed tone, intricate structures and tempos as slow as they go, across its movements the album rewrites how composition for percussion should be understood, before giving way to consuming and ecstatic rhythms which reference the Brazilian tradition of Batucada, various trance and ritual traditions of Africa, and drum solos from Free Jazz and Rock. This is as good as percussion records get. A lost marvel - accessible while distinctly avant-garde. The throbbing pulse of creative joy, distilled onto two sides of wax.

Ecstatic elements of Japan ambient minimalism dialogue with contemporary music solutions (Varèse, Ligeti), in the stream of a harmonious fusion of ancient and modern. It’s a propitiatory ceremony of supernatural things that open portals of blissfulness, tribal and shamanic darkness, timeless jungles. Between amazon fires and African safaris, we float in the Asian rivers of meditation, lost in water games, echoes of caves and rocks in the night, synergies of frogs, birds, snakes, marimbas, chimes, gongs, and tubular woods.

The album also includes one of the sickest percussion jam we’ve heard from 1980’s Italy: the mystically-named In the Land of the Boo - Bam. Exploring a wide range of percussions, from mallet instruments to drums, the band tightly builds a hypnotic jam with a strong Mediterranean feeling, maybe partly provided by the «Tullio de Piscopo-esque» drumming pattern. As the song goes by, the vibe gets more and more shamanic, often changing directions before climaxing in an epic final. True uplifting trance music!

200 copies limited edition* In 2022, Gillies Adamson Semple made a pilgrimage to the Valère Basilica in the Swiss Alps to play the oldest functioning pipe organ in the world. Built in 1435, this unique instrument is the centrepiece of this sensitive and stirring 6-track release, tracing the elemental themes of spirituality, anatomy, ecological collapse, and the nature of listening in its glacial minimalist drones. Drawing inspiration from the long-form compositions of Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone, Volumes was built from in-situ recordings Semple made in Switzerland, with the aim of capturing the physical qualities of the sound, from the stops and pedals to the air rushing through the organ’s ancient pipes. Treated like sculptural material and re-assembled at Semple’s London studio in the tradition of musique concrète, the tracks evoke a sense of exquisite timelessness, at once part of and floating free of their environment. As Semple explains: “What I like about the organ is that you can make it feel very physical. It has all these mechanical parts that sound really beautiful. And the piece is never performed. It is something that is rooted in the site. The whole pilgrimage to see this organ in Switzerland ended up acting like that, where you’re going to this very sacred place to see this specific instrument, but all you’re taking back is recording.” Released on vinyl via Fourth Sounds, Volumes was initially conceived as the soundtrack to Semple’s 2023 exhibition of the same name at Cedric Bardawil in London.

Music taken from the Carte Blanche performance "Monument 0.10 : The Living Monument" by Eszter Salamon. This album contains selections from Carmen Villain's score for the two-and-a-half hour performance, most of them edited down from the long-form versions that accompanied the ultra-slow scenes of the performance. These are Carmen Villain's first compositions for dance. Acclaimed Choreographer Eszter Salamon’s dance performance The Living Monument is built on still life, slowness and the presence of the body. In the performance, the theatrical elements are equal and interdependent, and it develops into an installation of sound, movement and figures. Each tableau is bound together by Carmen Villain’s hypnotic score in which the audience is taken on a meditative journey through vibrant tableaus in a dreamlike universe. Carmen Villain's score is a suspension of time where her music is seeking a new form of slow-moving minimalism.

"Stunning recordings from Norwegian pianist Anja Lauvdal, who follows-up last year’s Laurel Halo-produced ‘From a Story Now Lost’ with an album of improvisations made on a Wurlitzer electric piano, featuring the great Lasse Marhaug on mastering duties. Pastoral, personal, heartbreaking gear that’s required listening if you’re into Harold Budd, Loren Connors, Dominique Lawalrée, Robert Wyatt, Vincent Gallo." - Boomkat

"Night Rhythms proudly presents a first-time vinyl edition of Toshimi Mikami’s elusive gem of 90’s ambient “気舞 - Quimai” (“Chi Dance”). Released on CD in 1996 and again in 2008, this double LP version marks the first time the album will be readily available outside of Japan. Mikami states: “I made this album mainly as background music for Qi Gong, Tai Chi, yoga, etc., but I also want people to use it for various other kinds of relaxation.” The music reflects the practice of these deliberate, meditative disciplines with spacious motifs carried along by a steady rhythmic current. In his liner notes for the original CD edition, which are reprinted here, Mikami’s one-time bandmate Harumi Hosono writes of the evolution of the ambient/“organic” strain in 20th century music that “eyes, ears, and hearts opened like never before may now extend beyond notions to the specks of the natural world.” Ambient music isn’t music stripped of meaning, but rather its meaning finds form in our connection to the most basic elements of our environment, as distinguished from what Hosono calls the “endlessly exhausted economic principles” of modern pop music.

“Quimai” exists at the intersection of ambient, new age, and classic minimalism, with a gentle synthetic palette of global instrumentation layered and braided into fully orchestrated compositions. Relaxing though it may be, it’s a very focused sort of relaxation that encourages active listening rather than the blissful “tuning out” that some ambient music can inspire. Opening track “十六夜の月 Izayoi No Tsuki” immediately calls to mind Steve Reich’s work with its insistent 6/4 pulse and prominent woodwinds and percussion. “玉響 Ai Ai” continues on a similar footing, with shards of sunlight glinting off an otherwise untroubled and tireless stream. The enchanting marimba ostinato of “玉響 Tamayura” has a subaquatic quality, as if the listener is now witnessing the events on the water’s surface from below. Mikami follows it with “早乙女 Saotome,” a carefree piece that sheds the vestiges of tension present in the preceding tracks and features a playfully cascading gamelan figure. All underlying rhythmic churn falls away with album-closer “天の小道 Ama No Komichi,” an airy piece that maintains a structure similar to its sibling works while coming closest to the new age tradition, breathing freely without ever standing still. One can imagine Mikami or other practitioners enacting the final movements of their daily exercise — body tired but limber, mind reset.

This gatefold double LP edition is mastered from the original source by Travis Nordahl with lacquers cut at Palomino Records (USA). Track 3 “玉響 Tamayura” has been slightly abridged to fit the constraints of the format. Artistic elements of both CD editions have been combined by Joe Bastardo with additional nature photography courtesy of Night Rhythms Recordings owner Greg Holly. Liner notes by Toshimi Mikami and Harumi Hosono." 

A new dawn of infinite and eternal grief work. Inheriting the lifeline and tape music traditions of avant-garde heroes such as John Cage, Steve Reich and Brian Eno, sampling everything from easy listening to Musac long before it became fashionable, through slow, melancholic overtones. William Basinski, a legendary NY drone writer who will make a name for himself in ambient history as a pioneer who has predicted screw music and even vaporwave. The latest album from , which was composed by himself using a tape loop from an archived sound source recorded in 1979, is now available from ! Like many previous works, it is a profound meditation music with the theme of "death and corruption", but it is melancholic and lost, with a deeper arc of sadness than any other work since 2002's masterpiece "Disintegration Loops". Deformed screw music like steam of feeling. Of course, fans around The Caretaker ~ Natural Snow Buildings ~ Grouper are also a must-have!

Wave to Mikey, the fourth album from the Los Angeles-based actor, musician and photographer Danny Lane is a nocturnal, neon-lit ode to the friendships that shape us. “I made this album for my friend Mikey from back home,” Danny explains. “We were pretty much inseparable for a large part of our lives, and our musical and social minds were always in sync in a special way. Then with age, we drifted apart, especially since I moved to Los Angeles. This album is just a little wave hello to an old friend and a kindred spirit.” Equal parts avant-garde composition, instrumental city-pop, ambient, Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music) and Fourth World music, Wave to Mikey is an impressionistic and reflective cycle of eleven richly detailed memory portraits. Throughout the album, the influence of Jon Hassell, Arthur Russell, Hiroshi Yoshimura and Yellow Magic Orchestra hangs in the air like late-night mist, adding character but never overshadowing the rhythmic ambience of Danny’s musical visions. Wave To Mikey began as a series of sketches on analog synthesisers, guitar, sample and found percussion sketches, initially recorded in Danny’s home studio. Once he’d located the vibe, Danny called on his friends E Talley II, Solange collaborator John Carroll Kirby and Destroyer session musician Joseph Shabason, who respectively added flute, spiritual synth textures and saxophone to the record. For Glossy Mistakes founder Mario G.R., who originally discovered Danny through his photography, Wave To Mikey captures a vivid feeling of melancholy and peace. “He's able to encapsulate emotions in a very straightforward way, either in his portrait or songs,” Mario says. “I think that's a kind of virtue or skill given to talented artists, no matter the field.” Born and raised in Staten Island, New York, Danny began playing music with his friends when he was thirteen, before putting that passion on pause to study Fine Arts (Theatre) at Rider University in Lawrence Township in pursuit of an acting career. Acting led him to photography, after playing a photographer in a film, he was inspired to pursue the medium. Danny began shooting photos on film for magazines and lifestyle brands, spent a stint living in New York’s Chinatown neighbourhood, and eventually relocated to Los Angeles in 2017. Four years ago, Danny started recording and releasing music under his own name, leading to the trilogy of releases that preceded Wave To Mikey, How To Empty A Cup (2019), Memory Record (2019) and CAPUT (2021). Over the course of these releases, he’s revealed himself to be a sophisticated composer and producer with a studied ear from years spent digging through record bins for ambient, experimental, new age, jazz and electronica records from around the globe, with a particular emphasis on Japan. “Music is something that’s always been involuntary for me,” Danny reflects. “It’s unconditional, always there. It’s something I just have to do. I’ve taken breaks and it’s always gloomy when I’m not playing. I just want to get better and better and understand more and more.” Here at Glossy Mistakes, Wave To Mikey marks our second contemporary album release, following on from Evenings by Japanese composer Metoronori. We’re proud to be able to present Danny, Metoronori and other modern musicians' work alongside reissues of classic works from Stevia aka Susumu Yokota, Akira Ito, Yuji Toriyama & Ken Morimura, and Takashi Kokubo. Mastered by Damian Schwartz, Wave To Mikey will be released on Vinyl LP Glossy Mistakes on June 27 2022. Besides the regular black vinyl, a limited clear vinyl will be available in an edition of 100 copies. Both editions come packaged with original cover art photography shot by Danny.

Dedicated to the Island -soundwalk & music for SAUNTER magazine- is a new work by DJ/musician Kaoru Inoue, also known as Chari Chari. The album was released in September 2023 as a limited edition bonus CD for the special feature "Yakushima Today" in the sixth issue of SAUNTER magazine, a travel magazine published by the Yakushima-based publishing company Kiltibooks, and is now available for the first time on vinyl! The album is a gem of organic electronic music, including 9 tracks such as "Mizukumi," "Nagareru," and "Hoshifuru," which were produced based on field recordings made in Yakushima. It will be released as an RSD limited edition LP record (180g vinyl with liner notes) on "RECORD STORE DAY" on Saturday, April 20, 2024.

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.

Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.

Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Track Listing:

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

Philosopher, musician and anti-art activist, Henry Flynt has long foregone the academicism often associated with “serious music” in favor of a uniquely intuitive, emotional approach to composition. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a part of NYC’s vibrant avant-garde scene, studying with Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath and developing his own proprietary technique on violin. You Are My Everlovin’, Flynt’s first published musical work, finds the composer in peak form at a lower Manhattan loft in late spring 1981. Featuring solo electric violin and pre-recorded tambura, this sinuous performance elegantly brings together disparate vernaculars—Southern blues, modal jazz, Appalachian fiddle, North Indian raga—into a new and bracing whole. As Flynt writes in the liner notes, “The electric violin timbre is crucial; it allows me to crush the diverse styles into a unity. I imagined the genre as open, radiant improvisation…an open plain that could absorb anything.” Incorporating themes and melodic phrases from his earlier work, Everlovin’ becomes Flynt’s own Gesamtkunstwerk—a work that is at once rooted in and liberated by the drone, revealing the profound mutability and utter singularity of this American iconoclast.

Deadstock copy of Greek New Age Composer Vangelis Katsoulis's album. For fans of Franco Nanni, Ditto, Cabaret Du Ciel and Vito Ricci

The feeling that Anastasia Coope's music transmits seems to emanate from a precipice beyond the material world, like a void or memory pressing up against the veil. It’s exacting and enveloping, but unmoored in space and time: ghostly, spectral, far-out folk. Darning Woman, her debut album, feels like a dispatch from another past. Akin to lullabies or nursery rhymes, its minimal folk instrumentation contorts into something staccato and strange led by Coope's expressive, stratified vocals. In spite of the suggestion of antiquity that runs through Darning Woman, 21-year-old, Brooklyn-based Coope is very much a contemporary artist. Born to an English father and American mother (whose original Martin acoustic she uses to compose), she was raised in the New York village of Cold Spring. The lonely landscapes and small towns of the Hudson Valley populate her songwriting, setting wintry backdrops against the acrobatics of her voice. Her experience making this record was a largely insular one, too; she began recording music while staying at a relative’s empty home in Beacon, NY, experimenting with recording software in an empty living room, singing directly into the open space. Until that point, Coope had only thought of herself as a visual artist, not a musician– but it felt right immediately. Throughout the next year, she worked to invent the lush, sweeping universe conveyed here. Her voice is the core of this work - emotive, oscillating between shadowy effervescence and something more guttural, building atop itself. Coope spent months teaching herself to sing in a new way, through hocketing and layering her voice, constructing choirs of herself. These songs often start from a chorus or phrase that gets stuck in Coope’s head and bloom into chaotic, fractured earworms. There’s a slew of past cultural touchstones that inform her approach to music making – the avant-garde art rock of the ‘80s; Trish Keenan or Su Tissue or Brigitte Fontaine; medieval choruses; church choirs; contemporary folk; romantic close harmonies groups of the ‘50s; Meara O'Reilly’s Hockets for Two Voices. But rather than the sonics of those works, Coope was instead moved by the ephemera surrounding them, their songs’ abilities to conjure whole worlds. Here, the lush, romantic opener “He Is On His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together” is the portal into Coope’s universe. It teeters in, disquieted, a choral slowburn building into something between hysteria and euphoria, with a slinking piano and a jarring electric guitar line closing out the din. On later songs, like “Sounds of a Giddy Woman,” the auditory illusions became tactile as she composed: “I was able to envision a room of things happening, rather than me just building something,” Coope says. “The record was me starting to think spatially about music.” Coope’s songwriting revolves around intuition and aesthetics, rather than precise lyrical storytelling; she has a striking ability to invoke a sense of movement with her makeshift mantras. The word “woman” appears repeatedly throughout the album’s song titles, but for Coope, that was an unconscious motif. “The word ‘woman’ was having a physical idea of what my songs were trying to represent through this idea of a muse or an idol or an icon,” she says. “It was a mix of the idea of being maternal, of housekeeping, and then also the idea of a character, a star.” The title track serves as a skeleton key for the entire record; “Darning Woman” is a hyperphysical sing-song, a literal instruction to darn and repair, the wane and waxing repetitions that make up a life. It’s the umbrella under which the rest of the songs live. Decisive in its fervor, it loops around nesting: mending, cleaning, housework – collecting, building, and decorating – the hands-on, tangible aspects of at-home life. These songs are built from that, and mantras plucked from the ether or poems and fragments of overheard conversations jotted down, transformed into an entity unknown. Like Coope’s paintings, drawings, and mixed media artworks, which occasionally feature among the imagery in her album and single materials, her songwriting yields an esoteric distance. It’s the feeling of the work pushing back on you, holding you at arms’ length. It invites you to see, to feel, rather than know – but for all that’s arcane here, Darning Woman is rooted deeply in the things we can touch. --Libby Webster

In his “Pulse Music” compositions of the mid-1970s, composer John McGuire forged a unique interpretation of European serialism. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Gottfried Michael Koenig, McGuire moved to Cologne, Germany in 1970, where he become associated with the world-leading Studio for Electronic Music at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. Like Stockhausen, McGuire found his musical imagination both constrained and inspired by the technology that was available to him.A conversation with sculptor Hans Karl Burgeff led McGuire to think beyond the horizon and into limitless space. For “Vanishing Points” (1985–1988), McGuire used an entirely digital set-up for the first time: a digital sequencer, eight Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers and a Studer 24-track digital tape recorder. The piece was conceived as a “sequel” to the Pulse Music series, but also a step forward from it. Whereas the Pulse Music pieces had employed steady streams of pulses, with Vanishing Points McGuire employed pulse layers that accelerate or decelerate against one another, vastly increasing the resulting rhythmic complexity.McGuire's exploration of music technology continued in “A Cappella” (1990–1997), written for his wife, the soprano Beth Griffith, known for her recording of Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” made in 1983. Using samples, he created a four-voice choir of voice samples and arranged them into interacting parts. The composition faced challenges due to the organic nature of the human voice compared to the precision of synthesized sounds. This process involved extensive editing and a negotiation between the "material" and the "original conception". This sort of negotiation applies as much to the composition of a single piece as it does to the work of two decades.

FUJI||||||||||TA returns to Hallow Ground with his second full-length for the label after we had released his international breakthrough album »iki« in early 2020. Active since 2006, the Japanese composer and sound artist has become prolific since the release of »iki,« releasing a slew of records while also touring the world. His new album »MMM« is Yosuke Fujita’s most complex so far. Changing the set-up of his pipe organ by switching to an electric air pump allowed him to activate new sonic and compositional potentials of the instrument, while he also expanded upon his experiments with his own voice. »MMM« is a masterpiece of conceptual and formal rigour—a testament to how multi-layered and versatile the music of FUJI||||||||||TA can be. Previous releases had already showcased Fujita's interest in working with the rhythmic potentials of the organ he built himself in 2009. Replacing its hand-operated air pump with an electric one allowed him to work with it more freely and simultaneously record its sounds. This marked the starting point for the opener »M-1,« for which he recorded the pipes by waving a gun microphone close to it, thus creating shifting rhythmic patterns. The piece engages in a perpetual play of repetition and difference, balancing sonic intensity with compositional dramaturgy. For »M-2,« the artist uses his voice and works with a singing technique he has developed over more than a decade: constantly exhaling and inhaling, he puts a strain on his internal organs in order to create what he calls a »third voice.« The resulting piece is built on a throbbing rhythmic foundation topped by wordless melodies. »M-3« closes the album as a synthesis of these two pieces, but is far more than the mere sum of its parts. The subtle tonal shifts of the organ take on a more subdued role this time, and Fujita’s scat growling and singing reappears in processed form. »M-3« combines the rhythms and melodies of the previous pieces to let something entirely new emerge out of them, much like the album is based on perpetual changes and recombinatory strategies. In fact, Fujita explains, the acronymic title can be read in many ways: this album is minimalistic, but freely mixes and mingles different materials in magical and even metaphorical ways while also paying its dues to his wife and daughter—M. and M. Just like its title can mean a lot of different things, »MMM« itself is ever-evolving, traversing different moods and opening itself up to a plethora of interpretations at each of its many turns.

Kelly Moran has steadfastly established himself as a standard-bearer of contemporary music, challenging the classical school of piano with modern and experimental approaches; in 2018, he joined Oneohtrix Point Never's touring ensemble and has performed live with FKA Twigs. In the classical realm, she has composed for Margaret Leng Tan, while also performing with artists such as Kelsey Lu and Yves Tumor. Her latest album, "Moves in the Field," was released on March 29, 2012 on Warp Records! This album contains 10 duets that explore the inhuman and impossible realm of piano playing, experimenting with the Yamaha Disklavier automatic piano, which Moran plays in real time while the Disklavier plays ultra-fast arpeggios and chords that require more than 10 fingers, accompanying motifs that transcend the physical limits of the piano. Mixing and recording was done by Dan Bora, known as the sound engineer for Philip Glass, and mastered by Joshua Eustis of Tel Aviv.

Being somewhere, while being somewhere else
A place I look for in other places
A moment on repeat
I made this music as a way to hug myself

All music performed and written by Ulla E. Straus

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners, the keepers of secrets, the path-finders. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partch are from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe. New on Strut, the first ever reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original albums from 1982, Drumland Dreamland and Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Lori Vambe is a unique figure in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension. Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (Vambe, the sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord; the instrument would manifest itself as the drumgita. In 1982, he privately produced a pair of home recordings, the diptych set Drumgita Solo and Drumland Dreamland, releasing them on his own label Drumony. On these records, he rejected any commercial aesthetic and employed tape effects, temporal shifts, reversed sound and overdubbing to investigate space-time and access the fourth dimension. Combining layered drums with the rhythmic throb of the drumgita and, on Drumland Dreamland, an improvised piano performance by Brazilian concert pianist Rafael Dos Santos, the albums are both hypnotic and perturbing. Both albums were cut at Portland Studios by Chas Chandler and stand as a concealed monument of Black British experimental music. 500 copies of each record were originally pressed, and both were released together. The albums were never performed live. For this first ever reissue of Drumland Drumland and Drumgita Solo, Strut presents the two albums in their original artwork, housed in a deluxe slipcase including an additional 8-page 12”-sized booklet featuring unseen photos, liner notes and an interview with Lori Vambe by The Wire magazine writer Francis Gooding. Both albums are fully remastered by The Carvery.

Dear reader & listener, After being out of print for several years, Duval Timothy’s phenomenal ‘Brown Loop’ has finally been reissued. Recorded in New York in the winter months of 2016, this brand new edition features a slightly adjusted track listing. The release date is 2nd of October 2020, which happens to be the multidisciplinary artist’s birthday. Duval has asked me to write a few words about his record. I often find myself listening to Duval’s music when travelling. On an aeroplane for example, where the comforting piano pieces are set starkly against the sound of the world passing by, the constant engine humming, air conditioning running. Or when I’m walking through a city I’ve not been to before, the music blending into the continuous noise of cars and motorbikes, anchoring me when I find myself in unknown surroundings. Grounding me, one note at a time, in contrast to a city that does the exact opposite. Duval’s compositions bring a sense of comfort where there is detachment. It’s the soundtrack for an immigrant (such as myself), alienated from wherever he came, but someone who also doesn’t fully belong to the place he set off to. I heard Duval describe the music of Brown Loop as ascending a mountain, and after you reached the top you come down to the other end. Through rhythmic repetitive patterns, the music builds. Within the pieces, melodies stray away from the theme, into unknown territories, but always find their way back to a comfortable home. Most elaborately this happens on my favourite piece, Hairs. The patterns and melodies on pieces such as Through The Night and (recently added to the vinyl version) G are stripped down to their very essence. It is not just jazz, it’s pure hip hop, as the hooks are reminiscent of the shards of melancholy legends like Dilla, Pete Rock and Havoc used in their best work. In terms of repetition, the music is also very techno. And like in all good techno, the patterns (perhaps contrary to popular belief) ooze humanity and emotion. But most of all Duval’s Brown Loop is a very personal record. it takes courage to expose your inner self like that in the most minimal of compositions. But once you find the right notes, the right pattern, music is the most beautiful thing in the world. Martyn Deykers