MUSIC

Sakamoto on Guitar LP by Jonathan Bockelmann In Wishlist view x Share Tweet Share on Tumblr Embed this albumsmall medium large Email supported by Greg thumbnail dbp thumbnail alojlo thumbnail Raznat thumbnail Alexander Hine thumbnail Michael Gallagher thumbnail Kevin Burns thumbnail mattbenard thumbnail Cybershaman thumbnail Etienne B thumbnail Roygbiv thumbnail musicistheanswer thumbnail Bruce Levenstein thumbnail raffaele melina thumbnail Tseld thumbnail dasd thumbnail Bethlem thumbnail fulemin thumbnail wilb thumbnail Ian Reagan thumbnail Arthur LORENTE thumbnail alifetimeaway thumbnail ryryryryryryryryry thumbnail NAOKI WATANABE thumbnail Aoneko No Torso 00:00 / 02:13 Streaming + Download Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Download available in 24-bit/96kHz. €9 EUR or more Record/Vinyl + Digital Album package image package image package image package image package image 180g vinyl, first pressing comes with an embossed art print Includes unlimited streaming of Sakamoto on Guitar LP via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Download available in 24-bit/96kHz. ships out within 10 days €27 EUR or more 1. Aoneko No Torso 02:13 2. Dream 01:15 3. Bibo No Aozora 03:20 4. Blu 02:58 5. A Flower Is Not A Flower 03:12 6. 20220302 02:41 7. Opus 05:21 8. Dancing In The Sky 01:03 9. Suite for Krug in 2008: I. Movement 06:31 10. Suite for Krug in 2008: II. Movement 07:10 11. Suite for Krug in 2008: III. Movement 05:13 about Jonathan Bockelmann is a classical guitarist and composer based in Munich who first made waves in 2023 with his debut album ‘Childish Mind’. His entry into composing were arrangements he had made of pieces by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Some of these have been released digitally in three editions and are now available on vinyl for the first time. The record comes in high quality packaging with an embossed art print and features both some of Sakamoto’s lesser-known works like the ‘Suite for Krug’ as well as iconic pieces like ‘Bibo No Aozora’. "I have always been fascinated with the music of Sakamoto. He manages to communicate his musical ideas with only a few notes - something that merely a handful of composers are capable of doing. And no matter what instruments he writes for, you can always hear an underlying constant, a signature in his sound. It was a revelation to me when I finished my first transcriptions of his music and realized how incredibly well they actually work on the guitar. Somehow this instrument is suitable for capturing the spirit of his compositions and I think it's because of the unique and colorful tone of the instrument. It even f e e l s great to play those pieces. Sometimes I spend so much time studying them that they start to sound to me as if they were originally written for guitar. During the transcription process I had to take on different challenges. When the original score was available it was much easier to transcribe a composition because I had different instrument sections separately - like the string section of ‚Blu’, for example. This way I could figure out how and where to play it on the guitar. For some pieces though, like 'Dream', there was no score available and I had to figure out the notes by ear. In the end the whole process gave me so much joy and inspiration, not least because I felt that I have created a whole new repertoire for the classical guitar, one that is wonderful to listen to and a joy to play." - Jonathan Bockelmann

The second LP compendium of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s early solo piano works, recorded throughout the 1960s – finally available again. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear!

These original compositions, performed by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru herself on solo piano, were originally self-released in Germany in small editions as fundraisers for orphanages, support organizations for widows of war victims, and other philanthropic causes. We are humbled and proud to present this album in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation, and to assist in continuing her life-long mission of using music as a vessel to care for those who have been abandoned by society, or harmed by strife.

Black vinyl LP comes in black inner-sleeves and heavy cardstock jacket with color printing and gold-foil stamping, and song notes by the composer herself. Restored and remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk.

First volume of solo piano compositions by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, finally back in print. Born to an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa in December of 1923, Emahoy spent much of her youth and young adulthood studying classical music in Europe. She returned to Ethiopia in the 40s, where the war interrupted her musical studies. In 1948 during a church service in Ethiopia, she found her faith and began years of religious training. Throughout her physical and spiritual journeys, Emahoy continued to compose for the piano. She first released this album in Germany 1963 as small private press record. The tracks reflect her own travels, seamlessly moving between Western classical and traditional Ethiopian modes, evoking Erik Satie, the orthodox liturgy, and meditative Christian music all at once. Her work is like no one else in the world, lyrical, hypnotic, full of spiritual warmth and a direct connection to the divine. Emahoy is now 98 years old and still lives in Jerusalem. She continues to play, and the funds from her work go to the righteous causes to which she has dedicated her life. We are incredibly proud to present this music on vinyl again, mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk and presented in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation. This black vinyl LP version includes a new reproduction of the original artwork, with the composer’s own notes, translated from the original German.

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable. We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, its a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.” Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and minuscule, distant and immediate. This phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll. Félicia Atkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.

Tomoyoshi Date, a physician and musician known for his releases on prominent ambient labels such as 12K (US), LAAPS (France), and QuietDetails (UK), will release his piano trilogy, created between 2021 and 2024, on November 10 via Bandcamp in a limited edition of 150 cassettes.
This trilogy includes 438Hz, As it is, As you are, released by LAAPS and selected as one of Bandcamp’s Best Ambient albums in January 2023; Tata, composed for Silver Gelatin’s exhibit at Tata in Koenji, Tokyo; and Requiem, a piece dedicated in memory of a close friend who passed away too soon. All three albums are packaged in special jackets featuring found photographs curated by Silverわ Gelatin and are being released simultaneously.
Created with the theme of “objects and the passage of time,” this trilogy is characterised by elongated, repetitive piano motifs, microsound elements, and organic electronics, aiming to blur the line between rhythm and melody. Recently, Date has been working on a world-first program that auto-generates pure-intonation music (www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BNEjMtL1o). This trilogy serves as a culmination of Date’s past compositions in equal temperament.

Tomoyoshi Date, a physician and musician known for his releases on prominent ambient labels such as 12K (US), LAAPS (France), and QuietDetails (UK), will release his piano trilogy, created between 2021 and 2024, on November 10 via Bandcamp in a limited edition of 150 cassettes.
This trilogy includes 438Hz, As it is, As you are, released by LAAPS and selected as one of Bandcamp’s Best Ambient albums in January 2023; Tata, composed for Silver Gelatin’s exhibit at Tata in Koenji, Tokyo; and Requiem, a piece dedicated in memory of a close friend who passed away too soon. All three albums are packaged in special jackets featuring found photographs curated by Silverわ Gelatin and are being released simultaneously.
Created with the theme of “objects and the passage of time,” this trilogy is characterised by elongated, repetitive piano motifs, microsound elements, and organic electronics, aiming to blur the line between rhythm and melody. Recently, Date has been working on a world-first program that auto-generates pure-intonation music (www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BNEjMtL1o). This trilogy serves as a culmination of Date’s past compositions in equal temperament.

Tomoyoshi Date, a physician and musician known for his releases on prominent ambient labels such as 12K (US), LAAPS (France), and QuietDetails (UK), will release his piano trilogy, created between 2021 and 2024, on November 10 via Bandcamp in a limited edition of 150 cassettes.
This trilogy includes 438Hz, As it is, As you are, released by LAAPS and selected as one of Bandcamp’s Best Ambient albums in January 2023; Tata, composed for Silver Gelatin’s exhibit at Tata in Koenji, Tokyo; and Requiem, a piece dedicated in memory of a close friend who passed away too soon. All three albums are packaged in special jackets featuring found photographs curated by Silverわ Gelatin and are being released simultaneously.
Created with the theme of “objects and the passage of time,” this trilogy is characterised by elongated, repetitive piano motifs, microsound elements, and organic electronics, aiming to blur the line between rhythm and melody. Recently, Date has been working on a world-first program that auto-generates pure-intonation music (www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BNEjMtL1o). This trilogy serves as a culmination of Date’s past compositions in equal temperament.

Following releases on Sähkö Recordings and The Trilogy Tapes, "Fever of the World" is the Soda Gong debut by Memotone, the nom de plume of UK-based multi-instrumentalist Will Yates. As a collection, it is both intimate and expansive, like the feeling of gathering one's thoughts before setting off on a long journey or committing to an irrevocable course of action. Throughout, Yates' talents as both player and sound designer are on full display, as are the sonic signatures that have come to characterize the Memotone catalog: low-lit, ECM-inflected noir; evasive and evolving loop-based accretions; and mellifluous mosaics of keys, guitar, reeds, and percussion. It is patient and focused music, built around production techniques and compositional ideas that have been perfected both in studio and in live performance over a period of several years. "Catherine, On Fire" sets the scene, one of two languid, longform selections, and develops slowly from a spare, harmonic-laden guitar loop into a bed of rippling textural ambience and woozy clarinet filigree. Later, "The Bus" and "When the Bakery Has What You Want and It's Cheap" conjure images of rain-streaked windows, fanciful baked confections, and grey skies broken finally by sunlight. Warm, generous, and comfortable in its own skin, this is music that reminds us that when it feels easy to resign ourselves to world weariness, we should pause for a moment and listen to the rustle of the leaves. The wind knows not to linger.

Heavy weight vinyl. Remastered version of “out of noise”, his first solo album with commmons, released in 2009. The album was remastered under his supervision, adding previously unreleased tracks.

The soundtrack of the film "Monster," directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and written by Yuji Sakamoto, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Ryuichi Sakamoto held a no-attendance online solo piano concert "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 12122020" on December 12, 2020. The live performance was directed by Rhizomatiks and filmed by Zakkubalan, and was simultaneously broadcast worldwide from a studio in Tokyo. The live performance was a one-night-only event with no archive, making it a rare and precious event that will never be seen again.

The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch III’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

A solo album released in 2017. It is an ambitious work that breaks new ground after more than a year of recuperation from illness, and several concerts have been held overseas, mainly featuring material from this album. While the previous album "out of noise" was an organic acoustic work, this album makes extensive use of analog synthesizers, including vintage ones. Since one of the original production ideas was the soundtrack to a fictional Tarkovsky film, each song strongly evokes the listener's own image of the film. In fact, after the album's release, Shiro Takatani, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zakkubalan, and others made a film of the album and its songs, which was also presented as an installation. The album includes "andata," a new signature song that has been performed at every concert in recent years. Also, "fullmoon" and "Life, Life" featured readings by Paul Bowles and David Sylvian, respectively, from the film "Sheltering Sky".

Superb collaborative effort between Irish ambient master and WRWTFWW's favorite Gareth Quinn Redmond (Laistigh den Ghleo, Umcheol, Ar Ais Arís) and Polish producer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Albert Karch. Experimental sessions inspired by Mark Hollis and Satoshi Ashikawa featuring piano, drums, synthesizers, and strings.

Time and duration are core themes in the work of both William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of eight years from start to finish. In that time, our collective perception of time has at times become disorienting. “ . . . on reflection ” remodels that instability as an exquisite work of art – one that is unmoored by time or space. Limitation breeds creativity, revealed as an expression of minimalism and close focus. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging an iridescent flurry of flickering melodies. The sounds of various birds heard from late night windows on tour can occasionally be heard throughout, ricocheting off mirrored facades, reflecting on themselves as they continually reshape their own environments with song. “ . . . on reflection ” looks backwards, a bustling revelry of positive emotions heard through the aging mirrors of memory. It is a celebratory meditation where sound shimmers through time like the light of the sea’s waves glistening as it folds and unfolds upon itself. Created 2014-2022 between L.A. & London. Mixed at Narnia, Walton-on-Thames.

From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now!

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear.

This is the first archival release of the great composer’s recordings since the Éthiopiques series reintroduced her music to the world in 2006. Drawn from original master tapes and a nearly impossible-to-find vinyl release, Jerusalem unveils profound new facets of Emahoy Gebru’s performance and compositions.

The record picks up where the last two Mississippi releases left off, with tracks from her 1972 album Hymn of Jerusalem, of which only a handful of copies are known to exist. These include “Home of Beethoven,” “Aurora,” and a true masterpiece that stands amongst her greatest compositions, the moving “Jerusalem.” “Quand La Mer Furieuse” is the first release featuring Emahoy’s singing voice, forshadowing a vocal album planned for fall 2023. The B-Side brings us the artist’s home recordings - tracks like “Farewell Eve,” “Woigaye Don’t Cry Anymore,” and “Famine Disaster 1974” mark a bridge from liturgical work to dark and intense classical material, a new mode.

This album is released in celebration of Emahoy Gebru’s 99th birthday on December 12, 2022. Mississippi is honored to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher to continue to introduce this visionary composer to the world.

Newly remastered recordings pressed on 160gm black vinyl, heavy jacket with reproduction of 1972 artwork, song notes by the artist. 

It is with great pride Miasmah announces the posthumous release of this double album of the final work by experimental composer Marcus Fjellström, titled The Last Sunset of the Year. Collected by Marcus’ friends and colleagues Erik K. Skodvin and Dave Kajganich, this release brings together music written and produced during Marcus’ tenure as composer for the first season of the AMC anthology series The Terror, which told the story of the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage. That said, THE LAST SUNSET OF THE YEAR is, by design, not a soundtrack to the show. Dave Kajganich writes in the album’s liner notes: “Some of the pieces will be familiar to those who know The Terror (though in some cases in different forms), but many other pieces are being made available here for the first time. The selected pieces have a unity unto themselves, and we feel strongly that this release should be taken not as a companion to the show, but as Marcus Fjellström ’s final album, on its own terms. We’ve presented these pieces without titles, except for titling the four movements of the journey they suggest. It is a journey that evokes the mystery, grandeur, and desolation of the Arctic, and articulates the spiritual and existential implications of traveling there. In many ways, THE LAST SUNSET OF THE YEAR goes further, and deeper, than the show ever could, presenting a remarkable sonic line from contented exploration, to staggering decline, to death—and even to a final vista beyond death.” Kajganich reached out to begin discussing the idea of this release with Skodvin, back in 2017, after Marcus’ death, but before the series had premiered. In the years since, Dave and Erik have Zoomed and emailed back and forth hundreds of times, studying all seventy-five of the pieces Marcus wrote for the show in all their forms (as many as six or seven versions to a piece), to winnow down a final list of pieces to include. The most difficult phase of the process, Kajganich reveals in the notes, was understanding the best way to sequence the tracks. It required listening to many different track orders and paying close attention to how each order created a slightly different identity for the album through their specific juxtapositions and dynamics. “In a way I can’t fully articulate, it was very much as though Erik and I were having a final, deeply felt and joyous conversation with Marcus himself about the interior lives of these pieces,” Kajganich says. The album’s title comes from a moment in the show when a group of Victorian sailors who are trapped in winter pack ice, suffering dwindling psychological resources and supplies, stand on the deck of one of the doomed ships to watch the sun rise above the horizon for a moment, and then immediately set in the last sunset of the year before six weeks of darkness, an event which, even through the lens of their inevitable coming losses, could still be viewed as something astonishing and beautiful. None of those men could know, nor can we, what waits for us across the line of death, but in The Last Sunset of the Year, Marcus seems to have had a notion.

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell

990x has been blurring the line between rap and ambient for almost a decade, breaking up his subby, saturated 808 kicks and itchy percussive trills with effervescent pads, levitational loops and the kind of ghostly contrails you'd expect to hear on a Grouper record. He's never sounded quite as liminal as he does on 'Ruins', though, an album produced in recovery as he contemplated the healing process, shifting between one state and the next. As part of the recently formed label clique The Citadel, along with Sauron and IJI, he hones in on decentralised, defocussed sounds linked across continents by the internet’s rhizomatic networks, repping a certain slant on the sound that originated with Lil B and diffused via soundcloud to become a key node in the contemporary definition of what Brian Eno termed a “scenius”; a collective intelligence that transcends the sum of its parts. Throughout ‘Ruins’, 990x deploys all the hallmarks of the aesthetic - glyding 808 bass and sibilant trills, vaporous pads, and noctilucent melodies - with a melancholic grip all his own. According to classic cloud rap convention, the 8-part, 40 minute suite evinces a liminal, weightless state of mind with immersive structures that appear to float, buoyed by subs that plunge all the way down, whilst his ambient soul wraps the head in high tog puff stuffed with hopes and dreams. Shimmering echoes of Lil B and Clams Casino’s early works perfuse ‘Forest of Silence’ in his use of guzheng-like string motifs diffused to the rafters on diaphanous subs, and Yungwebster’s screwed diagonals come to mind in the vertiginous bliss-out ‘Fallen’. A tempered ecstasy thieves thru the saturated cinematic panorama ‘June Lovers’ and gives way to the ruder ballast of ‘Crates’ while the fractal hi-hats on ‘Sonar’ ultimately get subsumed by saturated waves of bass and screwed ambient dub on the album’s longest cut, the subtly optimistic 8 minute parting shot ‘Wisdom’, deploying a horizontal dembow rhythm that can't help but remind us of Kelman Duran's epochal '1804 Kids'.

Beatrice Dillon mints her new label with her first entirely acoustic work, performed by Explore Ensemble and commissioned by Mark Fell. Stunning, major work, RIYL CC Hennix, John Cage, Pascale Criton, Helmut Lachenmann, Morton Feldman. The naturally open-ended navigation of themes in Seven Reorganisations is exemplary of an artist whose thoughtfully considered catalogue is hailed among the most notable in modern experimental music. Beatrice Dillon’s first entirely acoustic composition allows her ideas on fundamentals of space and light, structure and tone, to unfold in beguiling, inspirational new directions unveiling whole new facets of a musical vision that continues to reveal itself with each new release. Derived from a Mark Fell commission, the album features a version recorded in a London studio setting, and another taken as a live recording made at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2023. The same compositions are here articulated by the same performers, distinguished by subtle alterations of atmosphere and dynamics on each side. The studio parts remain tethered to Beatrice’s practice with the use of discrete edits of drily close-mic’d parts judiciously rearranged across the stereo field with a near-hallucinatory minimalism. In exquisite juxtaposition, the live iteration relinquishes that control to Explore Ensemble’s sextet of players cycling the piece’s musical cells in a reverberant room. The recordings encourage listeners to revel in psychoacoustic frissons of overtones and microtonal, timbral intricacy, whilst also highlighting the way her score appears to prompt the performers to stop, breathe, listen and look around them, before deciding where to go next. The schisms of fixedness and ephemerality to Seven Reorganisations are surely in keeping with Dillon’s enduring obsessions with structure and motion in organised sound, but can also be attributed to an ever expanding grasp of interrelated artforms. Extramusical cues from W.R. Bion’s psychoanalytic assertion “Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available”, and the deconstructionist philosophy of S. Korea’s Byung Chul-Han’s statement, “Leaving things out, to better hear what’s kept in”, are guiding principles as much as the misty depth perception found in Hasegawa Tohaku’s C.16th Japanese folding screens, or the shifting focal points of Terri Weifenbach’s photography (as featured on this album’s cover). Perfect metaphors for the way the composition and mixing seduces you into its filigree detail and use of negative space - the listener activating its latent detail. Comparable to Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ in its etheric, harmonious beauty, or Pascale Criton’s ‘INFRA’ in how the music feels out the spaces in-between, Beatrice’s clean diversion from club music exposes a related, but whole other, architecture of sound that propels the imagination, embodied in reverie. Close listening rewards with passages of frankly astonishing iridescent beauty in the arp flutters of ‘Seven Reorganisations I’ and sublime tension of its lulled lacunæ in ‘Seven Reorganisations II’, with an absence of repeating melody that makes return journeys feel like revisiting a perpetually unresolved, waking dreamscape.

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable. We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, its a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.” Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and minuscule, distant and immediate. This phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll. Félicia Atkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell