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The definitive release of Dubhei & New Chanel, the extraordinary musical work by Shinro Ohtake, known as an artist. Shinro Ohtake is currently known as an artist, but his career began in music. JUKE/19., which was among the first in Japan to respond to NO WAVE and incorporate it into their work, was far ahead of its time in 1980. Yet, their work quietly influenced many later artists. Yamataka EYE of Boredoms, in particular, openly acknowledged its immense influence, and in the 90s, he even started a duo with Otake himself, PUZZLE PUNKS (the unit continues to this day).
Dabuhei & New Chanel represents the ultimate expression of Otake's musical vision. This band, featuring guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and turntables, was entirely remote-controlled, creating an extraordinary system where each stage performance itself became a work of art. Yamataka EYE was once featured in this system, performing with Destroy All Monsters, and his collaboration with Kazuhisa Uchihashi was also released as a CD work.
This release captures Dubhei & New Chanel's performance at the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art's TAD space on the final day of the touring “Shinro Ohtake Exhibition,” which began at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2022. It is presented across three analog discs and two CDs.
For this performance, Toshiharu Toyama, a close ally who had worked with Ohtake and JUKE/19. since the early 80s, brought his own modified instruments and joined Dubhei & New Chanel mid-performance. Their playing plunged into a black hole-like sonic world that could never have emerged from Dubhei & New Chanel alone, creating an intense, condensed history of Ohtake's music starting from JUKE/19. , creating an intense experience that felt like a sudden condensation of the entire history of Ohtake's music, starting from JUKE/19.. Ohtake's live performance added to the ultimate industrial sound mass, creating a physical chaos.
Both the packaging and content differ between the analog and CD versions.
The analog packaging is unprecedented: a B-size silk-screen printed poster cut into three pieces, each housing one record, then all stored within a silk-screen printed clear case. When connected, they form a B-size silk poster. During cutting, the request was: “Blow out the bass at full volume—a lighter player might blow the needle off!”
Please note that the jacket image is a concept rendering and may differ slightly from the final visual.
To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.
Last heard on Black Truffle as one quarter of the joyously anarchic Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett, Hans Reichel (1949-2011) is one of the great figures of experimental guitar music. Though perhaps lesser known than peers like Derek Bailey, Fred Frith and Keith Rowe, Reichel’s rethinking of the instrument was in some ways the most radical of all. Early on, he dispensed with existing guitars to build a series of his own that explored the use of additional strings and fretboards, moveable pickups, extra bridges, special capos, and other innovations documented in the extensive booklet accompanying this release.
What strikes the listener right from the opening selection on Dalbergia Retusa—‘Return of the Knödler show’, from 1987’s The Dawn of Dachsman—is the extraordinary beauty of Reichel’s music, at once alien in the shimmering sonorities and unconventional pitch relationships made possible by his invented instruments, and deeply lyrical, even romantic in its harmonic content. Growing up in West Germany in the 1960s, Reichel’s formative influences were mainly British and American rock bands, a background that shines through in many of the pieces included here: ‘An old friend passes by’ is haunted by the ghost of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar, and the wild closer ‘Heimkehr der Holzböcke’, taken from a rare 1975 7” and the only piece to use overdubbing, layers errant hammer-on and slide tones over a Canned Heat boogie chug.
Reichel was an important source for the development of Oren Ambarchi’s own extended approach to the electric guitar. Appropriately enough, his selection opens with the very first piece by Reichel he ever heard, on a flexidisc included with a 1989 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Though Reichel collaborated with others extensively in many settings and also performed on violin and his other major contribution to instrument invention, the daxophone, his music for solo guitar remains at the core of his oeuvre.
Focusing exclusively on solo pieces recorded between 1973 and 1988, the 23 pieces on Dalbergia Retusa showcase the range and consistency of Reichel’s work, allowing the listener to see how his performances developed hand-in-hand with his instrumental inventions. On a piece from his very first LP, played on an 11-string instrument (partly strung with piano strings and using a schnapps glass a slide), we hear his intensive exploration of fret-hammering to create zither-like, chiming tone, which Reichel would hone further in later years with a double fretboard guitar specifically designed to be hammered rather than fretted and picked. On a piece from 1979’s Death of the Rare Bird Ymir, Reichel uses two steel-string acoustic guitars at once, with beautiful results: ‘some even say too beautiful’, he jokes in the interview included here. Many of the pieces from the 1980s make use of varieties of the ‘pick behind the bridge guitar’, instruments of uncanny harmonic richness primarily designed to be played on the ‘wrong’ side of the bridge. At times the unexpected behaviour of attacks, resonance, and decay can almost seem electronic, conjuring up the technology-assisted work of Henry Kaiser or even Fennesz, but realised solely through Reichel’s unorthodox techniques on his invented instruments.
Visionary electroacoustic explorations return as Black Truffle reissues Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, a major work fusing musique concrète and synthesis into emotionally charged sonic landscapes of rare intensity.
Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke.
A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of 'Wanderlust', fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls 'climates'. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid 'closeness'; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the INA GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block.
Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous 'scenes', with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies.
Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.
Forest Factory is the duo of fellow nomads Elvin Brandhi and Andreas Trobollowitsch. Each using self-made turntables, sampler and voice to create a unique acoustic repertoire, suffusing computational and organic tonalities. Their vinyl debut HOLZWEG is a compositional amalgamation of recording sessions made in diverse ecosystems: Auditorium Novecento, Naples (2023), Ruang MES 56, Yogyakarta (2024), and their Japan tour in 2024. Redefining themselves in a range of contexts lends fluidity and plurality to the topology of their aesthetic.
Joshua Abrams’ Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation is the aural manifestation of an art event described as “an in-between space and access point to a pulsating experience that connects body and land.” Like the action of a slow-spiraling coil, the music information here revolves in dappling light, an evolution drawn slowly, magnetically forward, resonating there and back again. Deep-reaching in elemental movement, it leaves traces and echoes in the air—and in our ears, as our own experience evolves. Joshua originally created this music as a 4 channel installation to accompany Lisa Alvarado's Pulse Meridian Foliation exhibition at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. Written for two violas (both played by James Sanders), harmonium (Lisa), & electronics (Joshua), it was designed to play on a loop throughout the gallery's open hours between April 1 and August 20, 2023. And it did. When playing with Natural Information Society, Joshua’s writing is directed toward the form of the music as uniquely occupied by the group. Here, he wrote in strict dialogue with the exhibit, responding with choices in composition, performance and production on Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation. A key interpretation of the exhibition is voiced by Josh in the hand-off of information between the two violas as they weave together from oppositional points across the sound stage. In mixing the original surround sound down to two channels, Joshua worked toward the small details from left to right, placing former residents of triangulated speaker planes in a congenial spot on our present stereo azimuth—realizing, in the careful growth of this auricular border ecosystem, an essential aspect of the Pulse Meridian Foliation exhibit. Daniela Lieja Quintanar, REDCAT Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs, on Pulse Meridian Foliation: A threshold composed of a new immersive mural, a collection of double-sided paintings, a series of photos, and a sound installation. The exhibition explores how memory can be transformed through the body’s relationship to geography and geology, as well as engaging with Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of Nepantl (in-between): "the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, the place where transformations are enacted." In her exhibit, Pulse Meridian Foliation, Lisa Alvarado inhabits the process of foliation, in which extreme environmental pressures upon rocks evoke a new crystallization and a changed minerality. For Alvarado personally, this is a matrix through which she can consider time and changes, specifically the politics of change, and dialogues that multiply over distinct chapters of history. A way to view her family’s intergenerational memory of “Mexican Repatriation”, a 1930s US policy that pushed millions across the border into Mexico, including many U.S. citizens. The weight of these things shudders through the bones of the music here slowly, almost incalculably. Details come and go, light and shadow flickers as horizontal and vertical planes gently intersect… an ambient space in constant change. Constant MINIMAL change, with the recurrent events and slight returns cascading in slo-mo arcs all around. On Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation, Lisa Alvarado asks, “How does memory transform and live within the body?” and, in collaboration with Joshua Abrams, a transformation is enacted.
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
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
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
Sounds While Waiting documents the latest organ works by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro – following her phenomenal debut, 2017's For Organ And Brass, and the more recent CHORDS. Recorded at a centuries-old church in Unnaryd, Sweden in June 2020, these pieces reveal the enchanting qualities of sustained harmonic sound, how patterns of listening dissolve and emerge as textured space. On opening track "Changes," long radiant tones ebb and flow like divine breaths, while "Leaving Dreaming" builds with dynamic tension to unlock a subtle, otherworldly ambience.
As the composer states in the sleeve notes, "These recordings are traces of something I have come to love to do in large resonant spaces, which is to set up sustained chords on multiple organs and then move slowly through the sound. The instruments are usually far apart, which makes for the emergence of large fields of continuous change, spaces of harmonicity that can be passed through layer by layer and which contain within them points of both clarity and overwhelming complexity. The organ pipes are tuned and retuned, though sometimes I leave them just as they are. What I'm searching for is the moment when a particular kind of sounding texturality is revealed – it is rough, focused and yet strangely transparent."
Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, for synthetic sound and for combinations of both, including music for orchestra and smaller chamber ensembles and large scale installation works. She currently performs in Catherine Christer Hennix's Kamigaku ensemble, and she previously studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Recommended for fans of Sarah Davachi, Eliane Radigue and Charlemagne Palestine. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 307px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1223054530/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://ellenarkbro.bandcamp.com/album/sounds-while-waiting">Sounds While Waiting by Ellen Arkbro</a></iframe>
To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.
Discovery Zone’s Library Copy Do Not Remove is a sonic document of an immersive multimedia program originally written for and performed inside of the historic Zeiss-Groß Planetarium dome in Berlin, Germany. The album invites listeners into an eternally expanding “circular library,” an information network containing everything that ever was or will be. Passing through holographic chambers of memory, replication, and recognition, Library Copy Do Not Remove offers a reflection from the infinite mirror that lies at the boundary of the known universe.
Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.
This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.
"I'm sitting in a different room than you are now. I'm recording my own voice. By the resonant frequency of the room strengthening itself, my voice is excluding only the rhythmic elements. Repeat recording and playback until completely destroyed. At that point what you hear is the very natural resonance frequency of the room expressed by my voice. I have this movement in my voice. I think of it as a way to smooth out band irregularities, and I'm not conscious of revealing this phenomenon itself. "
A repress of the classic "I'm Sitting in a Room (1969)" by contemporary musician Alvin Lucier (1931-), originally released in 1981.
By repeatedly recording and playing back the sound of voices echoing in a particular space until the voices become indistinct, the work explores the acoustical engineering of the space to reveal its specific frequencies. It is a work that can only be realized by actually being there, and although it can be perceived as a mere acoustic work just by listening to the recorded sound source, its original purpose is a groundbreaking content that allows the listener to embody a vast and infinite space.
Alex Zhang Hungtai stands in stillness on 'Dras', but it's the kind of stillness that contains entire ranges of possibility. Recorded in 2019 inside Montreal's Saint Joseph Oratory (right before a piano demolition, no less), these nine pieces sat dormant on his hard drive through pandemic years until something finally clicked. What emerges now feels like watching someone trace the contours of their own interior landscape, each melodic line a careful negotiation with the unconscious. This is only a saxophone record in the barest sense.
The terrain here is tactile and unforgiving. On the title track, difficult melodies get torn apart and molded into emotive drones, dissonance interlocking where tones cut paths through the senses with metallic sheen. "El Khela" refracts into spectral layers that pull with eternal gravity, while "Estado" finds solace inside its own haze, rhythms barely audible but guiding forward with their cadence smeared against grey walls. These are small moments that become cathartic sonic breaths, each one revealing new passages through psychic geography.
There's beauty encased in the subtle repetitions of opener "Erg,” and in the glowing progressions of "White Dwarf." Zhang's saxophone becomes a dowsing rod for the uncharted, with electricity running through the album's veins while his breath anchors everything to something wordlessly human. The digital manipulation applied to those church recordings doesn't obscure that human element of 'Dras'. It transforms the raw material into something that navigates between external space and internal landscape.
By the time closer "Mazil" arrives, Alex Zhang Hungtai lets his saxophone speak its full resonance. Low, guttural expressions open up like chasms beneath melodic constellations floating in thick gravity. There’s a finality here even though something in these passages feels weightless. This is music permeated with inner dialogue, a wordless spell dancing above the psychic abyss. Tonal sequences disintegrate into narcotized sonics, a sharp elegant edge that cuts without drawing blood. This lonely work of exploration becomes something communal. 'Dras' is a map for traversing the space between where we are and where we might go.
Masami Akita’s work as Merzbow looms over all avant-garde, noise and heavy music like a dark cloud. Since 1979, the Tokyo-based sound artist’s fusion of industrial fervor and playfully Dadaist chaos across hundreds of releases has done more than pioneer harsh noise music — it has made him nearly synonymous with the genre. However, that famous reputation never quite conveys the actual thrill of sinking into a Merzbow album and absorbing its extreme contours, spiking peaks and layered valleys. It’s a feeling familiar to any fan, in a discography so deep and varied that no one ever explores it the same way. Merzbow’s new album Sedonis is an airy, ominous highlight and an essential release for both longtime listeners and those taking their tentative first steps into Akita’s boiling ocean of sound.
Sedonis caps one of the most exciting recent periods in Merzbow’s career, growing from the same set-up of computer, modular electronics and homemade instruments that produced the startlingly atmospheric Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance album series. It sparks to life on “Sedonis A” with propulsive drum machines and Akita’s prickling homemade guitar-string koto, played with a violin bow. The Penderecki-like strings melt into a nearly Hendrix haze at the start of “Sedonis B” building a crushing bridge to the centerpiece “Sedonis C.” The searing track brings to mind releases such as Dust of Dreams’ hazy percussion loops or the pulsing, jazz-influenced Door Open At 8AM, before igniting in a finale that achieves the same rippling funhouse terror as Aaron Dilloway’s Modern Jester. The three-part piece is paired with the 16-minute closer “Monolith 4”, which forms a spacious, burned expanse in contrast.
Akita explains that the title “Sedonis” didn’t have a particular meaning, but the word came to him in the aftermath of recording the album. “In terms of imagery, I was thinking of something similar to Barunga, the balloon monster from Ultra Q,” he explains, describing the classic ‘60s Ultraman kaiju. “A cloud-like form floating in the sky or outer space, with tendrils or tentacles — that kind of presence.” The music impressionistically conveys its inspiration at a kaiju-sized scale, while bringing to mind a modern day contemporary of Barunga— Jordan Peele’s terrifying, yet eerily beautiful creature from Nope. Similarly, Sedonis never stops unfolding into hypnotic new forms, while achieving a spectral, sinister atmosphere that feels utterly unique to Merzbow in 2025.
Space in the Sun was one of Akio Suzuki’s major sound projects, a unique construction completed in 1988 and located on the merdian line, which took around 18 months to build. Its purpose was to allow Suzuki to spend one day, on the autumnal equinox, purifying his sense of hearing in nature. This release comprises a 44 page book containing plans and materials from the time alongside texts, and two CDs of environmental recordings created on site at Space in the Sun. To date only tiny fragments of the recordings made between those massive clay brick walls have been used in performances and no environmental recordings of the objective of the project, i.e. the space itself, have been released. The first disk consists of the first release of “person-less” field recordings made at the same spot that Akio sat at during the event (recorded in 1993, 60 minutes). The second disk consists of a performance that took place in the space. Space in the Sun’s earthen walls have since been demolished, so these recordings represent a return to life of their soft echo, an experience accessible nowhere else.
From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
Comprising more than 5,000 works of contemporary art dating from the 1960s to the present, the collection of the MUSEUMMMK für Moderne Kunst is one of the most important of its kind in the world. With canonical works by Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Lothar Baumgarten, Thomas Bayrle, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Miriam Cahn, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, Roy Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Franz Erhard Walther and Andy Warhol, the holdings constitute an important source for art-historical research.
Reprinted on the occasion of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, this book presents the international Fluxus legacy through sound. With works by John Cage, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and others, it explores the interest of Fluxus artists in music and sound through performance, scores, records, and objects from the Luigi Bonotto Collection. Their public events challenged conventional form and content in music, and the approach to music scores was equally radical. Instead of traditional sheet music, they devised notational systems based on graphics, poetry, and the visual arts.
From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
This album, crafted entirely within a subharmonic framework and meticulously processed through tape manipulation, stands as Concepción Huerta’s sharpest work to date—undoubtedly her most abrasive, intense, and exhilarating. Her signature remains intact: a practice deeply rooted in drone, musique concrète, and hauntingly visceral textures—a kind of soundtrack that evokes powerful, image-driven narratives.
Conceptually, Huerta’s sonic vision evokes an image of open veins, not human veins, but those of the earth itself, the open veins of Latin America. These nervures are, in truth, rivers of lava; fury transmuted into fire coursing beneath the land until it erupts. The album is, in a way, a reflection on dispossession, resource extraction, and colonization. But beyond being a historical commentary—one that some might relegate to a forgotten past—it is also a reminder of the present, of how these practices persist in contemporary, postmodern guises.
It serves as both a tribute to the literary work of Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential voices of Latin American leftist thought, and a howl from the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, resonating with the Zapatista struggle, the resistance of the Guaraní people in Paraguay and Argentina, and the voices of Indigenous communities across Latin America.
In the 16th century, a book titled Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears) was published in Mexico, compiling Nahuatl texts that presented the unofficial history, the account of the defeated. Concepción Huerta’s album El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) is not a call to action nor a reactionary manifesto, but an invitation to reflection, a historical reexamination. It urges us not to accept the official narrative at face value and serves as a warning, to remain vigilant and, within our capacities, resist the resurgence of fascism and colonialism in all its modern forms.
Sound Reporters was a Dutch publishing company that specialised in anthropology, religion, and history, releasing unique documents of the cultural multiplicity of human societies and their importance. These recordings were originally released on cassette in 1988, and consist of field recordings made on the Greek island of Amorgos, part of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. The release was jointly credited to the painter Harry Van Essen, who lived for several years on the island and recorded its soundscapes, and also to the ethnomusicologist and founder of Sound Reporters, Fred Gales, who mixed the recordings.
The recordings consist of sketched amalgams of local sounds from Egiali, a port in the northeast of the island. The first half is a soundscape deeply rooted in the island people’s daily lives, alternating sounds of the sea with popular music, recitations of poetry, the sounds of fishing boats, people playing boardgames, a party. The second half takes us out of the village and into the mountains, unveiling the island’s unadorned natural environment: the sounds of cicadas, the buzz of honeybees, the bells of the large herds of goats left out to pasture, etc.