MUSIC

Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway composed of environment and abstraction. If the previous record moved with flowing water and submerged folk song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability: passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.

Across the album, Poole creates a phantasmic Celtic New Age sound world that’s marked by microtonal harmony, and swelling dissonance. Voices in Gaelic, Norwegian, and English surface and dissolve, stretched beyond recognition — more weather than word.

The ten song cycle opens with 1000, bagpipes and strings emerge from mountain icicles and frozen streams. Leaf is the centre point, the skittering squelches of moss, mud and grass, form a slippery rhythmic track. The album closes with 365 Days of Rain, a year’s rainfall data becoming a rhythmic lattice that slips from metrical order into converging motifs.

Recorded in Scotland between 2024–2025, Ben Beinn is a located listen, shaped by recordings of frozen hill passes, storms, and granite using contact mics and hydrophones. Rather than simply reflecting place, these recordings press against it — layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. An inflection point between fabrication — folk music as performed identity, a carrier of story — and its obfuscation through digital networks, where tradition is refracted into plural forms.

Reference points include the emotionally saturated textures of Inoyama Land and the folk-electronic hybrids of Eli Storbekken. There’s a tuning of biophony with the hyperrealist processes of Noah Creshevsky, owing as much to Galen Tipton’s adventures than the disquieting sonic simulations of James Ferraro.

Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods. Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky — a music of erosion, recurrence, and elemental presence.

Following up a string of releases on labels such as Mana, Sun Ark, Orange Milk Records and Abyss, Other People are honoured to present the new album Fobia by Argentinian musician and sound artist aylu, real name Ailin Grad.

Inspired in part of Grad's many collaborative projects over the last few years, Fobia sees her collecting and rearranging the music and sounds fostered within these to create an intimate, spiritually charged album that turns personal struggle into collective resistance and resilience. What initially started as a way for Grad to process her own experiences with agora- and claustrophobia, and an attempt to navigate feelings of shame and a perceived demand to keep these feelings bottled up and hidden from the world, she began to realise how mental health struggles are not isolated incidents but part of broader systems of collective suffering and injustice.

“It took a long time for me to discover that my issues were part of a system that produces these kinds of symptoms and that it takes a lot of courage to find a way around them. I have the feeling that more and more people suffer from these kind of things in some way or another, and what was at first taught as something you should be silent about and keep private, I discovered that the more you talk about it and share it with people you trust, the more you realise that it’s part of something much bigger.”

This tension and constant pull between fear and joy, light and dark, is present throughout the album. From the strained breathing featured in opening track Yodo echoing the suffocating feeling from claustrophobia interspersed with the lighter textures of Obelisco Elysium and Prospero offering up a sense of relief, to the almost cacophonous, immersive sounds of El Sol Mal, mirroring the complex, often contradictory emotions when navigating mental health challenges.

Fobia invites listeners to move through pain with honesty, finding strength in shared experiences.

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.

Octogenarian experimental legend Annea Lockwood returns to Black Truffle with more paradigm-shifting new material, playing Belfast's "peace lines" with sticks, stones and leaves to soundtrack 'History of the Present' and examining Vanessa Tomlinson's relationship with the bass drum on 'Skin Resonance'.

There's nobody else doing it quite like Lockwood, that's for certain. At 85-years-old, the New Zealand-born composer is still producing vital, radical experimental art; Black Truffle might have started their relationship with Lockwood by reminding all of us how genius her 1970 tape piece 'Tiger Balm' is, but 2022's 'Becoming Air / Into the Vanishing Point' brought us right up to the present day, spotlighting her recent collaborations with Nate Wooley and Yarn/Wire. This latest double-header goes even further into her contemporary canon; opening side 'On Fractured Ground' is extracted from Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon's 2023-released feminist opera-film 'History of the Present', an experimental work set in Northern Ireland that amplifies working-class women's voices. Lockwood, working alongside Dr. Georgios Varoutsos and Professor Pedro Rebelo, two academics who developed a binaural "soundwalk" along Belfast's Peace Wall, approaches the Troubles with refreshing clarity. Taking a radical perspective in terms of representation, she imagines the walls, built around Northern Ireland since the late '60s to divide Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods, as resonant instruments, playing them with her hands and found objects to emphasize the disruption of these barriers, not the space itself.

Lockwood, Rebelo and Varoutsos spent time tracking around Belfast and recording in-situ, but not making field recordings as such. It sets our mind back to Brötzmann and Bennink's iconic 'Schwarzwaldfahrt' album, in fact, where they decamped to Germany's Black Forest and recorded their natural free improvisations in the open air. Here, the trio take a similar approach to their landscape, representing the awkward topography of the region with sonorous, gong-like clangs, Limpe Fuchs-esque rolling resonances and extended micro-percussive asides.

On the flip, Lockwood teams up with Aussie composer/percussionist Tomlinson to represent a relationship between musician and instrument that's surprisingly difficult to put into words. The piece materialised after the duo discussed the concept of "sonic attraction", and is made from supple, unusual drum improvisations - the kind of rubbery, mutant resonances that are eccentric enough to fully command your attention - and poetic, confessional reflections from Tomlinson herself. "What do I absorb? What do I reflect?" she asks. "I start to think about my skin as an ear, so maybe the bass drum skin is an ear as well." Lockwood focuses her own ear on Tomlinson's ability to transmogrify the instrument's aesthetics, stripping away all conventional understanding of the bass drum and letting its component parts sing, rattle and hum.

frozen reeds is proud to present Mark Fell’s ‘Psychic Resynthesis’, an instrumental work performed by Explore Ensemble. This double LP, with included digital download, is the label’s 8th release, arriving 13 years after its foundation.

Fell is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and theorist based in Rotherham, UK. Renowned for his rigorous and conceptual approach to electronic music and sound art, his work explores the limits of structure, rhythm, and perception through a blend of computational systems, philosophical inquiry, and cultural critique.

Over the last decade, Fell’s practice has visibly shifted from a world of technical intricacy and myopic microdetail to one of collaboration and community. He has purposefully sought out diverse musical partners from a wide variety of traditions and disciplines and found equally diverse ways to work and create together – not to integrate their playing into a musical fusion, but rather to discover how such combinations of approaches and experience can stimulate unique and heretofore unheard results.

The music here emerges from a commission for contemporary chamber group Explore Ensemble, situating Fell’s work in a new context entirely. Having been a notable critic of classical music’s slavish adherence to traditional musical notation, “the score”, and its associated issues of control and hierarchy, one might expect a provocative or abrasive approach. Instead, a work of deep, tonal introspection unfolds - an elegant structure navigating the artist’s antipathy for linear or timeline-based musical approaches.

In Fell’s selection of timbres and events, the dynamic of composer and performer is interrupted by his twin adoption of system and flexibility. Mathematical determination and sonic fixation vie for dominance. The conflict governing combinations. Upsetting preconceived strategies.

Published in an edition of 777 double LPs, with included digital download, the result, ‘Psychic Resynthesis’, represents both a prismatic object for repeated examination and an abstruse table of musical correspondences.

The self-titled tape by Ulises Carrión, reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, revisits his elusive Trios & Boleros, a work once privately circulated. Here, Carrión reimagines popular form through a deconstructed lens, where fragments of music and voice are refracted into conceptual gestures that linger between intimacy, satire, and radical sonic experimentation.

Counter Culture Chronicles present the reissue of a scarce recording by Ulises Carrión, originally distributed in private circles under the title Trios & Boleros. Best known as a writer, publisher, and leading figure in conceptual art, Carrión also developed a body of sound work where his investigations of language and structure took on aural form.

This release captures his unique approach to the conventions of popular music. The recognizable formulas of trios and boleros emerge only to be fractured, recontextualized, and reframed as conceptual gestures. Sentimentality becomes parody, melody is interrupted or destabilized, and the listener is pushed to hear not only the sound but the cultural scripts it carries.

More than a curiosity from the archive, the work embodies Carrión’s insistence on communication as a shifting field of rules, signals, and noise. In re-presenting these recordings, Counter Culture Chronicles offers insight into an artist who challenged literary, visual, and sonic forms alike, leaving behind fragments that continue to resonate for their precision, wit, and critical edge.

The tape Afrikan Klavierkonzert by Rolf Julius, recorded in 1980 and now reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, reveals the German artist’s delicate approach to sound: sparse piano textures, environmental resonance, and a restrained poetics of listening that dissolve boundaries between music, silence, and space itself.

Counter Culture Chronicles is proud to reissue Afrikan Klavierkonzert, a 1980 recording that captures a rare side of Rolf Julius, the German artist celebrated for his “small music” and subtle environmental works. Known for creating soundscapes that merge with their surroundings rather than dominate them, Julius developed an approach that was at once intimate, fragile, and quietly transformative.

In this recording, the piano becomes less an instrument of virtuosity and more a source of resonance and atmosphere. Notes unfold slowly, placed with restraint, allowing silence and space to shape the listening experience as much as the sound itself. The title hints at a distant geography but functions more as poetic suggestion than cultural borrowing, underscoring Julius’s interest in imagery that evokes listening beyond the familiar.

Afrikan Klavierkonzert is not a concert in the conventional sense but a meditative work in which music and environment blur into each other, extending Julius’s lifelong pursuit of sound as a form of presence. This reissue offers a rare glimpse into the early 1980s period of his practice, reaffirming him as one of the quiet innovators who redefined the relationship between music, space, and attention.

From the archives vol. 13, released by Counter Culture Chronicles, gathers rare recordings from key figures such as Lawrence Weiner, Ulises Carrión, Michael Gibbs, and others. This collection traces the porous boundaries between conceptual art and sound, where language, gesture, and environment intersect in works both fleeting and resonant.

With From the archives vol. 13, Counter Culture Chronicles continues its excavation of overlooked and ephemeral sound works from the conceptual art milieu. This volume assembles recordings by Lawrence Weiner, Ulises Carrión, Michael Gibbs, John Baldessari, herman de vries, Jacob van Donselaer, Terry Fox, Maurizio Nannucci, Marinus Boezem, Hamish Fulton, and Georg Winter. Each artist extends the possibilities of sound as material, whether through spoken word, minimal interventions, or conceptual gestures that hover between the audible and the imagined.

Rather than a traditional compilation, the release functions as a collective document of practices that redefined the relationship between art and sound in the latter half of the 20th century. The pieces presented here embody a range of strategies: the taut precision of Weiner’s language-based constructions, Carrión’s playful subversions of form, Baldessari’s wry performativity, and Fox’s meditative listening experiments.

From the archives vol. 13 preserves fragile traces otherwise consigned to private recordings, underscoring the cross-disciplinary energy of a generation more concerned with ideas than categories. By making these works accessible again, Counter Culture Chronicles confirms the enduring relevance of artists who approached sound not as music or text alone, but as an unstable, vital field of thought and experience.

The tape Wildlife & it’s Results by Sue Fishbein, reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, captures a collage-based soundpiece from early 1980s San Francisco. A key figure in the mail art network, Fishbein constructs an aural patchwork where found sound, irony, and cultural debris converge into a sharp yet playful critique of everyday noise.

Counter Culture Chronicles unveils Wildlife & it’s Results, a rare sound collage by Sue Fishbein, recorded in the early 1980s when San Francisco’s underground scenes provided fertile ground for cross-disciplinary exchange. Best known as a central force in the mail art network, Fishbein used sound as another medium of correspondence—fragmented, suggestive, and defiantly anti-hierarchical.

In this piece, wildlife is less a subject than a metaphor for unruly activity: snatches of found recordings, cut-up voices, urban din, and unexpected silences intertwine in a restless composition. The results are both humorous and disorienting, echoing the anarchic spirit of mail art’s international dialogues. By treating sound as fungible material, Fishbein extends her cut-and-paste aesthetic into the aural domain, challenging notions of authorship and form.

Wildlife & it’s Results carries the immediacy of a cassette-era experiment yet resonates today as a prescient reflection on media saturation, excess, and play. More document than performance, more collage than composition, the work encapsulates Fishbein’s singular ability to twist fragments into a sonic correspondence that remains vital, unruly, and fiercely independent.

Louise Landes Levi - reissue of her Jack Kerouac Centennial reading that was part of her long out of print CCC boxset. The originally one-sided tape has new artwork and on the B side new material by LLL and Bombay Lunatic Asylum.

Limited to 60 copies only and released by Counter Culture Chronicle, the “Behind the Buddha's Mask” cassette is a stunning effort, largely built around the unique recordings made by Christophe Albertijn at the Middelheim Museum in May 2021. While the pandemic forced poet, writer, sarangi player and global wanderer Louise Landes Levi to reside in Japan, her voice – reciting poems from the “Behind the Buddha’s Mask” poem – was transported to the confines of Bruce Nauman’s site-specific installation named Diamond Shaped Room with Yellow Light, hosting the hypnotic, ritualistic playing of Bart De Paepe (Harmonium, Shruti box) and Koen Vandenhoudt (Sarangi, bells), under their Bombay Lunatic Asylum guise. Flirting with the outer-reaches charted by Buddhist music, “Behind the Buddha's Mask” is a trance-inducing, meditative, cosmic world of sonic interplay. On Side B we find Louise Landes Levi recorded live at Restaurant Tangine, NYC on November 20, 2002 with Ira Cohen, Kelvin Daly, J.D. Parran and assorted mysterious guests. Louise Landes Levi is a poet, translator, musician, and performer whose travels have charted an elaborate constellation of mystic and cosmic pathways. A founding member of Daniel Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, she participated - from 1967 to 1969, alongside Terry Riley and Angus MacLise - in multidisciplinary drama inspired by Artaud’s research with the Tarahumara, the Balinese Gamelan, Tibetan monastic ritual, and Indian dance. Following studies at Mills College with sarangi master Pandit Ram Narayan, Levi traveled alone from Paris through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, on her way to India to study the country’s traditions of Classical music and poetry, becoming the student of Ustad Abdul Majid Khan, and later of Ali Akbar Khan, Annapurna Devi, and La Monte Young.

Counter Culture Chronicles is proud to announce the release of a remarkable archival discovery: Allen Ginsberg – En Route To Gent, a previously unreleased recording capturing the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in an extraordinarily candid and intimate setting. This unique audio document presents Ginsberg interviewed in Amsterdam, traveling en route to Gent, and finally performing at the concert hall, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and artistry of one of America's most influential poets. This extraordinary tape features Ginsberg with his lifelong partner Peter Orlovsky, alongside prominent figures from the European literary scene: Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, who served as Ginsberg's translator and was a key figure in the Dutch "Fifties Movement", and Dutch Beat poet and artist Harry Hoogstraten, known for his collaborations with international literary figures. Throughout the recording, Ginsberg displays the remarkable candor and spontaneity that made him a defining voice of his generation. Far from a formal interview, this is an intimate portrait of the poet in conversation, revealing his thoughts on poetry, politics, and the human condition with characteristic honesty and insight. The tape captures Ginsberg not only speaking but also singing and playing, demonstrating the performative dimension of his work that made him such a compelling live presence. Vinkenoog was European Beat personified, serving as Ginsberg's translator and publishing the first substantial Dutch translation of Ginsberg's poems. Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong companion and fellow poet, was a central figure in the Beat Generation, portrayed by Jack Kerouac as the saintly Simon Darlovsky in Desolation Angels. Hoogstraten was a veteran Dutch poet and artist whose work appeared in publications from Rolling Stone to The East Village Other. This recording represents a convergence of American and European counterculture movements, capturing a moment when Beat poetry was finding new audiences and interpretations across the Atlantic. What makes this recording particularly special is its unguarded nature. Ginsberg speaks with the same directness and vulnerability that characterized his greatest poems, including Howl and Kaddish. The presence of Orlovsky adds an intimate dimension, while Vinkenoog and Hoogstraten provide the European perspective that enriches the conversation. For scholars of Beat literature, this tape offers invaluable insight into Ginsberg's working methods and philosophical outlook. For general listeners, it provides an accessible entry point into the world of one of America's most important poets, presented in his own voice and words. This is essential listening for anyone interested in Beat literature, 20th-century poetry, or the international counterculture movements that shaped modern literary expression.

After the conceptual depth of "Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice" (2021), dj sniff returns to Discrepant with a more direct and visceral document: Turntable Solos.

Composed from live recordings made during the latter half of 2024, Turntable Solos captures dj sniff’s improvised performances in their rawest form. At the core of his setup is Cut ’n’ Play, a software sampler he originally built in Max / MSP in 2007. Since then, he has continued developing custom tools and instruments that extend what Derek Bailey called the “instrumental impulse” — the tactile, responsive relationship between musician and machine that defines improvisation.

Following a summer 2024 tour of Japan with Gonçalo Cardoso, sniff was encouraged to document and release a selection of his live sets. Not long after, a performance at 20α (Alpha) in Hong Kong would become the emotional and conceptual anchor for the project. In the liner notes, sniff reflects on the eerie parallels between recent footage of protestors in Los Angeles — assaulted by police using so-called “less-lethal” weapons, and civilians being abducted into detention centers — and the 2019 Hong Kong protests. A place once filled with personal nostalgia began to feel like a grim foreshadowing of what might unfold in Western societies.

In this turbulent context, 20α stands out as a space of resistance and renewal — a beacon for a new generation of experimental musicians, growing in defiance of increasing censorship and surveillance. "Turntable Solos" is both a personal statement and a public act of sonic resilience.

Faitiche presents Beispiel (German for example, also suggests playing together), a joint project by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek. Muster is their first album. Free electronic music, the result of spontaneous improvisations. “Meaning” is a concept that is overused in connection with music. Muster does not call for the same kind of air quotes. With its title, German for patterns/exemplars, Beispiel’s album frees itself from the ballast of teleological semantics. There is no overarching theme, no preparation, no reading list, no reason for this music. Just two facts: Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek have known each other a long time and appreciate each other’s work; and they share a love of modular synthesizers and of experimental set-ups designed to capture surprise. Bretschneider and Jelinek got together for their first joint session in 2016 and the years that followed brought more such meetings at Jelinek’s studio for open-ended musical dialog – at irregular intervals and with no clear objective. The improvisations were recorded in two stereo tracks: one track for Bretschneider’s audio, one for Jelinek’s. After each session, the recordings were processed separately, the options essentially limited to cutting and altering the frequency range. The nine pieces for Muster were selected from the resulting material. This approach reflects an ideal: music is when you play your first note without knowing what the third or fourth will sound like. When your 290th note still sees you leaving the beaten track, and when curiosity grows as the piece unfolds. Duping is part of Beispiel’s practice. Improvisation is about disagreement. It’s a matter of addressing the right issues. What’s happening here? What’s mine, what’s yours? Are “why” and “where next” legitimate questions? Muster is an exemplary work. Nine suggestions for what can be. Nine ideas for possibilities of listening. Arno Raffeiner

Wolfgang Voigt makes a return to Astral Industries, seeing the continuation of his long-running Rückverzauberung (Reverse Enchantment) series. In line with previous volumes, one may expect the unconventional, idiosyncratic sound Voigt is reputed for. ‘Im Tunnel’ however, takes a more concentrated viewpoint - a metaphysical transmutation that brings with it an experience of mind-melting drones and swelling intensity.

Entering the tunnel is like opening a portal, but as the fabric of time-space begins to collapse on itself, it feels more like a rude awakening. Pulsing undulations rise and fall like the turbines of a spacecraft, marked by dissonant chords and a simmering cloud of complex and ever-shifting textures. Pushing thresholds and expectations, the unearthly nature of the tunnel over time disintegrates any proposed state of completion. A treacherous voyage, and possibly bewildering for some, the work is both unrelenting and uncompromising. Should one decide to step into the tunnel, be sure to take all necessary precautions and procedures.

This expansive double pack from Silentes finds each side of vinyl taken up by one long, ever-evolving piece of music based around one original. Gianluca Favaron & Stefano Gentile go first with their take on 'Landslide,' which goes from whirring machines sounds to brain cleansing sine waves and found sound abstraction. Dub techno don Rod Modell explores emptiness on 'Landslide' (Reworked) and Carl Michael Von Hausswolf's take is an eerie one with scratchy textures and filtered synth meanderings. Rod Modell then closes out with another rework of his own remix that will leave you adrift in space.

 

Félicia Atkinson’s Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one’s creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson’s music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it’s a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. « Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) », de Félicia Atkinson, s’aborde comme une méditation, non pas comme une musique méditative, mais bien comme une réflexion autour de l’art de créer ; comment habiter sa création, comment la porter, la domestiquer et vivre avec. En puisant son inspiration chez l’artiste Georgia O’ Keeffe, à la fois dans son travail de peintre, mais également dans les maisons dans lesquelles elle a vécu, au Nouveau-Mexique, ou même dans les paysages qui les environnent, Félicia Atkinson compose ici une pièce qui évoque et célèbre, de manière poétique et holistique, le mystère de l’art, le balancement somnambulique qui accompagne l’acte de créer. Mêlant voix fragmentaire, îlots de piano, textures et trames électroniques ou encore enregistrements de terrain, la musique que nous offre Félicia Atkinson est une musique sincère et inspirée, une méditation, donc, mais aussi une leçon qu’on oublie parfois : être artiste, ce n’est pas une activité, encore moins une profession, c’est une façon singulière d’aborder le monde et, par là même, de le densifier. — Richard Chartier’s music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier’s music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier’s music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis. La musique de Richard Chartier se loge aux frontières de l’audible, dans cette lisière où le son se diffracte dans une inter-dimensionalité où les sons, l’espace sonores, l’écoute et le silence se recombinent en une arborescence de devenirs qui se présentent à nous et disparaissent. L’espace-temps dans lequel se déploie la musique de Richard Chartier est un espace-temps étiré, affleurant à peine dans le monde sonore. La délicatesse, la précision et la justesse de la composition Recurrence.Expansion réside précisément dans ce dialogue entre une forme exposée, déclinée, de manière inspirée et maitrisée, et le biotope sonore dans lequel cette forme se développe. C’est d’une telle rencontre qu’émerge la singularité de la musique de Richard Chartier, musique d’écoute attentive, mais également musique sensible, habitée, une musique des métamorphoses discrètes. —Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023

Counter Culture Chronicles proudly announces the reissue of Dr. Timothy Leary – The Radicalization Of Timothy Leary, a remarkable archival collection from the early days of Counter Culture Chronicles. This powerful audio document captures one of the most dramatic and controversial periods in American counterculture history, focusing on the period following Dr. Timothy Leary's spectacular Weather Underground-assisted prison escape and flight to Algeria in 1970. In September 1970, Leary escaped from California's minimum-security prison by climbing along a telephone wire over a 12-foot chain-link fence, aided by the Weather Underground in a daring operation that cost $25,000. This escape led him first to Algeria, where he sought refuge with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, before eventually being captured and returned to the United States. This cassette contains a fascinating 1966 interview of Leary at the Millbrook estate, where he and Ram Dass (then Richard Alpert) continued their psychedelic research after being dismissed from Harvard. Both men were formally dismissed from Harvard in 1963 - Leary for leaving Cambridge without permission and Alpert for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate. The recording captures Leary during his transition from academic researcher to counterculture icon, offering insights into his evolving philosophy and growing radicalization. The collection includes a reaction to Leary's escape and Algerian exile by Ram Dass, his former Harvard colleague and lifelong friend. The two had launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960, conducting clinical studies that dramatically reduced prisoner recidivism rates through guided psychedelic therapy. Their friendship endured despite taking dramatically different paths after Harvard, with Alpert becoming the spiritual teacher Ram Dass while Leary evolved into the counterculture's most famous advocate for consciousness expansion. Most dramatically, the tape features a 1971 communique by Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information, in which he distances himself from fellow-exile Leary. Cleaver had placed Leary under "revolutionary arrest" as a counter-revolutionary for promoting drug use, reflecting the tension between the Panthers' political militancy and Leary's psychedelic evangelism. In this statement, Cleaver renounced any alliance between the Black Panthers and Leary, and also renounced involvement with psychedelic drug culture as a whole. The recording concludes with a 1983 interview of Leary following the publication of his autobiography Flashbacks, offering retrospective insights into this turbulent period. President Richard Nixon had called Leary "the most dangerous man in America," and during the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested 36 times. This collection captures the complexity of a figure who went from respected Harvard psychologist to fugitive revolutionary to eventual government informant. Reissued as Counter Culture Chronicles 4 with new artwork and including two inserts with militant quotes from both Leary and Cleaver from the Algeria period, this release documents a pivotal moment when psychedelic consciousness met revolutionary politics in the cauldron of 1970s radicalism. The tensions and contradictions captured in these recordings illuminate the broader conflicts within the American counterculture movement itself. This is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of consciousness research, political radicalism, and the underground movements that defined an era. As the insert notes: "Brains on fire and souls on ice."

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.

Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.

While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

AS Over and FT Over (Active noise canceling script) is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.

On AS Amygdala anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”

The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.

On AS U, Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.

AS Back staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence” FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say.
FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin. 

A certain post-peak revelry and shaky fidelity of memory triggers and recall underlies Sebastian Carghini’s subtly trippy debut bow for topo2, the label run by erstwhile Dekmantel programmer Bert de Rooij and home to upsammy and Windu.

With a compelling poetic quality Carghini seduces us deep into hypnagogic states of mind with the mercurial ephemerality of his ‘Ramble’ album, an idealised iteration of the peculiar, subtle sound he’s developed over the past decade for the likes of Second Sleep, enmossed/Psychic Liberation, and Total Stasis. 

Leading on in the steps of upsammy’s gently febrile ‘Strange Meridians’, and the featured flows of ‘Juxtapose’ by Wind, the 11-part suite chases a frayed thread of memory looping logic thru processes that appear to uncoil and re-stitch the strands into forms of smudged dub tech and decayed electronica shades away from Actress’s iridescent greyscale, the Peak Oil x False Aralia dubtech soul axis, or even the sounds Andy Stott’s machines make when he’s not listening. 

In the 1970s, Robert Cahen turned to the burgeoning field of video art, where he became a pioneering artist. He was originally trained in musique concrète, his creative background, and joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1972. The pieces on this record were composed in the GRM studios between 1971 and 1974. They testify to a lively inspiration and imagination combined with a precocious formal mastery that already carries the seeds of later developments, which the artist cleverly and inventively deployed in the field of visual arts.

I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind.
The sky and its forces: our ally.
A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined.”
Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves
François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg compose a modern symphony for virtual choir on 'Joy, Oh I Missed You', muddling sound poetry with Nuno Canavarro and ‘Systemische'-style machine-damaged surrealism. It's mindbogglingly good, like a mashup of Lee Gamble's 'Models', Akira Rabelais' 'Spellewauerynsherde' and Robert Ashley's timeless 'Automatic Writing’ screwed to perfection in a mode that will also appeal if you’re into work by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Nozomu Matsumoto, Theo Burt, Olli Aarni, Sydney Spann, Hanne Lippard.

Duncombe and Wennborg have been chewing over ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’ for four long years, working their process until they were "queasily intimate" with their arsenal of artificial voice tools. Tracing the history of the technology, from voice synthesisers and chatbots to AI voice analysis tools, the duo experiment relentlessly to develop a digital-age response to IRL extended vocal technique - think François Dufrêne, Yoko Ono or Phew. Less interested in replicating human sounds exactly, they instead test how various tools might cough up their own idiosyncratic tics as they stretch and stutter through attempts to mimic their "fleshware" counterparts.

Duncombe's got prior form here, most recently re-synthesising her voice on the brilliantly oily 'Sunset, She Exclaims' 45 for Modern Love, following a stunner for 12th Isle in 2021. Wennborg brings along experience from her tenure as one half of microsound duo soft tissue, whose 2022 LP 'hi leaves' was a haptic treasure. These approaches mesh remarkably well on their first collaborative full-length, with Duncombe's eerie bio-electronic incantations providing the ideal foil for Wennborg's carbonated hardware processes. It's not completely clear where the human voice ends and the zeroes and ones begin on 'Your Lips, Covering Your Teeth', as rolling cyborg syllables tumble over OS-startup womps and surprisingly svelte outcroppings of glassy, synthetic glitches. The music is surprisingly mannered, a sonic reflection of the cover, where a mouth is pixellated until only colour swatches remain. Duncombe and Wennborg trace the gradual erosion of their voices, leaning into the chaos as their various tools veer off into unique patterns of failure.

What sounds like a far-off, ghosted folk rendition (we're reminded of the Icelandic laments that Rabelais chewed up on 'Spellewauerynsherde') is offset by gnarled, bitcrushed machine faults and pneumatic lip smacks on the brilliant 'Residue', and on 'Brushed My Hair', the duo massage the voice until it sounds like a flute. Assembling stutters and barks and sighs into a celestial chorus alongside time-stretched moans, they create a levitational atmosphere on 'Smell It', freezing the energy from bizarre pitch steps to configure a zonked vocal ensemble.

'Joy, Oh I Missed You’ is an album that, like its source material, constantly morphs, testing the boundaries of its concept repeatedly without bubbling over into conceptual goo. In fact, it's remarkably euphonious, even at its most theoretically abrasive; Duncombe and Wennborg wring out uniquely angelic formations through a process of trial and error that packs a surprising, hefty emotional punch.

“François Bayle’s itinerary spans over five decades through which music was able to renovate its material through a sensible use of technology. The terms of Musique Concrète, Electroacoustics or Acousmatics, as conveniently proposed by François Bayle, ultimately explore a similar artistic approach: a creative and expressive work on recorded sound. This last half-century saw many major technical mutations and François Bayle – in the fertile context of the Grm – seized the right opportunities, often initiating them through his function as director, so as to renovate and update creativity to serve what he called the Light Speed Sound. The fifty opuses in this box set are all markers or beacons illuminating this musical adventure firmly placed under the sign of modernity. Listening through them with a curious and active ear is also a way of witnessing how utopia can occur; how yesterday’s strange sounds are now fully part of our audible landscape.” Christian Zanési. “Trois rêves d’oiseau” (1963, 1971). “Espaces inhabitables” (1967). “Jeîta, ou Murmure des eaux” (1970 – new version 2012). “L’expérience acoustique” (1969 – 1972). “Purgatoire d’après la Divine Comédie de Dante” (1972). “Vibrations composées” (1973). “Grande polyphonie” (1974). “Camera oscura” (1976). “Les Couleurs de la nuit” (1982 – new version 2012). “Erosphère” with “Tremblement de terre très doux” (1978), “La Fin du bruit” (1979-80 – new version 2009), “Eros” (1979-80), “Toupie dans le ciel” (1979-80 – new version 2009). “Son – Vitesse – Lumière” with “Grandeur nature” (1980), “Paysage, personnage, nuage” (1980), “Voyage au centre de la tête” (1981), “Le Sommeil d’Euclide” (1983), “Lumière ralentie” (1983). “Motion-Émotion” (1985). “Théâtre d’Ombres” (1988). “Fabulæ” with “Fabula” (1990), “Onoma” (1990), “Nota” (1991), “Sonora” (1992). “Mimaméta” (1989). “La main vide” (1994-95) with “Bâton de pluie”, “La Fleur future”, “Inventions”. “Morceaux de ciels” (1996). “Arc, pour Gérard Grisey” (unedited) (1999). “La forme du temps est un cercle” with “Concrescence” (2001), “Si loin, si proche…” (1998 – 2001 – new version 2012), “Tempi” (1999-2000), “Allures” (1999-2000), “Cercles” (2000-2001). “La forme de l’esprit est un papillon” (2002-04) with ”Ombrages et trouées” (2004 – new version 2012), “Couleurs inventées” (2003). “Univers nerveux – in memoriam K. Stockhausen” (unedited) (2005-2007). “L’oreille étonnée – in memoriam O. Messiaen” (unedited) (2006-2012). “Rien n’est réel” (unedited) (2009-2010) with “… sensations” (2010) et “… perceptions” (2009). “Déplacements” (unedited) (2011-12) with “Horizontal-vertical” (2012) et “Spiral” (2011).