MUSIC
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2 x LP in die cut card inner sleeves, in wide spine outer sleeve with thumb cut and embossed cover, postcard sticker insert, download card insert
A1 Acroyear2
A2 777
B1 Rae
B2 Melve
B3 Vose In
B4 Fold4,Wrap5
C1 Under BOAC
C2 Corc
C3 Caliper Remote
D1 Arch Carrier
D2 Drane2
2 x LP in printed inners with spot UV, in wide spine outer with spot UV, download card insert
A1 Cipater
A2 Rettic AC
A3 Tewe
B1 Cichli
B2 Hub
C1 Calbruc
C2 Recury
D1 Pule
D2 Nuane
Satomimagae’s Hanazono is an invitation to revel in your immediate and imagined surroundings, to make time and space for guileless curiosity and garden variety enchantment. A tribute to everyday mysticism, Hanazono is an ecology of simple, cyclical refrains and elegiac entreaties cross-pollinating with ludic and layered folk vibrations.
The first vinyl reissue of Flow Goes The Universe, released only on CD in 1992 and regarded as one of Laraaji's greatest works!
Born in 1943, New York-based new age/ambient legend Laraaji is still active today.
Born in 1943 in New York City, Laraaji is a living legend of new age/ambient music. After seeing him perform in Washington Square Park, Brian Eno invited him to participate in Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, the third installment of Eno's Ambient series, which was released in 1980.
After that, he has collaborated with various artists such as John Cale (Velvet Underground), Harold Budd, Bill Laswell, Pharaoh Sanders, Haruomi Hosono, Audio Active, etc. He released his masterpiece "Flow Goes The Universe" only on CD in 1992, and this is the first vinyl reissue!
The album was recorded at studio sessions and live concerts in Tokyo, Osaka, New York, and the Lake District in England, and was edited by guitarist Michael Brook, who is known for his collaborations with Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and David Sylvian.
For this reissue, Stefan Betke, who is also known for his work with Pole, did the cutting for this album, which is regarded as one of Laraaji's best works.
The LP is housed in a gatefold sleeve redesigned by David Coppenhall based on the original design.
The liner notes include a rare interview with Laraji by Andrew Parkes.
Limited clear vinyl edition. No matter how long it's been since Phew's debut solo album, made with CAN's Holger Schukay and Jaki Liebezeit in the studio of art punk band Arndt Sally and Connie Plank, he's not about to let us down.
New Decade," her first album on MUTE in almost 30 years, is a resolute rebuttal to the world's self-absorbed phonies, "I wanted to get rid of sentimentality. I guess I'm lucky," she says, "considering my current situation. Last year, I was especially lucky to be alive in a way. As a musician and an artist, it's a privilege to be able to speak your mind openly and honestly under such circumstances, and I felt that I shouldn't abuse it.
This has been a guiding principle for Phew in recent years, as he has created a number of solo works that combine his distinctive vocals with feverish drone synthesizers and brittle drum machines. Long before the pandemic, she was accustomed to working on her productions in the isolation of her home, even keeping her voice down so as not to disturb her neighbors. In "New Decade," the atmosphere is more and more intense, which she attributes to her absence from touring for the past 18 months. The bleak, haunting album is composed of empty words, unspoken screams and moans chanted in English and Japanese against a backdrop of cracked, dubby electronics.
The title "New Decade" used to mean hope and dynamism, but many of the newspaper and magazine articles published at the dawn of the 2020s predicted how much worse things would get in the future. "Thirty years ago, the word 'new' was synonymous with progress and things getting better," says Phew, recalling the expansionism that fueled Japan's bubble economy in the 1980s. "And there's a loose concept of time perception that runs through the album. "In the 80's and up until the 90's, things were moving from the past to the present to the future, but I feel that this has changed, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. Personally, I don't see a future that is connected to the present anymore." This is reflected in the disorienting nature of her current work. Phew is not deliberately retro like many analog synth revivalists, nor does he waste time trying to keep up with the latest trends. Phew's music is timeless, resonating in its own frequency.
Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances Haino has staked out a ground all his own creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. For all this, his 1981 debut album Watashi Dake? has remained enigmatic. Originally released in a small edition by the legendary Pinakotheca label, the album was heard by only a select few in Japan and far fewer overseas. Original vinyl copies became impossibly rare and highly sought after the world over.
Watashi Dake? presents a haunting vision – stark vocals, whispered and screamed, punctuate dark si-
lences. Intricate and sharp guitar figures interweave, repeat and stretch, trance-like, emerging from dark recesses. Written and composed on the spot – Haino’s vision is one of deep spiritual depths that distantly evokes 1920’s blues and medieval music- yet is unlike anything ever committed to record before or since. Coupled with starkly minimal packaging featuring the now iconic cover photographs by legendary photographer Gin Satoh, the album is a startling and fully realized artistic statement.
Fortunately for us, Dmytro Nikolaienko agreed to open up the jewellery boxes of his tape-loop archive for his debut album on Faitiche. What came to light was a collection of dreamy glittering gems, masterfully presented using the compositional possibilities of analogue tape machines. Some may consider a tape machine to be limited as a musical instrument, but Rings makes a convincing case with its sure-handed use of the available parameters – moving tape over the tape head mechanically and manually, cutting loops, manipulating timbre and creating noise by means of saturation. The results are eleven blurred, repetitive, rhythmic patterns that can be understood as an intervention against digital precision, as mechanical irregularities and background noise become musical events.
For those familiar with Nikolaienko’s work, his nostalgic approach here will come as no surprise: born in Ukraine and now based in Estonia, he has chosen a historical medium (that has been enjoying a renaissance for some years now) to record historical-sounding sequences. The way he manages his own back catalogue is similarly archival, documenting the chronology of his tape loops in such a way as to leave no doubt as to their advanced age. And then there are his two wonderful labels Muscut and Shukai, the latter being an archival project releasing electroacoustic obscurities from the Soviet past.
Before there was Rimarimba, Suffolk-born, Felixstowe-based musician and home recording enthusiast Robert Cox assembled a cast of friends, some musicians and some not so much, for an experiment in group exploration and ecstatic expression under the name The Same. Sonically and gravitationally defined by Cox’s collaboration with guitarist Andy Thomas (a partnership which formed in 1976 to record as General Motors), Sync or Swim, The Same’s one and only album, also featured keyboards by Florence Atkinson and Paul Ridout, and vocals by Robert’s sister Rebecca.
Originally released in small cassette and vinyl quantities on Unlikely Records, Cox’s imprint and a meeting point for many other musicians found at the fringe, the back cover of the original album jacket is as much a map of the personnel, place, and process fundamental to Sync or Swim as it is a table of contents for DIY music-making at the beginning of the 80s: “Recorded in peaceful Wiltshire between September 18th and October 6th 1981 (using a miscellany of home made devices) onto a Teac A-3300SX via a Teac A-3440. No noise reduction systems were used.”
Cox’s own definition of British psychedelia is “folk music meeting technology and going bonkers.” It’s by this definition that Sync or Swim takes unexpected forms, from tape-speed tomfoolery, concrète sound collage and analog delayed marimbas, to the colorful spectrum of interwoven guitar play between Cox and Thomas reminiscent of Ghanaian Highlife but more accurately indebted to Jerry Garcia.
On the album’s culminating final track, “E Scapes,” all of these elements are brought together in twenty-minute journey through layers of chiming guitar loops and spritely solos, keyed percussion, and tape experiments, all played as though the sun were rising over the standing stones of Salisbury Plain. Cox would later go to similarly greath lengths with certain solo sound endeavors, but the confluence of musicians on “E Scapes” pushes the piece to exceptional, unforgettable heights.
Transferred and remastered from the original tapes, The Same’s Sync or Swim arrives June 4, 2021 on Freedom To Spend, just in time for the album’s 40th anniversary.
The pioneering electro-acoustic band Seefeel, which had a major influence on the birth of "post-rock," has announced a reissue campaign covering their material released on Warp and Rephlex in the mid-90s!
The long-discontinued studio albums "Succour" and "(Ch-Vox)" are now available in an expanded edition with bonus tracks, the EP collection "St / Fr / Sp", and the 4-CD box set "Rupt & Flex", featuring material from 1994-96.
All of these releases include previously unreleased bonus material, all of which has been remastered from the original DAT tapes by acoustic techno genius Stefan Betke, aka Pole. The album also features new artwork by The Designers Republic (Succour is an updated version) and liner notes by Seafeel members Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock.
After gaining attention with their debut album Quique on Too Pure, the band signed with Warp in 1994. Initially, they were associated with the shoegaze sound of My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive, but their penchant for electronic sounds and sampler-driven style led them to be associated with the burgeoning IDM sound. This image was further strengthened when Aphex Twin, who had professed to be a big fan of Seafeel, provided a remix of his early track "Time To Find Me" and signed him to his own label, Rephlex.
Steve Beckett, founder of Warp, explains how the success of his first album, Quique, led him to sign with Warp. "Seafeel was the first guitar band Warp signed.... It took a lot of courage for them to sign with us because they were older in the family and had been accused of breaking the unwritten rule that they should be a pure dance label.
After hearing Seafeel's first EP, Robin Guthrie invited Mark Clifford to the Cocteau Twins studio, and soon afterwards Seafeel accompanied the Cocteau Twins on tour. Mark later remixed four songs for the Cocteau Twins (on their EP, Otherness), helping to bring their music to a new audience.
Their second album, Succour, released on Warp in March 1995, was a departure from the melodic, guitar-driven sound of the first album, and explored more rhythmic, quasi-industrial textures. A six-song mini-album, (Ch-Vox), released on Rephlex in 1996, took a more experimental direction, with most of the songs produced by Mark Clifford alone. Most of the songs were produced by Mark Clifford alone. It was also the catalyst for his later releases on Warp under the names Woodenspoon and Disjecta.
The band stopped playing in 1997, but a live performance at Warp20, celebrating Warp's 20th anniversary (with a new lineup that included DJ Scotch Egg and ex-Boredoms drummer Kazuhisa Iida), led to the release of a self-titled album on Warp in 2010. In 2010, he released another self-titled album on Warp.
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and pursued a line inwards, towards Catalan traditional music, idiosyncratic technique, and a spiritually clarified instinctivism inspired particularly by Erik Satie. The four books of pieces are considered by some to be Mompou’s masterpiece. Música callada creates a sort of musical negative space, in which presence (of external references) creates lightness, and absence (of formal complexity, of counterpoint, of thematic or harmonic development) creates weight and substance.
Metaphors such as these also lie behind James Rushford’s See the Welter, composed as a companion piece to Música callada in 2016. In See the Welter, Rushford introduces a concept of ‘musical shadows’. The aim is not a recognisable transcription or recomposition of Mompou’s twenty-eight pieces, but a sort of Proustian ‘sieving’, in which memories and sensations – such as finger pressures, resonances and harmonic rhythm – are projected across a new surface, in new forms, and as new memories. Just as a shadow both intensifies and diffuses the form of the object by which it is cast, so Rushford’s piece transforms and scatters the details of Mompou’s collection while intensifying its essence. Compositionally, the piece is the inverse of Mompou’s: a single block in place of a multitude of fleeting impressions; its long shadow. Expressively, however, See the Welter explores the same territory, if seen through the other side of the glass: resonances and absences, silences within sounds, luminosity and intensity, bodies within spaces.
UNIVERSITY CHALLENGED are Ajay Saggar (“Bhajan Bhoy”), Oli Heffernan (“Ivan The Tolerable”) and Kohhei Matsuda (“Bo Ningen”). The trio began in 2019, playing shows in Holland, where they gained a reputation for delivering highly dynamic sense-rattling shows, ranging from gentle melodic orchestral spinouts to epic power jams, all backed by beautiful self-made films in the background.
The plan had always been to record an album, and get the collective musical force and spirit cemented to vinyl. Many months of hard work and focus paid dividends with the majestic eight track double album “Oh Temple!” ready to be delivered to the world at large.
This is a beautiful collection of tracks where the pioneering spirit of the three artists allowed them to cross musical boundaries with their bold and accomplished playing to forge 8 unique and mesmeric numbers. While there is commonality in the artists approach to music, there are a wide variety of styles - kosmische musik, electronic experimentation, deep spiritual jazz, modern classical, pastoral guitar soli, and more.
These tracks sound fresh and revealing now, and will certainly do so for a long time to come.
It will be released on Hive Mind Records (Brighton UK)....home of Sonny Sharrock and Maalem Mahmoud Gania amongst many others...on Friday 29 January 2021
Experimental trio Giraffe crystalize time on ‘Desert Haze’, their new LP on Marionette. Giraffe is the musical project of Sascha Demand (guitar), Jürgen Hall (keys), and Charly Schöppner (percussion). Sascha Demand is a composer that comes from a contemporary and improvised musical background, collaborating with the likes of Ensemble Integrales and Vinko Globokar. Jürgen Hall works in electroacoustic experimental projects, theatre and film scores, with releases on Staubgold and Edition Stora. Charly Schöppner is known for his popular music releases such as Boytronic on major production companies in the 1980´s and composes for theatre, dance, and film scores. With only a couple of releases to date on the wonderful Meakusma imprint as well as an EP on Marmo, little is known about Giraffe. After letting go of other artistic projects, the trio now focuses solely on Giraffe by continuously searching for and finding their own unique language.
Sascha, Jürgen and Charly have quite diverse musical backgrounds, though morphing into Giraffe they tower into one single composer. Their music is a critical statement, not in a political sense but rather an artistic one. Being mindful about what it means to create and how to position themselves as artists nowadays (without the constant hassle of being en vogue and short-lived trends) shaped their rather rare and stoic artistic stance. It is refreshingly honest to see their expression develop so naturally.
On Desert Haze, they’ve created a vibrant and minimalistic tribal sound that feels inspired by the Saharan traditional music of the Tuareg, Jazz, and German psychedelic krautrock. Giraffe themselves also list the radical music of the Viennese School (Schoenberg along with his pupils Berg and Webern) as well as the Köln School with its early electronic experiments as their main influence and inspiration. More precisely the composition process and the organization of musical material within space and time, where a conceptual and intellectual approach melds with an experimental yet expressive sound searching method.
Side A focuses on the trios studio work; it is built around tone color and pitch analysis of resonating prepared guitar sounds. Through a unique mixture of free improvisation and a serialism "rule set”, they develop instrumental layers and structures to form their tracks. Side B sees Giraffe playing more freely with a reduced setup - representative of what you may hear when listening to them live.
Desert Haze, along with its track-titles, showcases an almost mimetic approach to art. The haptic music grabs the listener not as a passive recipient but as an active resonant body to vibrate through. One can almost feel the Elements, pressure and heat forming a diamond, hypnotic overtones ringing through windy caves, shamanistic rhythms conjuring up mysterious and ancient landscapes - where the constant cycle of sedimentation and erosion reveals structures of fragile beauty - always gentle to the hand’s touch and the mind’s eye.
