MUSIC

After his participation in a masterpiece such as Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra, in the early 1980s Klaus Wiese produced a series of seminal works in the field of ambient-drone and healing music. The first of these, Baraka, was released on tape by Acquamarin in 1981, and already contained all the aspects of his future research into the mysticism of sound. Wiese shares the path with other German explorers such as Hamel, Fricke, Micus or Deuter, but he focuses his attention on the most essential nature of sounds, on their acoustic purity, which is always infinite spiral, vortex of frequencies and cosmic bath. It takes only a few means (zither, tampoura, cybals, singing bowls) to reach the absolute through vibration. Like the archaic mood of a great universal harmony, the sound suggests a complete state of otherworldly meditation, an enveloping cloud of peace in the eternity of the present. The musician is only the one who distributes and directs the thickenings of ethereal matter, microtonal agglomerates, cascades of celestial harmonics and emotional floods, petals and stems of devotion.

In 1986, the vibraphonist Tom Van Der Geld composed his personal ode to creation, a tonal poem for all natural beings. Small Mountain reveal a pure minimalist inspiration, a vibrant style of sound variations that is decidedly more Zen-Impressionistic than the mathematical-metaphysical works of Steve Reich. This music, for four marimbas and other percussion instruments suggests an emotional osmosis with all the elements, a flow of ecstatic progressions that is more immanence than transcendence. It's the rain that falls softly on fragrant moss or the fog that hides the frost on the grass; an exotic spectrum of mutliform colours, dances of leaves, branches, sticks, fronds, lianas, swirls of petals and bark. Ode to the wind, to the rainforest, a psalm to the waters energy that opens the portals of the temples of Nature. As in the aboriginal songlines, every place or being on Planet Earth becomes, through music, space for the sacred. credits

In the late 1960s, Antonio Infantino linked his name to the Beat world and to italian performance and gestural music circles (Bussotti, Chiari, Curran). A poet and singer, a tireless devotee of the musical traditions of Southern Italy, he focuses his research mainly on the mysterious phenomenon of Tarantismo, a cultural syndrome of hysterical type found in the Mediterranean air and made famous by the studies of Ernesto De Martino. With his group, Infantino twists and reinvents the traditional repertoire of Basilicata, creating an entirely new and original songbook. The music reflects the states of Trance induced by the bite of the spider tarantula, with obsessive and hypnotic rhythms characteristic of the incandescent blood of the peasant world. A deep and universal human sound, it also takes its cues from Dylan's folk revolution and the frenetic drums of North Africa.

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

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

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

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

An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, with the desire to merge the knowledge and stimuli gained during numerous travels across the World in a single sound experience. Don's pocket-trumpet is melted with the beats of the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki. A pure hippie aesthetic, like in an intimate ceremony, filters a magical encounter between Eastern and Western civiliziations, offering different suggestions of sound mysticism: natural acoustics in which individual instruments and voices are part of a wider pan-tribal consciousness. A desert Western landscape marries Asian and Latin atmospheres. Indigenous contributions with berimbau explorations find fossil sounds of rattles and clap-hands invocations. Influences of Indian mantra singing are combined with eternal African voices or with folkish-Latin guitar rhythms , while flute and drums evoke distant dances. In the Organic Music everything becomes an act of devotion and love, an ecstatic dwell in the dimension of a sacred free-rejoice.

150 copies made available for international distribution, limited LP edition including an insert with drawings, score and notes. Over the past two years, Lorenzo Abattoir's work has focused on researching various breathing and amplification techniques to create a sort of non-verbal language through which to express the sounds of an 'inhuman' being. A key element of his work is the relationship between spiritual practices and unusual methods of audio processing, mainly focusing on the use of microphones as a medium for the amplification of an act. He explores the boundaries between sound and noise using breathing techniques, bodily sounds and different kinds of amplified objects as instruments to structures his performances. The first act of this transformation took place in "Disincarnazione" (CD, Flag Day Records, 2023); the artist frees himself from his own corporeal state and the cultural structures sedimented over millennia of evolution to explore the sonic possibilities of the animal body as a medium and instrument of his work. Continuing to explore these possibilities in "Second Act" (cassette, Vice de Forme, 2023) and then "Third Act" (cassette, Titania Tapes, 2023), Lorenzo Abattoir's new work succeeds in giving shape to this creature. The artist assumes the form of this new beast, delineating its field of action and incorporating movement into his practice. With "Mess (akt IV)", the fourth act of his research issued now on LP by Planam, Abattoir consecrates a new being in a state of sonic confusion, no longer human but not entirely beast, taking its first steps in his sonic and performative universe. The amplification delivers to the listener the sonic image of a hybrid primate amidst the entirety of the noises of its body, from breaths to movements, in a non-place that allows us to explore the depths of the animal body. All the material of "Mess (akt IV)" was recorded at Nub Project Space, Pistoia Italy.

Alga Marghen very proudly presents Opus 17, a major turning-point in the sonic oeuvre of Eliane Radigue. Finished in 1970, it was the last work composed with feedback materials. From that experimental period, Opus 17 preserves a plastic character: a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. Its vibrations structure the air surrounding the listener with densities, thicknesses, indeed with palpable movement. Her compositions are frames which let us hear these phenomena, open frameworks from the sonic installations of her Endless Musics and here reinserted in the five scenes making up Opus 17. In 1970, in her studio of very rudimentary means, she developed a completely unique body of work centered on sounds produced by feedback. Opus 17 has the quality of showing off the sum of the achieved techniques and methods. Eliane Radigue's music has never been rooted in ideas but in practice, the intimate experience of things in the wild which she has known how to tame. This dialog both intense and poetic which she keeps up with the solid matter of sound finds a remarkable concretization in Opus 17. It is to be underlined that with Opus 17 Eliane Radigue inaugurates a technique of composition which will be her footprint, her trademark: imperceptible transformations. For that she has developed a technique of meticulous mixings, based on the slow passage from one section to the next. Imperceptible all during the piece, we pass, ceaselessly and without noticing the changes, from one frequency flux to another. Time is suspended, smoothed out, stretched. It is this technique which Eliane Radigue will be essentially using for all the electronic works to come and which she will never cease to refine and render always more subtle. Opus 17 is the great panoramic voyage through material sound, its electronic phenomena detailed as if in a microscope. As Rhys Chatham recalls: "Eliane Radigue (...) had just moved to New York and had the idea of acquiring an analog modular synthesizer, which is why she worked at NYU in order to try out the possibilities of the Buchla 100 series which we had there. One day, while gossiping, she invited me to her loft, which was just on the corner. She had me listen to a piece composed in France; the piece called 'Opus 17'. (...) What I heard changed to course of my life as a composer. (...) That piece, impressive source of inspiration, gave the impression of being in a grand cathedral, both for the sensation of immensity of being in such a large cathedral, as for the effect of being so close to God." Opus 17 was created at the artistic center of Verderonne on May 23, 1970, for the Fête en blanc (i.e. White Festival) organized by the visual artists Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra. Previously unreleased,

Everything Is Simple arrives four years after its predecessor, Hold You Up, which in turn came five years after Show Us The Fire. Zelienople does not do things in a hurry. Why should it? Operationally and musically, haste has nothing to offer the Chicago-identified trio. They do not rush their time signatures, and they do not rush their albums, because however long it takes is the amount of time necessary. So, what’s necessary? Singer-guitarist Matt Christensen, multi-instrumentalist Brian Harding, and drummer Mike Weis had all been in other bands before they united to become Zelienople in 1998 (the band’s name references a town in Pennsylvania where Harding and Christensen were once stranded while waiting for parts necessary to fix a broken-down car). All of them have all played other music since then. Harding records long-form instrumental music under the guise Ill Professor. Weis has explored ambient sound, studied Korean rhythmic practices, and improvised with Kwaidan and Slow Bell Trio. Christensen is torrentially productive on his own; at the end of April 2024 he had 212 digital releases on Bandcamp, and by the time you read this, there’ll be more. If Christensen is driven by compulsive necessity, Zelienople’s rate of production must be a spoiler, not an enhancer. But the three musicians need each other to make the convergence of ceremonial cadences, echo-laden instrumentation, and mournfully resigned singing that constitutes Zelienople’s music. Still, the making of Everything Is Simple took Zelienople out of its comfort zone. In 2020, Weis left Chicago for Kalamazoo, Michigan, which meant that the band no longer had access to its usual recording refuge in his basement. They turned loss into an opportunity to change their approach. Instead of layering tracks incrementally, they recorded mostly live with two extra musicians, Eric Eleazer (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano) and PM Tummala (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano, vibraphones). Keyboards and metallophones broaden the sound field around Weis’ patiently perambulating percussion. And instead of clinging, Harding’s basses and clarinets swirl and wreath around Christensen’s apprehensive articulations of the experience of being a quiet person in a menacingly loud cultural moment. Tummala also contributed his engineering skills, which enabled Christensen to step back from recording duties to concentrate on singing and playing, and his studio, which is much more spacious than Weis’ old basement. While the basic tracks went down quickly, a lengthy period of mixing and fixing ensued, followed by the spatially conscious mastering of Slowdive’s Simon Scott, all of which further magnified the effect of being a bigger band in a bigger space. Still, Zelienople wears its expansiveness lightly; Everything Is Simple may loom sonically, but it doesn’t overwhelm the listener so much as give them the space to inhabit a singular realm.

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies. Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world. Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream. Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record. Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind. — James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. His work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. Hoff’s multidisciplinary approach begins at the user level—the level at which we interact with consumer technologies, media, and data. He has worked with computer viruses, inaudible data signals, ear worms, culture bound illnesses, dead zones, and hacked google maps as tools and framing devices for works that reimagine and expand the creative potential of digital and cultural networks beyond their economic and corporate-engineered use value. By exploiting and manufacturing technological and cognitive glitches, Hoff illuminates the social, political, and historical context of the software and media that we interact with on a daily basis. Hoff co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books. The organization has published hundreds of titles, including facsimile editions of Art-Rite, Broken Music, Black Art Notes, Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, and Womens Work as well as new works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, DeForrest Brown Jr, Tony Conrad, Dara Birnbaum, Constance DeJong, Alexandro Segade, Martine Syms, and Flora Yin-Wong, among many others. He has exhibited and performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), The Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, The Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among many others.

"Dedicated to a united Arab response." - Bryn Jones

フィンランド電子音楽界の生ける伝説であり、Mika Vainioらと共にPan Sonicでも活躍した実験的作家、Ilpo Väisänenによる2022年の12インチ作品をストック。今この時間も繰り広げられ続けている、無視できない殺戮と破壊に対する、鎮静と鎮魂が込められた、力強く瞑想的な、漆黒のポスト・インダストリアル作品。版元は、「自由と独立のために戦うすべての人々に捧げる」ウクライナの新しいレーベルであり、MuslimgauzeやMerzbow、Noémi Büchiの作品も発表している 〈I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free〉。Noel Summervilleによるマスタリング＆カッティング仕様と盤質も万全。

「この侵略には依然として反対だ。夏は最高だが、一部の人にとってはそうではないのだ。ロシアはウクライナで残忍な戦争を続け、民間人を爆撃し、民間人を殺害し、都市や村を意図的に破壊している。

戦争は続いており、ロシアの戦略はそれを長引かせ、西側諸国がいつかすべてを忘れるようにすることである。プーチンは、エネルギーと食料を武器として使い、我々の団結を破壊しようとしている。

現在、ヨーロッパで大量虐殺が起きていることを指摘したい。ちくしょう、今ここにあると。忘れるな！」
- Ilpo Väisänen

The much-anticipated analog release of the standout Japanese mellow fusion album, Ka Ri Bu No Yu Me: Light Fusion Fantasy, is finally here! The album features standout City Pop tracks like "Ka Ri Bu No Yu Me," a Balearic-infused tune with an oceanic vibe, "Manhattan Blue," a beloved number arranged by the artist, and "Click My Heart," a techno-pop gem highlighted by its charming electric organ melody. It's a piece that exudes a unique sense of weightlessness and charm, perfectly showcasing the diverse allure of the Electone. Also noteworthy is the captivating cover illustration by Tom Akamine!

‘2 Sim’ is a phrase the references mobile phones with two sim cards to describe people of mixed heritage, dual nationality or multiple residences. After being called a 2 Sim in conversation with a stranger whilst on a walk through Freetown (a recording of this moment features on the record), Duval began to explore what the 2 Sim experience is in contemporary West-Africa. 2 Sim was created from 2 months of field recordings and interviews with family, friends and peers in Freetown Sierra Leone. These site specific recordings are collaged with solo piano recordings and production recorded in Sierra Leone and the UK. The EP is accompanied by a short film/ music video of the same name which Duval shot and Directed whilst making the record. 2 Sim EP is the second release from Carrying Colour which follows on from 2017’s ‘Sen Am’

TRACE is a collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced by Yutaka Hirose during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic Soundscape series album Nova. Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's label, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way). Following Wave Notation, Sound Process Design worked with museums, cafes and bars to create site-specific soundscapes, starting with the sound design of the Kushiro Museum. Yutaka Hirose was called to work on sound for these spaces.

Rather than simply providing pre-recorded compositions, Hirose sought to create a "sound scenery". To achieve this, he participated in the conception of the space and paid particular attention to the accidental combination of sounds by placing the speakers and using a multi-sound source, and following the concept of "sculpturing time through sound".

The composer explains: "sculpturing time through sound means that the time, the space itself, the sound played in it, and the audience all become one sculpture. It is close to the idea of a Japanese tea ceremony where you use all of your 5 (or 6) senses to taste the tea."

TRACE: Sound Design Works 1986-1989 is divided into two parts. "Reflection" is based on an ambient soundscape. It narrates "a sleep that starts with the sound of water droplets at dawn and slowly disappears into darkness" and feels like a natural and soothing progression of Nova. It was played at entrances of spaces, at events, in cafes and bars. "Voice from Past Technology" expresses the dream world born out of that sleep and is based on what Yukata Hirose calls hardcore ambient, environmental music with a noise approach. It was played in museums and science centers.

All in all, TRACE is a crucial addition to every Japanese environmental music fan’s collection, alongside Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, Satoshi Ishikawa’s Still Way, Motohiko Hamase’s Notes of Forestry, Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon, and Yutaka Hirose’s very own Nova.

WRWTFWW Records is proud to announce the highly anticipated official reissue of holy grail album MKWAJU by acclaimed Japanese percussionist Midori Takada’s MKWAJU ensemble, sourced from the original masters and available in two versions: a vinyl LP cut at Emil Berliner Studios (formerly the in-house recording department of Deutsche Grammophon) and a digipack CD.

Originally recorded in February and March 1981 and released by fabled Japanese avant-garde label Better Days (home of Ryuichi Sakamato’s debut album, Yasuaki Shimizu’s Kakashi, Colored Music self-titled LP and many more) MKWAJU is the fruit of the collaboration between Takada’s crew and world-famous composer/musical director Joe Hisaishi, the man behind most of of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli anime soundtracks and over 100 other films scores, including Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine, Hana-Bi, and Kikujiro. The ensemble’s transcendental wonder is, in fact, the first-ever Midori Takada album and the first-ever Joe Hisaishi-produced album. Historic.

Led by Midori Takada on marimba, gong, vibraphone, and tom tom, MKWAJU is an inventive and riveting take on Eastern and Western minimalist traditions, African rhythms, and early electronica. Drawing from its jazz-rooted polyrhythmic improvisations in the most inventive ways, the album covers a wide spectrum of sounds, from colorful dance floor-ready percussion pieces that stand somewhere between proto-techno and experimental synth-pop, to cinematic ambient landscapes and ethereal drone delicacies. The feverishly sought-after full-length is a stepping-stone in Midori Takada’s career and an all-around pioneering album.

Alongside Takada and Hisaishi (who not only produced the album but also played synthesizers), personnel on MKWAJU includes famed Japanese musicians Yoji Sadanari and Hideki Matsutake of KI-Motion fame, Junko Arase (heard on Satoshi Ashikawa’s legendary Still Way - Wave Notation 2), and Pecker (whose stacked resume boasts collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jun Fukamachi).

Descending out of the southern night sky through a turbulent cloud of dreams, memory, longing and psychedelia, Saigon Soul Revival’s second full length album — Mối Lương Duyên — represents the latest act in the group’s resuscitation of the raw, heavy and subversive sounds of 1960s and 70s Saigon. Roughly translated to “destiny”, Mối Lương Duyên is a journey through eight original compositions and three soul-stirring reinterpretations of Saigonese nhạc vàng or golden music: the soundtrack to a Saigon once thought lost to history and amnesia. Driven by Western influences rock, bolero, soul, jazz and the rich heritage of Vietnamese ballads, Mối Lương Duyên delivers a seamless blend of genres and traditional instrumentation (Đàn Tranh, Đàn Bầu & Đàn Nguyệt) with themes from across time and space. Nguyễn Anh Minh's seductive vocals glide through this multi-stylistic tapestry of sound, going beyond the universal concepts of love and heartbreak to explore how destiny can be forged through individual experiences... or as she puts it in her own words: "Anything and anyone that comes into your life, every occurrence, whatever comes and whatever goes. It all happens as it is meant to. Whatever you have to face, whoever you love or lose - we must accept it. We can’t choose our physical body, family, happiness or misery, our place in the world, in the universe...but we have the power to embrace and welcome our destiny. In Vietnamese "Mối Lương Duyên" means destiny but it doesn't only refer to love. It can mean many things, for example: How we all came together to form this band." In this way - by being part of the unfolding story - the album also attempts to musically connect the past with Vietnam's evolving future. And the fact that Saigon Soul Revival seems to succeed in this is perhaps also the reason why the song ĐÁM CƯỚI NHÀ EM will be featured in the upcoming HBO Mini-Serie „The Symphatizer“ (directed by Par Chan-Wook (Oldboy) / Robert Downey Junior producer and actor), which is based on the novel of the same name (Pulitzer Prize 2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Vocal Shades And Tones is a miraculous leftfield library classic from the genius mind of celebrated UK composer/singer/vocal arranger Barbara Moore. It's a heavenly groove-based blend of jazz, Latin, soft-psych, folk-funk and gospel soul. Recorded for the legendary Music De Wolfe in 1972, it's an audacious start-to-finish listen, as dizzying as it is dazzling. It's a perfect snapshot of a musical era, supported by Moore's glorious vocal arrangements. Widely regarded among collectors, DJs, and lounge/easy-listening acolytes as an absolute essential it is viewed as the holy grail by many production music heads, rarely appearing for sale and disappearing in a flash when it does. Indeed, originals now go for over £300 and it's easy to see why. Just one of the reasons why this fresh Be With reissue, part of a wider De Wolfe reissue campaign, is so utterly crucial. Racing out the gate, the driving "Hot Heels" is a bright, sophisticated scat groove which sounds Brazilian, richly produced as if coming by the hand of Arthur Verocai. Yes, *that* good. It's followed by "It's Gospel" which is, er, a wonderfully slow and deeply soulful gospel treasure. The appropriately monikered "Steam Heat" is a darker, breathy gem, one for salacious crates and one of the record's most infamous tracks. "Fly Away" is pastoral West Coast soft rock, very much in conversation with John Cameron and Keith Mansfield's epochal KPM recording, Voices In Harmony. "His Name Was" is a stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks Beach Boys accapella church-organ stunner, whilst "Swing Over" is another carefree, richly produced sun-dappled smasher. The gentle Bossa and sunshine soul of the aptly-titled "Touch Of Warmth" closes out a virtually perfect A-Side. The B-Side opens with the easy grace and dramatic build of "Voice Force Nine". The jaunty "Very Fine Fellow" may be the only track to slightly grate so we advise heading to the slower, moody "Shades-Tones", eminently more compelling with sparkling, hypnotic piano throughout, underpinning the gorgeous wordless vocals. Just beautiful. It was sampled by Redman for his Method Man-featuring "Do What Ya Feel" on the great Muddy Waters. We're back in Brazilian territory with the cool, uptempo "I'm Feather" before swooning to the warm, relaxed "Drifting", another total highlight which was famously sampled by Koushik on his legendary remix of Madvillain's "America's Most Blunted (Doom's Verse)". The penultimate track, "Take Off" is a bright, organ lounge groove before this remarkable set is rounded out by the beaty "Fly Paradise". It's so so good, it sounds like Rotary Connection fronted by The Mamas & the Papas. As noted in a recent Guardian article on Moore's life, "there is a plushness and electricity in the tight vocal harmonies that spring out, sung with the precision of cathedral choristers decades before Auto-Tune." Amen. In the 1960s, Barbara Moore was a member of Top of the Pops’ resident vocal-harmony group, The Ladybirds and sang backing vocals for Dusty Springfield’s TV show. Her own outfit, the Barbara Moore Singers, were regulars on TOTP, singing with Jimi Hendrix when he performed "Hey Joe" live in Lime Grove Studios. An important detail for Moore was the shepherd’s pie she bought Hendrix when she found him alone, looking emaciated, near the BBC canteen. By 1970, she was working as a session singer for De Wolfe and, by 1972, was composing her own tracks for De Wolfe and working within their tight creative strictures. Each short track had to evoke an obvious mood and theme, with no significant key or tempo changes. Her response, this very album, managed to stay between the lines while cohering as an overarching artistic masterpiece. The audio for Vocal Shades And Tones has been carefully remastered by Be With regular Simon Francis, ensuring this release sounds better than ever. Cicely Balston's expert skills have made sure nothing is lost in the cut whilst the records have been pressed to the highest possible standard at Record Industry in Holland. The original, iconic sleeve has been restored here at Be With HQ as the finishing touch to this long overdue re-issue.

Sweet And Nice is the vital debut album from Jamaica’s undisputed first lady of song Marcia Griffiths. It's reggae at its most soulful. Slinking through a tight ten tracks of R&B and pop-sourced material, it became an instant best seller. 45 years after its initial release the LP is available again on vinyl, now as a double LP, with an extra record collecting 14 rare tracks.

Everything’s been remastered of course, including the original LP, so Sweet And Nice now sounds even sweeter, and even nicer.

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding - its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance . Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher’s work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. These works, each with their own agenda, evolve with grace and inspiration in their exploration of vast sound worlds, and it is with great pride that we present them in the new collection. Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier 
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.

A discreet but essential figure in the field of musical creation, Horacio Vaggione has been crafting an ambitious, precise and highly significant body of work for over the last fifty years, coupled with a demanding research activity. This disc offers four purely electroacoustic pieces which illustrate, each in their own way, this singular and fascinating grammar developed by Horacio Vaggione, a complex but fertile grammar which establishes a very special relationship between structure and texture, between matter and formula, to create a fascinating musical space, made up of polyphonies and metamorphoses.

Music Promenade (1964–1969), 20’29


Electroacoustic Music
World premiere for the Théâtre de la musique, March 16, 1970
« Hétéro-Concert »
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Permanent version for four stand-alone tape recorders. A series of colliding realistic sounds and sonic images. Whilst walking, a man is struck by the violence of his surroundings.
 Nature has disappeared in a whirlwind of warfare and industry in the midst of which he encounters a dying folklore and a lost young girl.

The "Installation" version is used to sonify a place in which walkers are free to choose their musical itinerary.

Unheimlich Schön (1971), 15’40


Musique concrète made in 1971 in the studios of the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden.
Voice: Ilse Mengel.

“How does a young woman breathe when thinking about something else ?”
To be listened to at a low volume.

Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - collaborators for the better part of a decade - reemerge with 'Palimpsests’, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album’s 2 sides distill 6 years of work into 9 splintered, airy reimaginings of minimalism - each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful - that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète. Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, ‘Holiday For Sampler’, issued by Planam. 'Palimpsests’, the duo’s second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations - cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza - before culminating, like the album’s title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; “an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”. With each of the album’s compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, 'Palimpsests’ constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts - traces of memory, image, and action - cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms. Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album’s two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions - reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality - into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic - reducing their sources to a series of unknowns - recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms. Shelter Press is thrilled to present 'Palimpsests’, another brilliant outing from the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi. Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, with artworks on printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

‘Halos of Perception’ releases on November 3, 2023 with a hyperreal film in collaboration with Chinese-Malaysian Australian video artist Tristan Jalleh. Drawing from Lerkenfeldt's field work and electroacoustic practices, piano, cello and tape loop arrangements light up lost chambers and underground histories in a patchwork of reflective musique concrète, instrumental composition and surreal cinema. The artist's sophomore LP on Shelter Press spotlights underground networks opening questions of reality, virtuality and perception through oral traditions, experimental AV composition and diary-like vignettes.