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Happy Today, the third album from guitarist/bandleader Jeff Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet, was recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. This fresh entry into the IVtet’s catalog captures Parker and the band – including drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson – on record outside of the now-shuttered Highland Park micro-club ETA for the first time.
The performance also captures a distinctly joyful night of togetherness set against the backdrop of dark times. “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family,” Parker says. “Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”
That joy and camaraderie found in communal space seems to be a major catalyst for the ETA IVtet’s music. The band’s audience is, somehow, an essential part of the formula. Case in point: the show at Lodge Room was actually meant to be the cherry on top of a weekend of studio sessions by the band. Those sessions were intended to be the next album released by the group, its first ever studio record. Upon listening back, though, it was clear to Parker that the Lodge Room performance was the recording that shined brightest and felt most true to the band’s spirit, harkening back to the weekly session the four musicians held at ETA for so many years.
ETA was undoubtedly more than just the namesake of the band. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, it’s where the language of the IVtet’s sound percolated and coalesced over the course of an almost mythical seven-year-long Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy—and an instantly recognizable group sound.
Happy Today is that sound—the IVtet's signature syntax built around long-form, minimalist improvisation—expanding confidently into a larger space while creating the same hypnotizing, deeply-tuned listening effect on visibly enraptured audiences. The album contains two sidelong pieces recorded as the band performed in the round at Lodge Room, surrounded by an audience of 400 or so deep listeners. (The venue, appropriately enough, sits on the same street and just a few hundred feet away from the storefront that used to be ETA.)
The drastic change in venue size, and this document in general, is representative of an expanding demand to experience this band live that has been surging for years, starting with the release of their debut album Mondays. For the subsequent, final year that ETA was open, there would typically be a line down the block on Monday evenings, with far more people trying to catch the show than the club could hold. Even if you could get inside the building, given the limited capacity, the IVtet was a difficult band to actually see play. Couple that with the fact that before the closure of the club in December 2023, the IVtet had never played outside of Los Angeles. Access to the live experience had been extremely limited, and that has seemed to feed a sense of mystery and allure around the band’s music for the many fans of Mondays and The Way Out of Easy.
On paper, the IVtet’s growing audience is something of a conundrum. After all, minimal longform improvisation is likely the precise antithesis of streaming-centered content culture. Despite that, at the show that produced Happy Today, as with any IVtet show, the audience willingly settles into and accepts the band’s pace as they iron out a story which digs deeply into every facet of an idea before investigating a new one. Here the attention economy feels lightyears away, the crowd instead surrendering to that old and very human penchant for listening. With open ears, the crowd stands ready for a big yarn, a long tale, and from the jump there seems to be a trust between performer and audience that mimics the trust between the musicians as they move from detail to detail.
“The band isn't afraid to explore static spaces,” says Parker. “It seems like the thing is to stay on one idea for a while. Really, for a long time. To kind of exhaust it. And then one person shifts and then the thing moves together.”
“Everybody is constantly dropping crumbs and you can take them or you can leave them,” agrees Bellerose. “There are these little hints, these little moments, and everybody's aware of them.”
“When it is time to change, it can change very quickly,” says Butterss. “If someone suggests a new idea, it can flip in an instant. Everyone's constantly ready to go with it if the moment calls for it.”
“Like Swimwear,” the side-length opener of Happy Today, contains a quintessential example of this distinct IVtet move. The track gets off the ground slowly but deliberately, ramping up tension over the course of its first ten minutes without a moment of harmonic dissonance. The band, rather, steadily pulls at the corners of the rhythm. Here each member steps forward and backward in the sonic space to build a gleefully disorienting group cadence, where the repetitions of the individual overlap in such a trancelike way that even soloistic breaks from Parker’s electric guitar or Johnson’s effected alto sax never manage to snap the tension wire. Bellerose works deep into the rhythmic fascia, employing all manner of auxiliary percussion—strewn across his kit, tucked into his shoe, or wrapped around his legs—all without a hint of novelty. Every micro-choice comes from a place of both curiosity and confidence.
And then the shift: just as the thing is about to come unglued Bellerose opts into a smooth, low-register downbeat groove that Butterss has been auditioning for the previous minute or so. Parker swiftly kicks into an organ-like drone while Johnson and Butterss stay the course. It’s a series of decisions that could go any number of ways depending on the night, like running water pushing into fresh geography, moving from tributary to mainstream, past the levee and into the floodplain. There is no set path; if it went a different direction it would still be the cumulative result of the same water flowing.
That is to say that there are no hard and fast rules to what the IVtet does. Defining the music, in fact, is something that the band takes special care not to do. Living in that mystery, it seems, helps to keep the path open, cleared to push into new and satisfying territory.
“For me, the thing to protect is just where it started from, which was freedom and openness,” says Bellerose. “In the early days of the band Jeff was recognizing how we were all communicating within the structure of playing standards. He's one of the greatest producers I've ever worked with because he has this vision. And a big part of producing is casting—putting the right people in the room. So these shifts, they're completely natural within these improvised pieces that we do because the foundation was there and Jeff knew it. He had already noticed the communication within the band, but wanted to really push it further.”
The key to Parker’s push lies in the generosity to step back, to allow each member an equal voice, and to de-center himself. What we hear on Happy Today is an egalitarian group sound by design, curious and intuitive.
“Everybody's listening in a way where it's not always like ‘I'm going to go with you’,” says Johnson. “But it's always ‘I hear you’. And sometimes it's ‘I hear you and I'm going to stay here and allow the tension of these two things to exist for a while before maybe joining you.’ But the thing that's cool is that everybody’s hearing it. Because of the time that we've spent together there’s a maturity to the listening—a very special version of deep listening.”
“The number of times that we've talked about the music is so few compared to the years and years of playing,” Johnson continues. “I think that's one of the really beautiful things about the band—how organically the way that we play together has come about and evolved over time. Definitely on brand for the music that the band makes too. Slowly evolving, long form development.”
“I learned how to improvise in this band,” reveals Butterss, astonishingly. “I didn't really play improvised music before. So my whole approach to improvisation has been shaped by playing with Jeff, Jay, and Josh. It is a band and it has its own language. I think you could drop the needle on any of the recordings and people would be able to say ‘that's the quartet.’ It's very distinctive and it's developed very organically. We have never talked about it, I don't think.”
“That's our band,” says Parker of “Like Swimwear,” almost with an outsider’s sense of fascination at the recording. He seems to feel the same enchantment and surprise that the audience does while listening, despite being a primary part of the process. “That's it. I mean, that's what the ETA Quartet does.”
It’s a blessing for this band to be so expertly documented in its naturally public, live context. The two sidelong improvisations from Lodge Room that make up Happy Today, as with the recordings that made up the IVtet’s first two albums, are beautifully rendered by engineer Bryce Gonzales—recorded and mixed live, direct to a Nagra tape machine utilizing a compact outboard rig that he built himself, specifically to record this band. Much like the thumbprint originality coming from the players themselves, Gonzales’ capture of the music is its own signature, his mixes a form of sound improvisation themselves.
A major addition to this particular presentation is the full album length film by Charlie Weinmann, documenting the band's performance of Happy Today at Lodge Room, which will be released in tandem with the album. A shadow-laden, almost noirlike capture of the band in its full sprawling glory, Weinmann’s camera makes the joyful reality of seeing the IVtet at work widely accessible for the first time.
With Happy Today the reach of Parker’s IVtet extends further than ever before, but the essential formula, if there is one, remains the same. The anchor seems to be in variations on an almost alchemical communication—a feeling of connection between band members, sure, but also between the band and the audience. It’s an ongoing trust exercise, born organically in the corner of a small room in Los Angeles and flowing outward at exactly its own natural pace. It’s social music with a clear ability to move those willing to listen. Happy Today is an invitation to become part of the exchange and experience the joy of deep listening.
It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001—when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry's sonic insurgent Russell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997–2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: "Science Fiction is now!" In the face of this darkening reality, LET IT GO arrives as both acknowledgment and antidote. This new full length on Editions Mego extends an olive branch through defiant sonic diversity—an unpredictable mosaic that embraces everything from propulsive rhythms to radical abstraction and enveloping ambience. True to Haswell's core practice, the material draws from the same tactile, free-improvised electroacoustic framework that powers his live sets: immediate, powerful and unscripted. The album weaves reverent echoes of 1990s Detroit techno's hypnotic pulse and the abrasive, metallic edge of the Birmingham sound into fractured generative territories. Haswell returns to his computer-generated origins while integrating his recent modular-synthesis experiments. During a residency at the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) in Norway, he harnessed the latest GRM Tools suite to conjure the volatile, "rapidly fluctuating pitched sounds" that characterized Iannis Xenakis' late electronic works—resulting in pieces such as Fall 3 and Fall 2, where instability becomes a form of vitality. The tracks Exit Downwards and The Anxieties Of Our Time whilst reflecting the currents of the release also offer surprisingly melodic patterns over jagged rhythms. The wryly titled Thu 25 Dec 2025, (recorded in Glasgow after a solitary post-Christmas-lunch walk home) is a vast drone which evolves according to the random walk model—known more evocatively as the drunken walk—each sonic step veering unpredictably, mirroring the disoriented lens of contemporary existence. LET IT GO is liberation. Amid the cacophony of crumbling certainties, Haswell deploys a full arsenal of resistance: kinetic drive, disorienting rupture, quiet refuge, raw aggression, and tentative hope. In an age where dystopia has shifted from fiction to lived fact, this music asserts that possibility endures.
When you’re creating something loosely referred to as “art” with another person, you’re mining the depths of minds and experience, searching connections with pasts, each of us producing from a different place. Communication exists as unspoken and simultaneous, more carnal than collaborative, and dwelling rather than saying. We all miss that, wrapped up fantasies of perfectness and lovesick doves. Youth, how fleeting and naive. "Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as a sound companion for an exhibition of 13 different 14th Century manuscripts. The original pieces existed as 13 different parts for each individual piece of art." Or so the origins of the original release in 2009 on Students of Decay state. What seemed real was a myriad liquor haze, fabrication, or imagination. Embellishment is equivalent to invention, and that moment when you can’t tell the difference between dreams or reality (I surely can’t remember which is which now) is important - and must be noted. I remember pouring over 14th century art, utilizing unauthorized library passes, and being witness to the trajectories of two individuals on divergent but somehow-crossing timelines. Originally recorded in 2007-2009 (?) by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, with backpacked gear, garage photography, sleepless nights and skipped work. I brought the tape and made the loops, she brought the laptop and the pen and paper. Try to look at it like this. Recorded in stereo, then split into two tracks for each left and right channel, reversing one side and adding reverse reverb, and the other long reverb and then reversing. Making each stereo again, then putting back together and blending each left and right together to make a stereo track again. This was an age of hybrid experiments between analog tape loops and digital processing, to render a new path, for better or worse. Somehow this correlated with a pad of scribbled poetry - whether original or quoted (one can never tell), a few random phone numbers, and the omnipresence of long-toed shoes in the 14th century paintings. “How befitting, like Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers.” What all comes down to is this - that sometimes those paths of yours and theirs cross for a time - and only for a time, and in that time, you’re there in that same place. It doesn’t mean that you know the other person, or that you ever will. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll be looking for the same thing at that moment, and that’s what you’ve shared, in many different ways, in different directions; backwards, equivocally.
The Glitch hype was a rather short one. But it brought together different scenes; minimal techno, sound art and electronic minimalism. Then it hit a dead end and dissolved. In the centre of Glitch we found labels like Mille Plateaux (who released the formative ”Clicks + Cuts”) and raster-noton who especially with their static series formed a sound. The first release (2000) was by a young Andreas Tilliander who under his new moniker MOKIRA released the ”CLIPHOP” album. He had done synth and techno for years and then got his hands on an early COH CD on raster-noton in some Stockholm record shop and decided to send a demo to Carsten Nicolai and crew. They luckily decided to release it. I got my copy in the Wave record shop in Paris, as I knew Tilliander’s earlier techno and synth stuff. But this blew my mind. Sharp, funky (yes), static and it sounded like pure electricity. It still sounds great, and rather alien to me. I am proud to reissue this on iDEAL, and to dive even deeper into "CLIPHOP" - check out Johan Jacobsson Franzén's book on the album.
Joachim Nordwall, Gothenburg 29.10.2025.
Convergence is a new live album from William Hooker featuring guitarist John King. Recorded at the B10 Festival in Shenzhen, China on October 25, 2024, it captures an exhilarating set shaped by the audience’s energy and deep mutual connection. Hooker’s thunderous drumming meets King’s walls of distorted guitar in an expansive, hour-long performance of raw intensity, recorded direct from the soundboard. The music moves fluidly between intensity and restraint, structure and spontaneity. The album stands as a document of cross-cultural exchange and creative freedom, reinforcing Hooker’s decades-long legacy as a leading force in avant-garde music while showcasing a compelling collaboration with King.
Paulownia by Merzbow is a 2025 full-length statement comprising two lengthy compositions that fuse intense electronic manipulation with Merzbow’s enduring fascination for natural phenomena. Across both pieces, the album merges organic inspiration and harsh digital process, producing a hypnotic yet confrontational experience. **Edition of 200** With Paulownia, Merzbow (Masami Akita) delivers a formidable new addition to a catalog already legendary in the experimental music world. The 2025 release spans two extended pieces—“Paulownia part1” and “Paulownia part2”—each developing a dense matrix of sound where digital noise entwines with subtle references to organic structures. The album’s name, drawn from the paulownia tree, hints at Merzbow’s long-standing environmental preoccupations; here, they are rendered less as representational themes and more as evocative textures and forms. The compositions surge with layered feedback, haunting drones, and micro-rhythmic fluctuations, evoking an ambiguous, immersive environment that rewards attentive listening. What distinguishes Paulownia is its ability to generate tension and release from the interplay between ferocity and fragility. The music neither settles into a predictable assault nor dissipates into formless ambience; instead, it sustains a meticulously sculpted intensity. As always, Merzbow’s commitment to tonality, texture, and structure resists easy classification, maintaining a delicate balance between repetition and change, aggression and atmosphere. For those prepared to let sound define its own territory, Paulownia is a compelling testament to Merzbow’s ongoing innovation, fortifying his place at the core of the noise tradition while persistently opening new vistas for exploration.
Bifuu_ZONE, translated loosely as “a zone of gentle breeze,” is a concept drawn from Tsudio Studio’s personal vocabulary rather than a strict linguistic equivalent. While liminal spaces are often framed through unease, Bifuu_ZONE reimagines them as sites of quiet comfort, restoration, and slow transformation. The project centers on impermanence, erosion, and the subtle ways time reshapes even the most solid structures.The West takes its title literally, drawing inspiration from buildings and environments located west of Osaka. Each track is composed with a specific architectural space in mind, allowing tone, texture, and resonance to emerge from imagined structures rather than narrative progression. The result is a site-responsive ambient work that listens closely to stillness, weathering, and spatial openness. Saxophonist mori_de_kurasu appears on three tracks, introducing breath and human fragility into the album’s restrained sonic palette.This perspective is deeply informed by a Japanese sensibility toward impermanence, an acceptance of loss and change not as absence, but as gentle continuation. Rather than positioning liminal space through anxiety, Bifuu_ZONE gestures toward what lingers quietly after the dream has ended.Beyond the album itself, The West also marks a point of convergence within Tsudio Studio’s broader practice. In March, he will present an exhibition and live performance at Gallery SHUTL in Higashi-Ginza, Tokyo, centered on the idea of “post-liminal space.”Under his primary name, Tsudio Studio has released work through Media Factory, Local Visions, and ULTRA-VYBE, collaborating across Japan, Europe, and the United States. In 2022, the compilation OACL, which he contributed to and mastered through Local Visions, reached #2 on Bandcamp’s global charts. The West is a focused ambient work shaped by space, time, and quiet transformation.
The album opens at dusk with an imagined final stop before departure, a roadside gas station just as daylight fades. This introductory scene, conceived as “Last Gas Station Before the Horizon,” places the listener amid passing cars, distant seagulls, and the low hum of anticipation. The idea is to frame the record as part of a radio program, potentially guided by a radio announcer’s voice drifting in and out of the soundscape. From there, the journey moves fully into night. Tracks progress like signals picked up along the drive, calm, reflective, and gently nostalgic, until the album’s closing moment. “Peaceful Blue” represents arrival at the final destination at dawn, when the sky shifts into a deep blue and the listener waits quietly for the sun to rise and a new day to begin. Transcoastal Night Drive is an album about motion, atmosphere, and memory, less a narrative than a feeling, inviting listeners to settle into the drive and let the night pass by.
Recorded between the iconic Abbey Road and Polish Radio studios, Hania Rani’s original music for Joachim Trier’s Cannes and Golden Globe winning, Oscar and Bafta nominated ‘Sentimental Value’ is a deeply intuitive collaboration, composed before a single frame was edited. Intriguingly Hania worked on the score for Sentimental Value without an edit in hand; instead, she was given a carefully written script and the freedom of her own substantial imagination. The story told in the film oscillates around three characters and the motionless presence of the house, yet the relationships between all these personalities are not fixed, but in progress. Those subtle qualities were at the center of her attention and became the core topic of numerous discussions with Joachim about the music, the film, and the philosophy behind Sentimental Value. In September 2024, Hania went to Oslo and spent a couple of days in the main film location (the family home in Oslo) with her sound engineer, Agata Dankowska. The film crew was away in France to shoot another scene for the project, so they were allowed to freely explore the space - both visually and sonically. They made field recordings in the building, capturing the sounds of objects and furniture found in the apartment, and they also managed to record a couple of piano pieces. The house plays a significant role in the story, silently witnessing the tangled trajectories of its residents.
A 2026 release from Japanese sound artist Chihei Hatakeyama. Spanning six tracks and roughly 43 minutes, the album unfolds without dramatic shifts, letting subtle fluctuations and delicate changes in texture gradually expand across each piece.
Based in Hong Kong, vocalist and songwriter Anita Tatlow — also known for her work as Salt of the Sound and Narrow Skies — presents a delicate ambient work that gently draws the listener into its sound world.
Here In The Valley is the debut full-length release from helllhound, the intimate sonic collaboration of life partners Cadmar Fitzhugh and Nailah Hunter. Born out of a seismic shift from urban Los Angeles to a remote mountain town in the Sierra National Forest, the record reflects a period of profound transition—into the wilderness, into parenthood, and into a deeper communion with self. Woven together through acoustic guitar, harp, voice, and gentle electronics, Here In The Valley evokes the textures of the natural world and the unseen dimensions of ancestral memory. It moves like mist through tall pines and echoes like a fireside tale overheard from across a moonlit meadow. Tracing the arc from conception to early motherhood, the album celebrates the beauty and impermanence of life on Earth, the mysticism of matrescence, and the long journey home to oneself. With tracks written before, during, and after pregnancy, the album unfolds like a handmade map of a spirit-led pilgrimage—through waterways, starfields, and golden hills. Each song is a milestone, a myth. From the harmonic murmurs of “downstream” to the ancestral chant of “by sea,” the stargazing restfulness of “the pleiades (sleep),” and the gentle nighttime balm of “lullaby,” Here In The Valley is a love letter to new life, old stories, and the sacred quiet in between. The pair’s shared creative language finds expression in ethereal ambient and folk sounds. Nurtured in the stillness of California’s high country, their music conjures pastoral dreamscapes that hum with the mystery of birth, the longing of memory, and the wild devotion of partnership. Named after their spirited Husky-Aussie dog Sigge, helllhound channels both the chaos and comfort of life lived close to the bone—deep in the valley, with stars above and earth below.
“Noneness” is a work by shakuhachi player Lenzan Kudo, featuring reinterpretations of traditional honkyoku and long-form improvisations rooted in Zen philosophy. Recorded in Hakone, Kanagawa, the album incorporates natural sounds and reverberations, maximizing the breath and spatial resonance of the shakuhachi. The title “Noneness” signifies ‘emptiness’ or ‘void,’ capturing traces of personal spiritual practice and dialogue with nature. The credits include acknowledgments to Ryuichi Sakamoto and Zen master Nanrei Yokota, with a written comment from Yokota also included. Transcending the boundaries of ethno, jazz, and ambient music, the album carries both spiritual and cultural depth.
A collection of short-form compositions by shakuhachi player Lenzan Kudo, rooted in Zen spirit. In contrast to his long-form work “Noneness,” each track on this album spans approximately 2 to 5 minutes, distilling intense focus and spiritual depth into concise musical expressions. Utilizing the breath and overtones of the shakuhachi, the pieces incorporate ambient spatial processing, remaining grounded in the instrument’s traditional sonic world while embracing a contemporary resonance.
9 CD with 9 composers of electroacoustic music who did work at INA-GRM.Ludger Brümmer, “Deconstructing Double District” (2011), “Xronos” (2002), “Glasharfe” (2006), “Spin” (2014).Philippe Leroux, “La guerre du faire” (1992), “M.É” (1998), “Objets trouvés… posés” (2009).Diego Losa, “Cronicas del tiempo” (2005), “Historias de dos mundos” (2007), “Sortie d’un rêve dans une nuit étrange très loin d’ici…” (2012), “Horizons ou le récit d’un voyageur” (2015).Mario Mary, “Signes émergents”v (2003), “2261” (2009), “Une bouffée d’air” (2006), “Portraits témoins” (1997).Luis Naon, “La sphère et la pierre” (1993-94), “Perspectives” (2004 – 2017), “Lascaux rbana” (2004).Ake Parmerud, “Les objets obscurs” (1991), “Renaissance” (1994), “Dreaming in darkness” (2005), “Electric birds” (2012).Elzbieta Sikora, “Axerouge V” (2011), “Chicago Al Fresco” (2009), “Flashback” (1968-1997), “Derrière son double” (1982-83).Kees Tazelaar, “Chatoyance” (2013), “Chroma” (2006), “Sternflüstern” (2003), “Sérénade” (2016).Hans Tutschku, “Extrémités lointaines” (1998), “Distance liquide” (2007), “Monochord” (2008), “Migration pétrée” (2001).
For the 30th birthday of INA, the GRM has decided to present in this CD box some of his archives. CD1 “les visiteurs de la musique concrète” : André Hodeir – Pierre Boulez – Jean Barraqué – Darius Milhaud – Roman Haubenstock-Ramati – Henri Sauguet – Edgar Varèse – André Boucourechliev – Claude Ballif – Iannis Xenakis – Olivier Messiaen. CD2 “L’art de l’étude : Pierre Schaeffer – Monique Rollin – Michel Philippot – Philippe Arthuys – Luc Ferrari – François-Bernard Mâche – Mireille Chamass-Kyrou – Ivo Malec – Philippe Carson – Akira Tamba – Beatriz Ferreyra – Alain Savouret. CD3 “Le son en nombres » : François Bayle – Dieter Kaufmann – Jean-Claude Risset – Ivo Malec – Denys Smalley – Gilles Racot – Yann Geslin – Bénédict Maillard – Jean Schwarz – Francis Dhomont. CD4 “Le temps du temps réel” : Bernard Parmegiani – Åke Parmerud – Denis Dufour – Horacio Vaggione – Alain Savouret – François Bayle – Gilles Racot – Daniel Teruggi – Ramon Gonzales-Arroyo – Michel Redolfi. CD5 “Le grm sans le savoir” : Bernard Parmegiani – Robert Wyatt/F. Bayle – François Bayle – Alain Savouret – Jean Schwarz – Michel Portal/J. Schwarz – Boris Vian/B. Parmegiani – Robert Cohen-Solal – Guy Reibel – Edgardo Canton – Christian Zanési.Pour marquer et fêter les trente ans de l’Ina, le GRM a choisi de réunir en un coffret exceptionnel de cinq disques compacts quelques unes de ses archives musicales parmi les plus remarquables. Souvent inédites ou alors dispersées au gré des publications, ces œuvres originales ont marqué par leur nouveauté et leur audace la seconde moitié du XX° siècle.Un coffret de 5 CD augmenté d’un album de 101 photos.CD1 “les visiteurs de la musique concrète” : André Hodeir – Pierre Boulez – Jean Barraqué – Darius Milhaud – Roman Haubenstock-Ramati – Henri Sauguet – Edgar Varèse – André Boucourechliev – Claude Ballif – Iannis Xenakis – Olivier Messiaen.CD2 “L’art de l’étude : Pierre Schaeffer – Monique Rollin – Michel Philippot – Philippe Arthuys – Luc Ferrari – François-Bernard Mâche – Mireille Chamass-Kyrou – Ivo Malec – Philippe Carson – Akira Tamba – Beatriz Ferreyra – Alain Savouret.CD3 “Le son en nombres » : François Bayle – Dieter Kaufmann – Jean-Claude Risset – Ivo Malec – Denys Smalley – Gilles Racot – Yann Geslin – Bénédict Maillard – Jean Schwarz – Francis Dhomont.CD4 “Le temps du temps réel” : Bernard Parmegiani – Åke Parmerud – Denis Dufour – Horacio Vaggione – Alain Savouret – François Bayle – Gilles Racot – Daniel Teruggi – Ramon Gonzales-Arroyo – Michel Redolfi.CD5 “Le grm sans le savoir” : Bernard Parmegiani – Robert Wyatt/F. Bayle – François Bayle – Alain Savouret – Jean Schwarz – Michel Portal/J. Schwarz – Boris Vian/B. Parmegiani – Robert Cohen-Solal – Guy Reibel – Edgardo Canton – Christian Zanési.Album “archives grm en images” : album photos noir et blanc de 80 pages et 101 documents. Une suite poétique de photographies jalonnant l’aventure des chercheurs, compositeurs, musiciens et techniciens, qui animent les cinq disques du coffret.
Milestone Reissue! The three discs collected here - housed in a lavish cardboard boxet (+ Includes a 116 page booklet in French and English with biographical notes, essays and program notes for each work, and a 52 page booklet with photographs) - cover the bulk of Pierre Schaeffer's concrète works, beginning with his pre-tape days when he composed using multiple turntables mixing sound effects recordings direct to lathe. The earliest recordings here were created in 1948 during Schaeffer's days as radio engineer for Radiodiffusion Française and are built from sounds ranging from locomotives and whirligigs to pots, pans, piano, and percussion. Each of those collages eventually made their way onto the air. His Suite pour 14 instruments is an amalgam of orchestral sounds rendered far beyond their original context. Where these early works clearly function as experiments for Schaeffer, once Pierre Henry joins in as his assistant, the music takes on both a playfulness and a refinement of detail that eventually became landmarks of the French approach to musique concrète. The processes became increasingly laborious, and those who once flocked to Schaeffer's studio to work in this new medium became disillusioned by the demand and patience that the work required.
Original 2xLP Remastered by Bob Weston pressed on maui blue vinyl
Never-Before-Released Live Studio Album pressed on orchid purple vinyl
all 3 LPs are packaged in a triple LP gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves
After finishing American Don with (Steve) Albini, we were nearing the peak of interpersonal tensions that would eventually wash us overboard. I (Eric) became convinced we lost the true essence of the songs in the recording process. It was not a unanimous decision to record with Steve. We wrote the album entirely on guitar loops and Team Storm & Stress wanted to go further in the studio with Pro Tools, which felt related to both what we were doing and where we were going. Steve had just finished building the magnificent A room at Electrical and Damon insisted we would record there for the drums. He never budged on it. As soon as we got there we realized all the songs, which were written in stacks of overdubs on our pedals, would only allow for mono guitar recordings. We worked around this by performing the songs to a single loop and overdubbing all the guitars later allowing for a full stereo field to match the glorious bombast of Steve’s drum recordings. This approach
dramatically changed how we played. While it allowed for magic moments of improv (Peter Criss intro), once the album was done, it sounded bloated and the performances sluggish. With increasing certainty I was sure the sound of the Akai Headrush, and the tempos it set for Damon was the heartbeat of these songs. Ian agreed.
In an audacious last ditch hail mary, I had the idea to call Greg Norman (who worked for Steve!) and asked if we could secretly come to his studio in S. Chicago *road hot* after our next shows and re-record the album LIVE. It was an enormous gesture that could’ve never worked, but miraculously everyone agreed to do it and we gave it a try. Greg captured us at our most fiery hot personally and professionally. The tempos are faster and no one is holding back with anything to lose. These true live tapes show the songs exactly as we played them on the road where they were developed between June of 1999 and July of 2000. Now, 25 years later, the Greg Norman tapes have been dusted off, baked, and transferred to digital. With the aid of modern restoration tools, and the expertise of Sir Bob Weston, we were able to re-mix and master these recordings for the first time.
lovesliescrushing's Bloweyelashwish is an ambient masterpiece, originally recorded in 1992 with a 12-string guitar, 4-track recorder, looping pedal, and boundless reverb. Scott Cortez’s project, alongside the haunting vocals of Melissa Arpin Duimstra, transformed bedroom daydreams into a serene, moonlit journey on a timeless sea. This expanded and remastered double album features five additional tracks, each distortion-laden and hypnotic, alongside lyrics and a replica postcard to guide listeners deeper into its world. Blindness, not eyewash, is the intended experience.
Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts is the definitive recorded collection of living Chicago DIY legend, Dr. Charles Joseph Smith. Born on Chicago's southside in 1970, Smith is a lifelong resident of the Beverly neighborhood who went on to earn 3 degrees in piano (Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate) and perform as a concert pianist in 5 countries (USA, Italy, Germany, France and Hungary). The album also marks the first archival release from Chicago’s Sooper Records.
All of the music here is being made widely available for the first time. This 90-minute collection is compiled from 30 years of Charles’ self-released original music spanning concert piano, electroacoustic experimentation, electronic beats, free improvisation, and two instrumental sketches of his evolving sci-fi opera, War of the Martian Ghosts (a 2023 electronic realization, and a 2018 piano realization). This double Vinyl / Triple CD Collector’s Edition comes with an extensive Insert Booklet containing 9000 words including poetry, interviews, quotes, 30 archival photographs, and extensive liner notes on the life and work of Charles Joseph Smith written by Sooper co-founder Glenn Curran (edited by Sadie Dupuis). This is a piece of Chicago music history.
Dr. Charles Joseph Smith’s remarkable story begins with a mute child’s gift for music, and the purposeful way he nurtured this talent to become both life practice and raison d'être. Charles recounts this artistic journey in his autobiography, The 88 Keys that Opened Doors, a self-published book that chronicles a life in which music was (and still is) the primary key to overcoming immense challenges posed by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
His career as a musician starts in the church, reaches into the international concert piano circuit, and eventually settles to bear strange fruit in Chicago’s experimental underground. Along the way, Charles Joseph Smith’s compositional voice absorbed and metabolized popular music spanning pop to jazz, the gospel of the church, the canon of the classical conservatory, modern dance scores, and the rule-shattering experimentalism of his city’s DIY subculture, where he has been a mainstay for over 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, Charles has been performing, dancing, and selling his self-published musical and written works in person, often at the local shows he frequents. He is known around Chicago as a living symbol of the power of music, and of the beloved spirit of community at the heart of DIY. This is the definitive collection of his original recordings—though it would be impossible to ever encompass the galaxies of music, poetry, and prose penned by the prolific Dr. Charles Joseph Smith.
Morphing between the sensory and the suppressed, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland’s debut album summons a poetic musical proclamation of transfigured reality and social amnesia. These seven tracks evolved collaboratively over two years, beginning as a series of duets that Moumneh instigated at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango studio in summer 2023. The Arabic title of Eternal Life No End translates more literally as "A dark, cursed night, like the seekers themselves" and the album is an outcry amidst the oceans of injustice flooding the SWANA region, haunting the lives and visions of vast populations.
Like Dante and Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, Oberland and Moumneh’s compositions chart an emotional vortex, as dream-time seeps into trancelike percussion and hypnotic melodies, channeling collective urgencies that ripple through the currents of Radwan’s voice and Arabic lyrics. Oberland’s passages of saxophone and clarineau evoke shamanic exhortations of evil, while Moumneh’s buzuk strums and swarms, often through electronic processing, with tempestuous mourning about unfolding tragedies. An array of instrumentation fleshes out the wider soundscapes: daf (a Middle Eastern frame drum) and bongos, a modified electric rababa, shuddering bass and other synthetic filigree from Oberland’s Buchla and Deckard's Dream synths.
"It's a healing process in a way," says Oberland about the work. "Since the genocide started, I’d had a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through" explains Moumneh, who ultimately packed his instruments and gear and flew to Paris in the summer of 2024 to work on the album in earnest with his long-standing friend. The two had collaborated on multiple previous occasions, with Oberland’s primary group Oiseaux-Tempête, and through Moumneh's work as Jerusalem In My Heart and as a producer/engineer on various other projects. Eternal Life No End builds on their abiding allyship as Oberland and Moumneh navigate energies and emotional shifts in newfound ways, merging their sensibilities and uncovering deeper resonances. “We worked day and night together and made clear decisions collectively” states Oberland, who nonetheless also took the lead in positioning Moumneh’s voice to shine through these compositions—there is singing on four of the album’s seven tracks. The duo played reverse roles of a sort and ventured new creative processes, as Moumneh openly took direction from Oberland, setting aside his usual lead-producer role as steward of Jerusalem In My Heart.
"Squeal of Swine" and "Dagger Eyes" open the album with dual gut punch, as hand percussion, low end synth tones, and ricocheting buzuk and rababa set the stage for Moumneh’s keening Arabic singing, reflecting a sea of sickness currently drowning the state of humanity. On the instrumental track "A Dream That Never Arrived", a lo-fi dancehall-inflected beat anchors otherworldly melodic lines set against electroacoustic sound design in spatio-temporal displacement. Eternal Life No End is accompanied by an audio-visual essay for the electronic (and vocal) song "The Serpent", assembled by Oberland and shot on Super 8mm camera in Montréal, Paris and Beirut, including footage of Gaza protests in Paris, and of the Frequent Defect event at Irtijal Festival’s 25th anniversary edition in Beirut. Lebanese graphic designer, printmaker, and calligrapher Farah Fayyad provides talisman-like artwork of entwined serpents, similarly inspired by this centerpiece album track.
Live at KEXP! is a studio‑live recording captured during Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio’s appearance on Seattle’s KEXP, offering the most direct and unfiltered experience of the band’s signature sound.
"As expected, the set began with some brain-blasting brutal noise [...] Although Merzbow is known for his extreme electronics, he is much more diverse and creative than most give him credit for. The best part of the set was when both Merzbow and Mats [Gustafsson] worked more carefully with their electronics while Mr. Pándi played some cerebral, shifting currents on his drums [...] which brought this set to a grand climax [...]". » GALLANTER, Bruce. « Downtown Music Gallery », June 2018 "The festival concluded—climactically and cathartically—with a bracing wall of sound, noise and fury from the trio of Gustafsson, the mystical Japanese noise master Merzbow and impressive young Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi.". » WOODARD, Josef. « DownBeat », May 27, 2018 "If you've seen Merzbow perform live, a question you probably wouldn't ask is, "How can we make that louder?" Well, the answer comes in the form of sax monster Mats Gustafsson and a relative newcomer, Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi." » HILL, Eric. « Exclaim! », May 20, 2018