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On Beacon Hill: at twilight we find Anthony Moore, roots winding backwards to the halcyon days of Slapp Happy and the ‘70s progressive art rock scene, at guitar and piano. With the atmospheres and accompaniments of AKA & Friends, he breathes infernal new life into songs from his six decades of multivarious music making. This new delivery system is unto a séance, a communal incantation, twining Anthony’s avant and pop traditions together in a darkly radiant coil of folky chamber music; a rope to lower the listener through cobwebs and murk, unveiling new life beneath Anthony’s mad old lines.
It is new life that we will need if we hope to reoccupy this cursed earth.
AKA are Anthony Moore, Keith Rodway and Amanda Thompson. A pagan family of sound worshipers hailing from that unholiest of all places: Hastings UK, home of Crowley and Turing. Like their sinister forbears in that infamous tradition, this latest trinity shares a passion for subverting pattern and number, factoring unlikely permutations arising from sea and horizon, greensward, the southerly aspect, and the planisphere as half-world. Their equatorial shore speaks of a planet of water and earth, fire and air. AKA’s humble tools of choice for this endeavor are guitar, piano, organ, synthesizer and vocals.
The Friends of AKA are Tullis Rennie, trombone and electronics; Olie Brice, double bass; Richard Moore, violin; and Haydn Ackerley, guitar. They too navigate the shoreline of the south coast, haunt the same taverns and regularly play together in whatever combinations fit the bill.
Leaving the drums (and their drummer) at home to realize anew these dream-laden songs, AKA & Friends ensure that the notes fall around the beat and not on it, so as to define the pulse with absence. As such, time is liberated, prised free from the merciless clock; a rhythm of waves, passing through a steady-state universe of no beginnings and no endings. Discontinuities are dissolved, all is transition.
On Beacon Hill: Anthony Moore with AKA & Friends manifest a sensuous post-devastation lounge act, seeking to re-invoke natural orders by naming — rather than cursing — the darkness in its many guises. Like final-phase Johnny Cash on a lost episode of Twin Peaks, Anthony’s innate gravitas is a light through the surreal landscape, as the players combine themselves again and again, their efforts rising and falling in shared space. Their gothic jazz orchestra carves delicately through Anthony’s songs, releasing the melodies and the melancholy to drift upward, like smoke against a sooty and scorched backdrop.
On Beacon Hill: fantastic, prophetic journeys, dry eyed but deeply affected, through the shadow depths of Anthony Moore’s mirror. As we listen, we gravitate and journey alongside fellow refugees in solidarity and solitude alike.
Holy grail of US roots reggae released in 1979. Old-style tip-on sleeve replicating the original sleeve. More Relation started in 1977 in New York as a backup band for reggae artists such as Melodians, Larry Marshall, Carlton Coffee, and Ken Boothe, but soon they started crafting their own melodic & deep roots reggae. They released many now sought-after singles such as "The Light", "Solve Them" and one self-titled album.
Tommy Peltier's Echo Park, compiled of unheard tapes from the early/mid 1970s, brings us into contact with a long-extinct creature — equal parts slinky hipster, universal soldier of the heart and snuggly loverman — the light-rockin’ tinseltown troubadour, the likes of which hasn’t been served around Hollywood since 1979! Tommy’s somewhere in the tuneful tradition of Rupert Holmes, Stephen Bishop, Andrew Gold, David Batteau and of course, Captain Fantastic and the Thin White Duke. His soulful songs and high-pitched vocals (he was once called “Tom Rapp on helium”) are paired with the requisite chopsy, jazz-enriched LA players, entrancing the ear with grooves and performances both tasty and sweet. Mixed and mastered with great zest by Jim O’Rourke (he brought new life to recordings of a similar vintage for Judee Sill’s posthumous Dreams Come True back in 2005), Echo Park is an encompassing trip through a whole other time and place. A trumpet player since childhood, Tommy felt no need for pop music; he’d come of age during the west coast jazz explosion of the 1950s, hearing Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker’s legendary performances at The Haig Club, just a mile west of MacArthur Park. Inspired by the departures of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, he founded The Jazz Corps in 1963, gigging all around around town, including a residency at Hermosa Beach’s also-legendary Lighthouse. Their sound was captured on a stellar 1967 Pacific Jazz release featuring Roland Kirk. Jazz was Tommy's game, but when he injured his side playing lead parts in a big band, he couldn’t blow for long without aggravating it. Something had to give. Fortunately, there was a lot of giving in those days. In ‘68, he met aspiring singer/songwriter Judee Sill. He found her energy amazing, as she played bass in a group he was sitting in with, and it quickly became clear—he and Judee were in tune! When Tommy picked up the guitar and started writing songs, she was there with help and encouragement. As the '70s dawned, Tommy was turning 35, but he was also turning the page, like so many others, to find something amazing there on the other side. Amazing music things flow freely up and down the tracklist of Echo Park. Inspired — not influenced — by Yes, Supertramp, ELO, Queen, Bowie, The Beatles and others, Tommy developed and honed his new music throughout the '70s. A handful of the cuts here were recorded between 1970 and ‘73, just a mile from Echo Park Lake, at an unassuming rear house set back in the hills (that Tommy’s been a resident of since 1966!). Other tracks were recorded at sessions in Hollywood in 1975 and ‘76, at now-obscure studios like Music Grinder and Heritage. Tommy was tight with a great bunch of guys: guitarist Art Johnson, who worked with far-out jazzers like John Klemmer, Paul Horn and Tim Weisburg, and was a member of the progressive jazz collective The Advancement; keyboardist Richard Thompson, whose studio rounds included The Association, John Hartford and Gábor Szabó; bassist Wolfgang Melz, who played with peaceful, easy folkies Hedge & Donna, Mark-Almond and Daniel Moore, plus Charles Lloyd, Szabó, Klemmer, and the psychedelically wigged Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band. Judee Sill’s on a couple songs too, as are former Jazz Corpsmen Lynn Blessing and Bill Plummer. Tommy’s first pop band, Jasmine, appear on “Here Today” — his very first vocal composition, and the earliest recording here. Lots of great times and great songs, but no contract.... which turns out to be our gain, as we release them today! Tommy has continued to play music, releasing new stuff with Plastic Theatre Art Band in 1996, and a number of releases under his own name, most recently in 2011. And at the ripe young age of 90(!), he’s still playing today! Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke, Echo Park is a high-flying journey through the past.
Mats Gustafsson meets Jan St. Werner in 2019 when they both perform with Peter Brötzmann and a group of prolific improvisers for three days at Flutgraben in Berlin. Mats and Jan notice their mutual passion for performing not just inside spaces, but also with them, activating environments and shaping sound through diversion. Mats introduces Johan Berthling, whose complex bass explorations complement the frantic jitter of Mats’ saxophone and pedals, and Werner’s digital nerdery. The trio instantly agrees on sound as a physical material, one that can bend, shift, and move anywhere within instants. They establish musical forms only to immediately dissect and reassemble them again. It’s a nervous ride: a hyperactive conversation, keen on detail and open to argument. Though IFANAME’s sound is instantly graspable, it is also hard to pin down. Nothing seems stable, yet it endures, holding together like some kind of catchy glue that vaporizes as quickly as it forms. IFANAME is question and concern; it is music as much as it is movement. It is attention, care, curiosity, and disaster. Wherever IFANAME came from, there is much more waiting, ready to burst and reshape in front of and inside your ears.
Soft Echoes presents the first physical edition of In a Few Places Along the River by Abul Mogard as a limited run of 500 vinyl copies. Originally released digitally in 2022, the album now appears in its intended form, marking the label’s second release. Three long pieces, composed between 2019 and 2022, emerged from Mogard’s meticulous experimentation with analogue and digital instruments. Slowly evolving harmonic fields of layered drones and spectral textures drift across the record. They are enhanced by reverb from Scotland’s Inchindown oil tanks, which hold the longest reverberation of any man-made structure, giving the music a haunting resonance and a sense of suspended space. Against a White Cloud and In True Contemplation open the album with their nocturnal tones that gradually intensify into dense, immersive waves of sound. Side B is devoted to the 21-minute elegiacal piece Along the River, which flows between weight and silence, unfolding with reflective depth and moments of subtle transcendence. As one listener observed, “His music doesn’t break the wilful suspension of disbelief: you stay in its trance.” “Recording for this album began in 2019, when I was still living in London,” Mogard explains. “The first version of Along the River was created at my studio near Brick Lane. It started with experimenting around a chord progression inspired by a classical piece I had once been recommended, though, strangely enough, I no longer recall what it was. Early in 2022, I revealed the identity behind Abul Mogard and wanted to mark this new period, so I decided to release it quickly, by myself, as digital-only.” After returning to Rome, Mogard created the other two pieces, working with new digital instruments alongside his modular synthesiser, and integrated recordings from the London sessions. The music reveals a patient attention to texture and space, defining his usual restraint. Mogard adds, “I was trying to explore very subtle changes in the spectral characteristics of the music using extremely slow, intertwined tones.” Described by critics as one of Mogard’s most melancholic and absorbing releases, the album maintains an austere beauty and contemplative weight, leaving a lingering impression that lasts far beyond the final note. The music has extended beyond the album itself, with tracks appearing in films and contemporary artworks. Most notably, Swedish artist Peder Bjurman’s Slow Walker audiovisual installation and French filmmaker Fleuryfontaine’s politically charged animated film Soixante-sept millisecondes. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri and cut to vinyl by Lupo, the record emphasises the clarity and depth of Mogard’s frequencies, with each layer precisely balanced. The cover artwork and design are by Marja de Sanctis, who has collaborated with Abul since his first cassette release in 2012.
Ball of Eyes, released in 1971, is the debut album by the Belgian jazz-fusion group Placebo, led by keyboardist and composer Marc Moulin. Unlike the more well-known British alternative rock band of the same name, this Placebo carved out a distinct identity in the early 1970s European jazz scene, merging soulful grooves with rich brass arrangements and experimental textures. While many contemporary jazz acts leaned into chaotic free-form structures, Ball of Eyes opts for carefully arranged compositions that emphasize rhythm, melody, and atmosphere. Though not widely known upon its release, the album remains a landmark in Belgian jazz and a testament to Marc Moulin’s visionary fusion of jazz, funk, and soul aesthetics.
Peel Sessions 1973-74 is a unique collection showcasing the legendary German experimental rock band’s dynamic live performances captured for BBC Radio 1’s John Peel sessions. This album brings together raw, electrifying recordings from 1973 and 1974, highlighting Can’s groundbreaking sound that blended psychedelic rock, avant-garde, and improvisational music. Fans and newcomers alike will experience the band’s creative energy and innovative spirit in an intimate setting outside the studio.
Featuring tracks that emphasize hypnotic rhythms, ecstatic grooves, and visionary experimentation, Peel Sessions 1973-74 stands as a vital document of can’s influential role in shaping modern music. Collectors and enthusiasts can look forward to remastered audio quality and detailed liner notes providing insight into the sessions' historical context.
Dance Till You Die is more than just a track title—it’s a loud and clear order, a warning, and a timeless statement from one of the most uncompromising Japanese post-punk outfits of the early 1980s. Emerging from Japan’s underground scene, Daisuck & Prostitute forged a raw yet magnetic sound that blended the abrasive edges of No Wave with an almost ritualistic sense of groove. Dance Till You Die stands as a rare testament to their uncompromising vision: esoteric and challenging, yet undeniably contagious on the dance floor. This newly unearthed gem brings sharp, jagged rhythms, dissonant textures, and a feverish punk urgency together in a way that feels both deeply of its time and eerily timeless. For No Wave obsessives, post-punk devotees, and seekers of obscure underground treasures, Dance Till You Die reaffirms the visceral spirit of a band that refused to compromise or cater to convention. With its intensity undiminished decades later, Dance Till You Die resonates as both an invitation and a provocation: keep moving until the last beat, keep resisting, and keep challenging the boundaries of sound. This release celebrates the survival of radical creativity and provides a crucial document of Japan’s contribution to the explosive worldwide post-punk movement.
Carl “Sherlock” Holmes started gigging in the early sixties forming Carl Holmes & the Commanders with whom he recorded a full length album for Atlantic in 1962 entitled Twist Party At The Roundtable. Later on he recorded a couple of 45’s for the Parkway and Verve labels. In May of 1966 a pre-Experience Jimi Hendrix gigged with the group but never recorded with them. After a final 45 for the local Philly label Black Jack, the group disbanded and Carl formed the Sherlock Holmes Investigation a solid outfit backed by a strong rhythm section packed with congas, vibes, flute, organ and sax. Philly’s Sigma Sound Studio was the place they recorded their sole album and Curtis R. Staten’s CRS Records was the label that released it. This album has it all! Smokin funk breaks in Black Bag, Investigation, Get Down Philly Town, It Ain't Right and some syncopated latin-inspired jams in Modesa. All these coupled nicely by some fine mellow numbers in Close To You, Think It Over and Your Game . And all but one (Bacharach/David's Close To You) written by a guy named Len Woods, a remarkable songwriter, no doubt! After Tramp Records has released four songs of this album on two 45RPM singles recently, the entire Investigation No.1 album is now available on CD. It even comes with a bonus track which has been originally released on 45RPM single only.
Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada E.P. is the only EP and second release by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It was released in Canada on the Montreal-based label Constellation Records in 1999, and concurrently in the US by Kranky.
Formed in Antwerp in 1966, Orange rose from the city’s fertile art and music scene to become one of Belgium’s most compelling underground rock bands. After several lineup changes, the group solidified its identity in 1969, making a national television debut and honing a sound rooted in psychedelia and melodic rock. Later that year, with Hugo Van Camp joining Marc Van Geystelen (lead guitar), Norbert De Lange (guitar/vocals) and Swa De Houwer (bass), the band recorded their debut single, ‘The Sun’ b/w ‘Wait Until Sunrise’, at Decca Studios in Brussels. Dark and brooding, ‘The Sun’ remains a striking artefact of Belgium’s late-’60s underground and has since earned lasting cult status.
SCULPTURES is composer and pianist Derek Hunter Wilson’s third solo album, an ode to the ancient and contested shorelines of the Pacific Northwest. Deeply embedded in place, the six longform pieces that make up the album reflect the artist’s journey through grief (including losing his father) and the passage of time, each one built upon loops created from extended sessions with harpist Joshua Ward. Like the foggy, moss-encrusted locations that inspired the album, Sculptures has a timeless feel to it, shadowed by the rumblings of a colonial system in decay. Award-winning poet Mathias Svalina composed a poem in honor of the album, entitled “A Dream for Sculptures”: "The roof of the church collapsed long ago. Vines cover the stone walls, thick, old columns of rough, dark bark & new shoots so thin & so green they almost seem, when the breeze shakes them, to be more light than plant. Tall grasses & thorny things twist through the weather-warped pews, the air thick with plant-wet breath. Each architectural feature of the church has been smoothed & vagued by growth, all but the altar, which sits on a square slab of white marble. You walk to the altar, stepping through the tangles of scrub & burr as smoothly as crossing a salt flat. You rise onto the slab of marble. The air thinner & dry. And from here you can hear it, the insistent creeping & creaking of never-ending growth, wordless with want. A small gold bowl has been left on the altar. In the bowl sits three blue flowers. The petals have been tied back with thin silver, each petal tightly overlapping another, the bloomed flowers have been forced back to buds. You lift one blue flower to your nose. It smells of old coins, shiny from centuries of fingers, of corroded batteries. Vibration rises through your feet. And again. And again. There is something beneath the altar, trying to get out. You press your shoulder into the altar & push with all your might. Your every tendon & muscle strain. Your lungs burn. Sweat streams from your face. And finally, the altar moves, only a touch & then it grinds forward, revealing a hole. Beneath the altar the cold seas splashes, wave after wave of icy saltwater churning up. You take a deep breath. You close your eyes. You dive in."
New album of peaceful explorations by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. This, their second record, maintains the space and long tones that made their debut, "All Is Sound" a successful anecdote to the loud and fast times we live in. It also expands their musical palate with powerful rhythmic elements.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio have been breaking new ground with healing / meditation music that also honors their roots in Gospel and Blues...and hints at forward looking Spiritual Jazz. Through their Cello, Saxophone, Piano and Flute playing they bring a new sound to the table. Ancient to the future.
Big Crown Records is proud to announce Marco Benevento to the family with his unstoppable debut 7”. A true piano virtuoso who’s been playing since the age of seven, Marco’s career has taken him around the world many times over, earning him a deep discography and a reputation as an in-demand session player.??Big Crown co-founder and Grammy-winning producer Leon Michels first brought Marco into the fold during the recording of El Michels Affair’s Adult Themes album, and he’s been lending his talents to countless Big Crown projects ever since. Outside the label, Marco’s unmistakable touch can be heard on records by Clairo, Kevin Morby, and Freddie Gibbs, among others.??But enough about what he’s done for everyone else—this release is Marco at his finest: doing his own thing, and doing it well. The A-side, “Frizzante,” is pure celebration captured on wax, waiting for the needle to set it free. It’s a high-energy, feel-good banger that finds Marco trading melodies with himself over a relentless groove. From the first note, the infectious topline riff hooks you in, giving way to
cascading piano runs, lush horn arrangements, and layers of electric piano and synths that keep the energy rising. There’s no lull, no letup—just a proper soul-jazz dancefloor affair.??On the flip side, Marco shows an entirely different shade of his sound with “Turnadot,” featuring Italy’s own Marianne Mirage.
Hauntingly beautiful and cinematic, the song sits comfortably between Portishead and Serge Gainsbourg. Marianne’s vocals float over Marco’s perfectly balanced arrangement—his production both restrained and expressive, making the tune universally captivating, whether or not you speak Italian.
The first resonant space Zosha Warpeha played in was the Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Oslo, Norway. Built as a mausoleum, its walls reach up into a gradual archway, creating an environment where sound expands and reverberates for twelve seconds before decaying into silence. Warpeha was greeted only by dim lights when she entered, and it wasn’t until she had spent several minutes listening that she was able to make out the frescoes that covered every inch of the room: graphic depictions of the cycle of life from conception through death. As the sound of her Hardanger d’amore encountered the walls and these slowly emerging scenes, they obscured its point of origin in both time and space, augmenting its own life cycle. The experience sat in the back of her mind over the next several years as she developed her own patient style of composition and performance, one that comes into full bloom on her new album I grow accustomed to the dark. When Warpeha was selected as an artist in residence at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room in 2025, she saw it as an opportunity to more intentionally explore how her music might fill a room with ample natural reverb. I grow accustomed to the dark documents two single-take solo performances for Hardanger d’amore and voice at IPR, with both pieces composed in a unique tuning system developed to interact with the space itself. Listeners can trace resonance from the contact of the bow on gut strings into the body of the instrument, its five sympathetic strings offering another layer of refraction, before the sound is thrown about the cavity of the room. The echoes emerge like a photographic double exposure, or wisps of smoke that linger in the air, creating ghostly harmonic convergences that blur the line between what is there and not-there. Sound begins to act like light, a synesthetic alchemy that transforms drones into beams and ornamental trills into flickers. Both side-long compositions, “filament” and “visual purple,” exemplify a duality that animates Warpeha’s music: an expressive, individualistic style that draws on extensive knowledge of her instrument’s history in folk traditions, and an austere, devotional quality maintained by focus and precision. Though very different in character and structure, both pieces evolve slowly through numerous repetitive phrases, passages of stillness, and bursts of intensity. “filament” opens with a cycle of delicate melodic fragments played and sung around a drone before blossoming into an outpouring of swooping arpeggios, harmonics flying from the strings like sparks off a bonfire. The disorienting pulsation of harmonic beating forms the core of “visual purple,” the close-tone dissonance building to a swarm of open strings ringing boldly throughout the space. After the knotty tones reach their climax, the piece collapses into studied quietude, hushed, but without any drop in intensity. When Warpeha first visited the Vigeland Museum in 2019, she was in Oslo to deepen her relationship to the Hardanger fiddle through the study of Norwegian traditional music, which is primarily passed down aurally. The experience of learning songs by ear, not only internalizing the tune but also absorbing the techniques and tonalities by listening, was a crucial step in her development as a composer. The years since have seen her sharpen those skills as a prolific member of the New York avant-garde and improvised music communities. Warpeha’s music encourages listeners to join her in this journey, to listen closely with each repeated phrase and through each dramatic shift. Like the frescoes on Vigeland’s walls, with time and intention, the depth of I grow accustomed to the dark comes on like a revelation.
Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok’s »Uncontrollable Thoughts« on Morr Music is the duo’s debut joint release. The Netherlands-based Georgian composer and the German sound artist from Berlin first met in 2019 in the context of a workshop programme that took place in Tbilisi, and later worked with Eto Gelashvili, Hayk Karoyi, and Lillevan on the massive »Glacier Music II« music and book project, released in 2021. This led them to engage in a less conceptually driven form of musicking and real-time composition that corresponds with their respective environments. They draw on traditions such as minimal music or late 1990s and early 2000s electronica to integrate subtle beats with elegiac organ drones, playful melodies with lush textures. The first document of an ever-shifting intergenerational dialogue, »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is a product of mutual listening outside time.Though Chkheidze and Lippok had access to professional studios, they chose to rent a simple rehearsal space, equipped with only the bare essentials—bass and guitar amps as well as a small PA—to maintain immediacy in their working process. The music they made together corresponded to and drew on the respective possibilities and shortcomings of this studio, much like their collaboration in general is characterised by the care with which they approach each other's talents and ideas. While both had loosely defined roles—Chkheidze was responsible for the free-flowing beat programming and the evocative distortion came courtesy of Lippok, for example—they individually contributed in different ways to their joint process, which is as free of hierarchies as it is limitless. Hence, the duo’s focus on spontaneity and out-of-the-moment emergence makes them organically move beyond tried and tested conventions, resulting in music that seems to suspend time altogether.When the first chimes on »Bird Song« announce a piece that sets rattling kickdrums against a backdrop of layered drones and rhizomatically entangled melodic elements, it becomes clear why »Uncontrollable Thoughts« carries this title: The album follows the constant detours of the subconscious of its makers, letting them explore moments of ecstasy such as on »Rainbow,« melancholy with »Field,« and the interplay of suspense and release through the ten-minute-long title track. But the different pieces also tie into one aother in various ways. The dirge-like organ drones on which »Rainbow Road« ends reappear in the beginning of »Uncontrollable Thoughts,« much like Chkheidze’s gentle yet emphatic piano chords on »Field« seem to provide the starting point from which the artist develops the striking motifs of the final piece »Opening«, whose title itself suggests that the record as a whole can and should be enjoyed as a loop. All this creates a unique, idiosyncratic temporal logic.While there is much that sets Chkheidze and Lippok apart as solo artists, the major shared leitmotif in their respective bodies of work is the sonic engagement with space. »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is hence best understood as an extension of this practice; as an album that maps the geographies of their minds in motion, tracing musical movements as they melt into each other.
Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok’s »Uncontrollable Thoughts« on Morr Music is the duo’s debut joint release. The Netherlands-based Georgian composer and the German sound artist from Berlin first met in 2019 in the context of a workshop programme that took place in Tbilisi, and later worked with Eto Gelashvili, Hayk Karoyi, and Lillevan on the massive »Glacier Music II« music and book project, released in 2021. This led them to engage in a less conceptually driven form of musicking and real-time composition that corresponds with their respective environments. They draw on traditions such as minimal music or late 1990s and early 2000s electronica to integrate subtle beats with elegiac organ drones, playful melodies with lush textures. The first document of an ever-shifting intergenerational dialogue, »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is a product of mutual listening outside time.Though Chkheidze and Lippok had access to professional studios, they chose to rent a simple rehearsal space, equipped with only the bare essentials—bass and guitar amps as well as a small PA—to maintain immediacy in their working process. The music they made together corresponded to and drew on the respective possibilities and shortcomings of this studio, much like their collaboration in general is characterised by the care with which they approach each other's talents and ideas. While both had loosely defined roles—Chkheidze was responsible for the free-flowing beat programming and the evocative distortion came courtesy of Lippok, for example—they individually contributed in different ways to their joint process, which is as free of hierarchies as it is limitless. Hence, the duo’s focus on spontaneity and out-of-the-moment emergence makes them organically move beyond tried and tested conventions, resulting in music that seems to suspend time altogether.When the first chimes on »Bird Song« announce a piece that sets rattling kickdrums against a backdrop of layered drones and rhizomatically entangled melodic elements, it becomes clear why »Uncontrollable Thoughts« carries this title: The album follows the constant detours of the subconscious of its makers, letting them explore moments of ecstasy such as on »Rainbow,« melancholy with »Field,« and the interplay of suspense and release through the ten-minute-long title track. But the different pieces also tie into one aother in various ways. The dirge-like organ drones on which »Rainbow Road« ends reappear in the beginning of »Uncontrollable Thoughts,« much like Chkheidze’s gentle yet emphatic piano chords on »Field« seem to provide the starting point from which the artist develops the striking motifs of the final piece »Opening«, whose title itself suggests that the record as a whole can and should be enjoyed as a loop. All this creates a unique, idiosyncratic temporal logic.While there is much that sets Chkheidze and Lippok apart as solo artists, the major shared leitmotif in their respective bodies of work is the sonic engagement with space. »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is hence best understood as an extension of this practice; as an album that maps the geographies of their minds in motion, tracing musical movements as they melt into each other.
Living in the present is an album built around the work of American minimalist poet, Robert Lax (1915-2000) who is widely praised for his artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important as the things said.
The album brings together the sound of Robert Lax reading his poetry, narrative field recordings by Nicolas Humbert and subtle yet imaginative timbres by Carina Khorkhordina (trumpet) and Miki Yui (electronics) who is also behind the final mixing of the album.
Living in the present is drawing from an archive of audio recordings originally made by film maker Nicolas Humbert while shooting a film on Robert Lax entitled Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, ( Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, Germany, 1999) The film was made on the Greek island of Patmos where Lax has lived withdrawn for 3 decades.
More than 25 years after the premiere of Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, Humbert, Khorkhordina and Yui are revisiting the original audio material and patiently open worlds within worlds, pointing to new harmonic textures and isolating timbres, synchronizing different layers of time and traces of various locations into a new composition in its own right.
In some ways this album feels like an expansion of the work Humbert and Penzel did with Lax across six years, between 1993 and 1999, where they developed a unique intimacy in their textual-visual collaboration. On two long pieces, for each side of the album, “Where do i begin” and “One moment passes, another comes on” respectively – Yui’s electronics and Khorkhordina’s trumpet interweave beautifully with Humbert’s field recordings, in a manner that shadows the reflective reduction of Lax’s poetry. Indeed, it's no surprise that Lax’s poetry draws musicians into its orbit; it offers the curious a welcoming reduction in which only individual words and syllables represent the essence of language.
Lax’s poetry is notable for its qualities of near-stillness and its capacity to pause the reader’s thought, asking them to hold the sensuality of language for an extended, quietly revelatory moment. His readings on this album share a similar cadence, interested in settling with syllables, with single or several words, for an extended time.
Ultimately, Living in the present unfolds with unforced grace and poetics – one moment passes, then another comes on. (Jon Dale)
Interstitial Spaces is Martin Brandlmayr’s debut release on Faitiche. In this award-winning radio collage, the well-known drummer and composer (Radian, Polwechsel) explores the quiet moments in music and film recordings.
The last notes of a piece of music fade out in the space. The pianist and the violinist remain frozen in place, holding their breath. The sound engineer sits silently at the desk. Once he has switched off his tape machine, the dull drone of a ship’s horn is heard in the distance. Otherwise, not a sound. Or was there something else hidden in the white noise?
Interstitial Spaces is based on short excerpts from music recordings, films, TV adverts and field recordings. Brandlmayr takes these quiet scenes, intervals in which nothing seems to happen, and brings them into the foreground, subjecting them to a microscopic spotlight. Moments in which one hears only the space itself, or the subtle presence of someone in the space: faint breathing, footsteps and the soft creak of a chair. We also hear preparations for an orchestra rehearsal: the musicians are all busy tuning their instruments, talking to each other, the concert has not yet begun.
This leads to a shift in perception: incidental details hidden in the hubbub of voices or in the silence suddenly take on a leading role. In the empty spaces, we discover various shades of noise, sharpening our awareness of sonic peculiarities. In a gentle rhythm, Brandlmayr’s radio collage offers a sequence of strange, not immediately identifiable sounds that are woven in the second part into a dense structure. At the end, the carefully captured sounds are released back into the empty space. Interstitial Spaces is a bold spectacle that celebrates the eventful uneventfulness.
A decade after its release, A Fragile Geography returns transformed. This limited edition cassette accompanies the AFG10 anniversary reissue, offering an inspired re-envisioning of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s landmark compositions. Reworks presents distinctive readings of these pieces, with each artist leaving their personal mark on the material. The titles remain unchanged, with the sole exception of “Hiatus,” reborn here as “Ausencia.” Together, these reimaginings extend the emotional cartography of the album into new terrains.
KMRU reframes “Displacement” with expansive, glimmering layers that open into meditative ambient landscapes. Nairobi born and Berlin based, he is known for morphing field recordings into vivid aural experiences, often capturing the texture of footsteps, foliage, and distant city life and weaving them into contemplative soundscapes. In this version he introduces subtle new sounds, including stringlike synths that trace and heighten the piece’s emotional arc. The result invites close listening, offering enveloping tones where the organic and the synthetic gently collide and flow.
Penelope Trappes renders “Reprisal” as a voice-led invocation of the delicate and the intimate. Her wistful vocals bloom with fragile sorrow, rising over shimmering strands of strings to create a sound world at once sacred and shadowed. She is adept at channeling inherited grief into music that is transcendent and otherworldly. The interplay of her voice, the strings, and her use of space and depth draws those qualities into Irisarri’s orbit, imbuing “Reprisal” with the same spiritual weight and clarity that define her most powerful work.
Kevin Richard Martin (a.k.a. The Bug) transforms “Empire Systems” into a cavernous “Iced Mix,” driven by polyrhythmic double bass motifs and sculpted from subterranean pressure and negative space. Known for pushing sound to its physical limits, Martin brings the stark intensity of his dub and noise infused practice into Irisarri’s architecture. The track seethes with harmonic distortion and erupts in white noise rhythms, its brooding low end depth and icy reverberant textures amplifying the tension. Vulnerability and force are set in stark relief, as silences feel as heavy as the bursts of sound themselves. The result is a stark study in atmosphere, restraint and impact, reframed through Martin’s singular lens of sonic mass and low end intensity.
On Side B, Mabe Fratti opens with a cinematic, dreamlike, Lynchian reimagining of “Hiatus” in her native Spanish (“Ausencia”). She threads cello and voice so wondrously that her rendering feels at once hauntingly beautiful and disquieting. Emotionally charged melodies shift in unexpected directions, while her soft, intimate vocals hover above Irisarri’s brooding synth textures. Fratti’s gift for blending experimental and avant pop sensibilities with visceral, emotionally powerful expression shines resplendently here. She gives voice to Irisarri’s reflections on the passage of time and his growing desire to reconnect with his familial roots.
Abul Mogard stretches “Persistence” into a vast drone elegy. A master of patient sound sculpting, Mogard layers evolving waves of analog synths into a dense shroud that radiates its own internal light. Gradual surges of tone and subtle harmonic shifts emphasize the piece’s endurance and inevitability. Irisarri’s original composition, in Mogard's hands, becomes a rumination on time’s unrelenting flow. Melancholy and transcendence coexist in equal measure in this engulfing, cathartic rework.
William Basinski and Gary Thomas Wright close the cycle with a spectral version of “Secretly Wishing for Rain.” Basinski’s field recordings of Reseda rainfall and birdsong, which open and close the rework, add a personal touch and evoke the imagined sound of a grainy film reel flickering to life. The piece suspends Irisarri’s yearning for the Pacific Northwest, lodging it hazily between memory, place and an unreachable dream. It feels like a fading recollection, half forgotten and half felt. A final gesture that dissolves the album into vapor, leaving the listener adrift in its lingering afterglow.
Mastered with great care by Stephan Mathieu and featuring a remixed version of the original artwork by Daniel Castrejón, this edition refracts the language of the original through new prisms. Less a return than a passage, across time, across interpretation, into uncharted emotional realms.
In 2016, after reissuing two Bruce Haack albums, Haackula and Electric Lucifer Book II, Telephone Explosion began speaking with Ted Pandel (Bruce’s lifelong friend and business partner) about working on the 1970 masterpiece The Electric Lucifer. It turned out there was another matter that he wanted to discuss: finding a final resting place for the Bruce Haack archive.
We were shown test-pressings of The Electric Lucifer board mixes from his Columbia studio sessions, countless pieces of written music, a large number of personal photos, an invitation from Raymond Scott inviting Bruce to play his newly created Electronium instrument (now owned by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh), poems, press clippings, and, most importantly, a heavy-duty shelf containing 213 reel-to-reel tapes.
All of the chosen material on The Preservation Tapes is unreleased, and has only been heard by a handful of people.
The Bruce Haack archive is now resting in the Provincial Archives of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Beyond Rare! These historical recordings of a 1967 concert at Hope College in Michigan involving John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and David Tudor, performing compositions by Ichiyanagi and Alvin Lucier, were recently discovered in an archive in Japan. The Lucier piece, "Music for Solo Performer”, was the first musical composition to utilize human brainwaves; this 1967 performance, released here for the first time, is an early realization of the piece, featuring Tudor, Ichiyanagi and Lowell Cross, using alpha waves to activate a wide range of percussion instruments. This proto-industrial version is heavily influenced by the amplified performance techniques pioneered by Cage and Tudor in the 1960s; quite different from the 1982 Lucier/Pauline Oliveros realization on Lovely Music. Ichiyanagi’s 1967 composition “Appearance” combines live electronics with acoustic instruments and adds Cage to the list of performers. This is the same piece which was released in 2006 by Omega Point, but the source tape used here is believed to be the master tape, resulting in a significant improvement in audio quality. These are historically significant and musically fascinating recordings, available on LP and CD. The release includes liner notes by Ibe Osamu of Omega Point, who explains how the tape was discovered, as well as liner notes by sound artist Minoru Sato, a researcher of Lucier's work who was in contact with the composer during his lifetime. Ichiyanagi contributes a note about “Appearance”.
Beyond Rare! These historical recordings of a 1967 concert at Hope College in Michigan involving John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and David Tudor, performing compositions by Ichiyanagi and Alvin Lucier, were recently discovered in an archive in Japan. The Lucier piece, "Music for Solo Performer”, was the first musical composition to utilize human brainwaves; this 1967 performance, released here for the first time, is an early realization of the piece, featuring Tudor, Ichiyanagi and Lowell Cross, using alpha waves to activate a wide range of percussion instruments. This proto-industrial version is heavily influenced by the amplified performance techniques pioneered by Cage and Tudor in the 1960s; quite different from the 1982 Lucier/Pauline Oliveros realization on Lovely Music. Ichiyanagi’s 1967 composition “Appearance” combines live electronics with acoustic instruments and adds Cage to the list of performers. This is the same piece which was released in 2006 by Omega Point, but the source tape used here is believed to be the master tape, resulting in a significant improvement in audio quality. These are historically significant and musically fascinating recordings, available on LP and CD. The release includes liner notes by Ibe Osamu of Omega Point, who explains how the tape was discovered, as well as liner notes by sound artist Minoru Sato, a researcher of Lucier's work who was in contact with the composer during his lifetime. Ichiyanagi contributes a note about “Appearance”.
