Released as Cassette in 1975 and re-released as Digital album in 2019:
60 minute field recording from founding member of This Heat, Charles Hayward. Charles, who we have known for many years wrote to us with the proposal of releasing a field recording he had initially constructed back in the mid 70's. Charles wanted this recording to be specifically released on cassette to further appropriate the recordings intention.
Here are some words from Charles about the recording itself:
" Objects Of Desire, this is how I remember it: summer of 1975 I had the house to myself. I had some ideas that I wanted to make real. So I did what I’d always done, work with what was to hand. I’d record onto one cassette machine, play that back into the room while also adding something live, ultra primitive overdubbing. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about how music didn’t really work in an either/or way, it was only our need to put things in boxes that did that, so whatever the next idea, that was what I made. I deliberately avoided using the drum kit too much, instead I focussed on my collection of instruments collected since childhood, junk market finds, radio noise clouds, second hand keyboards advertised in the back of the Melody Maker, plastic swanee whistles from Woolworth’s taped together, kazoos, an old tape found in a Soho dustbin. At the same time the simple cassette machines added their own presence to the sound, whispering traffic passing unpredictably, the crude compression breathing; a lot of the work happened inside the machines."
I always like Darren Harper's releases. Usually they are more in pure drone territory - this one is very twinkly/burbly and rather nice. (And Porya Hatami mastered it.)
"darren harper's latest work is a joyous collage for all seasons; a delicate record that soothes and refreshes the spirit.
kaleidoscopic chimes and playful bells tumble against each other.
twinkling notes drift down in little flurries, then melt away as sunlit
chords push aside the clouds.
low, thrumming bokeh echoes bring distant mountaintops intimately close,
then curve down into hushed forest floors, winds whispering through
leaves overhead. tiny layers of loops and quiet delays, jumbled
melodies, sparse crackling branches, and somber swells invite
contemplation of these fragile spaces..."
Our very first record, still students. 4 LPs and 3 EPs we call Myths Foundation - 7 records for the 7 letters in Sub Rosa - made up our very first productions. Back then, we weren't contemplating starting a record label, we simply wanted to produce pretty complicated (and obscure) objects that could be listened to, read, and scrutinized. We released these items once we had enough money to do so, we had no resources, and we were still students. Slowly, one record a year, against sound judgment, we put these releases together through a series of defining encounters. This handful of records was meant to be the beginning of an adventure, And in that regard, they didn't fail. . . .
These 4 first releases digitally remastered and completely redesigned by Jon Wozencroft (1996).
‘Kochi’ is an immersive, heavily textured ambient album inspired by
memories of the Arabian Sea. The four lengthy tracks are all centred
around field recordings of Fort Kochi beach in Kochi, a port city in
Kerala, South India. The character of the environment is captured in the
sounds of lapping waves, birdsong and crow calls, the buzz of
fishermen, traders and locals walking in the sand.
These sounds are layered with Indian cowbells and elephant bells, and
hypnotic, evolving drones created with a shruti box, melodica and Moog
semi-modular analogue synthesizer. Glockenspiel and electric guitar
played through a swathe of effects pedals add hypnotic, looping melodic
textures and soft, glowing tonal patterns.
Telefon Tel Aviv - Dreams Are Not Enough - September 27, 2019
The return of storied Southern Gothic electronic entity Telefon Tel Aviv is as unexpected as it is impressive. Their three influential albums of the 2000’s—Fahrenheit Fair Enough, Map Of What Is Effortless, and Immolate Yourself—charted an increasingly turbulent and textured vision of post-IDM synthetic songcraft, until the sudden passing of founding member Charlie Cooper in 2009 ceased the project, presumably forever. During the decade since, co-founder Josh Eustis has performed with, produced, mixed, and mastered countless artists, from high-profile institutions (Nine Inch Nails, Puscifer, Apparat) to underground fixtures (Belong, Vatican Shadow, Drab Majesty, Tropic Of Cancer), in addition to his own solo and collaborative work in Sons Of Magdalene and Second Woman. But years of reflection and processing gradually seeded in him a desire to revive TTA and venture a fourth full-length, in the spirit of what they started: Dreams Are Not Enough. . . . .
Tenzin Choegyal, chanting, Tibetan singing bowls, gong, lingbu (Tibetan bamboo flute), and dranyen (Tibetan stringed instrument) Laurie Anderson, spoken word and violin Jesse Paris Smith, piano, crystal bowls, and gong Rubin Kodheli, cello Shahzad Ismaily, percussion
'Songs from the Bardo' begins with a bell ringing out once, twice, three times, as a ritualistic chant emerges from the dense silence. The collaborative composition by avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson, Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal, and composer and activist Jesse Paris Smith is a guided journey through the visionary text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, unfolding in an 80-minute ebb and flow of sound and words. Songs from the Bardo is a transporting experience, meant to draw the listener into the present moment and provide a framework for inner exploration. Anderson, Choegyal, and Smith fuse modern compositional techniques with the mystique of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to make these visionary traditions more accessible to a new generation of listeners and to reveal the ancient wisdoms contained within.
Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) & Ryuichi Sakamoto have been playing together
for many years now - their first collaborative LP, Vrioon, dates from 2002. The
duo’s new album Two acts as a celebration of Noto & Sakamoto’s artistic
legacy - both of their previous work and also of the musical understanding that
they have built up down the years.
The pair’s 2018 concert at the Sydney Opera House forms the basis of this
record (not the whole thing, mind - their performance ran to two hours and had
to be edited down). Across the performance they run through several cuts from
their extensive back catalogue. These old cuts come retooled for a new context,
and it’s enjoyable to contrast the changes in sound - ‘Trioon II’, for instance,
morphs from bleeping ambience into a micro-house loop reminiscent of Jan
Jelinek. Most exciting of all is their portentous, brooding take on their theme
for The Revenant, here given all the moodiness of a Ben Frost piece.
Around half of the record is made up of work that was improvised on the day.
The new pieces are generally obtuse electronic things that reference the likes
of Oval, Mika Vainio and Karlheinz Stockhausen. They are also rather spare -
rather than crowding their textures, Sakamoto & Noto allow certain sounds to
linger, something which indicates two artists wholly confident in their creative
relationship.
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Two is part-new work, part-retrospective
and wholly impressive.
. . . After many collaborations this new record by Anne-James Chaton and
Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto speaks a new language, generated by the
fusion of objective poetry and minimal music. From the dialogue of the
graph and the glitch a poetics of the code is born from which arises a
representation of the contemporary world.
Released today is the loscil score for the
interactive project Lifelike by kunabi brother. Described as a
"mesmerizing particle symphony," Lifelike
occupies a space between a game and a meditative, interactive instrument comprised
of swarms of cell-like entities that move and adapt to the player's touch
in strange but alluring ways.
These 14 compositions, extracted from the context of the game, are among the
more melodic and rhythmic in the loscil oeuvre.
In contrast to loscil's
recent full length Equivalents, Lifelike is comprised of
brief episodes of colour and momentum primarily intended to live and evolve
within the vibrant environment of the game. Outside the interactive
context, the music takes on a new identity, revealing its melancholic
undercurrent
The Senja Recordings is a collection of various outdoor recordings and
studio improvisations recorded on the island of Senja, Arctic Norway,
between 2015 and 2018.
Oles DUO – bassist Marcin Oles and drummer Bartlomiej Oles – from more
than fifteen years create the original music which the main point
reference is jazz. They are the creators of original projects and
accompany the many famous music artist from around the world being
rhythmic dream team as wrote about them German magazine JazzZeitung.
They still looking for the new ways to break stereotypes, proving the
bass and drums are enough to create music complete, full of energy and
unusual sounds.
Shasta Cults is the musical project of Canadian electronics technician
Richard Smith. For almost two decades, Smith was the official Buchla
& Associates repair tech for studios, collectors, and musicians
around the world. Having worked for artists such as Aphex Twin, Suzanne
Ciani, Morton Subotnick and institutions such as The Library of Congress
and Mills College, Smith has had the unique experience of restoring and
interacting with nearly every model of Buchla instrument constructed
over the past 50 years.
Recorded over the span of three months in the fall of 2018, this album
was programmed using the only fully functional Buchla Touché. Developed
in the early 1980s with hardware by Donald Buchla and software
programmed by musician David Rosenboom, the Touché features waveforms
generated internally by twenty-four digital oscillators and uses
frequency modulation along with sophisticated digital and analog signal
processing to produce complex timbres.
This LP is a continuation of themes first heard on Configurations, with more consideration given to the generation and
recording of the pieces. The album's six tracks – a collection of sonic
experiments and hypnotic drones – span almost forty minutes, showcasing
not only the incredible fidelity of the Touché but also Smith's
evolution as an audio engineer.
Yes, this and Configurationsare both wonderful. If you're able to get to hear those early David Rosenboom recordings of him using this, it's definitely worth it.
Instruments of the collection performed by Submerged, Julia Zanke with special guest Achim G. Reisdorf Voice: Julia Zanke
Instrumentarium: Gravel, Gravel Bed, Rocker filled with Stones, Wooden Drum filled with Stones, Stone Slabs, Pien Ch'ing Gong, Rock Gongs (Tiles, Roof Slates), Small Lithophones compiled from fragments of Stone Slabs, Large Phonolite Lithophone, Large Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone, Quartz Glass Bowls, Elmar Daucher Klangstein, Mallets (Pebbles, Small Prismatic Rocks, Wooden Sticks and Beater, Timpani Sticks), Voice
The "Klangstein" is a Scuplture by Elmar Daucher The Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone was made by Jochen Fassbender The Quartz Glass Bowls were manufactured by Heraeus Quarzglas GmbH All other stone installations originate from Julia Zanke
The final Forwind release of 2019 sees the Swedish multi-instrumentalist
Erik Levander join the roster with a dynamic speaker filling five
tracker.
The album title 'Inåt', translating 'Inwards', refers to the
introspectiveness of the compositions, drawing inspiration from personal
struggles in everyday life. The track titles and music cycles point to
another layer of context with the ongoing pattern in politics, and of
people turning inward, being somewhat inescapable. . . .
After years of mythology, misinterpretation and procrastination Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers Records as the ideal collaborators to release “the right tracks” from his uber-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French specific Volume One of this authentically titled Strain Crack Break series. Featuring some Finders Keepers’ regulars amongst galactic Gallic rarities (previously presumed to be imaginary red herrings) this deluxe double vinyl dossier demystifies some of the essential French free jazz and Parisian prog inclusions from the alphabetical “dedication” inventory as printed the anti-bands 1979 industrial milestone debut. . . .
I’ve mentioned eilean rec a few times recently. The label ran a project consisting of 100 releases, each connected to a location on an imaginary island. It completed at the end of last year and I bought the whole set.
the label just relaunched on Facebook as Laaps rec (there does not seem to be a bandcamp page yet) with an interesting new concept. Again there will be 100 releases, but this time it will be an exquisite corpse project, with each release building on continuities with the last. The first one is out Jan 20.
Black Truffle announce the release of Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke, offering up two side-long realisations of Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko parlour. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves, creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles; snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko parlour. Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises d’Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari’s piece layers Luc Ferrari’s sounds into a dense new work that emphasises the insistently pulsing rhythms of the source material. In this realisation with O’Rourke, the piece becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape calls up Luc Ferrari’s classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the swarming electronics bring to mind O’Rourke's Steamroom work or even the vast expanses of Roland Kayn.
Tiny Mixtapes - A very remarkable collaboration . . .
“Invisible Ritual” captures the synergistic collaboration between violinist/composer Jennifer Curtis and multi-instrumentalist/composerTyshawn Sorey, and is an outgrowth of work they have done within the context of the wide ranging programming of the International Contemporary Ensemble. The eight tracks heard here are all freely improvised, yet categorizing them as free improvisation suggests a soundworld that they do not inhabit exclusively. Both musicians bring their compositional sensibilities to spontaneously generated structures, intuitively guiding their way through material that consistently demonstrates their virtuosity across diverse stylistic territory. . . .
Comments
Released September 6, 2019
Charles, who we have known for many years wrote to us with the proposal of releasing a field recording he had initially constructed back in the mid 70's. Charles wanted this recording to be specifically released on cassette to further appropriate the recordings intention.
summer of 1975 I had the house to myself. I had some ideas that I wanted to make real. So I did what I’d always done, work with what was to hand. I’d record onto one cassette machine, play that back into the room while also adding something live, ultra primitive overdubbing. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about how music didn’t really work in an either/or way, it was only our need to put things in boxes that did that, so whatever the next idea, that was what I made. I deliberately avoided using the drum kit too much, instead I focussed on my collection of instruments collected since childhood, junk market finds, radio noise clouds, second hand keyboards advertised in the back of the Melody Maker, plastic swanee whistles from Woolworth’s taped together, kazoos, an old tape found in a Soho dustbin. At the same time the simple cassette machines added their own presence to the sound, whispering traffic passing unpredictably, the crude compression breathing; a lot of the work happened inside the machines."
- Blank Editions.
Frode Haltli: accordion
Emilia Amper: nyckelharpa
Håkon Stene: percussion
Eirik Raude: percussion
released September 13, 2019
Nordic traditions get weird in accordionist/composer Frode Haltli’s stripped-down successor
to ‘Avant Folk’. . . .
kaleidoscopic chimes and playful bells tumble against each other. twinkling notes drift down in little flurries, then melt away as sunlit chords push aside the clouds.
low, thrumming bokeh echoes bring distant mountaintops intimately close, then curve down into hushed forest floors, winds whispering through leaves overhead. tiny layers of loops and quiet delays, jumbled melodies, sparse crackling branches, and somber swells invite contemplation of these fragile spaces..."
4 LPs and 3 EPs we call Myths Foundation - 7 records for the 7 letters in Sub Rosa - made up our very first productions. Back then, we weren't contemplating starting a record label, we simply wanted to produce pretty complicated (and obscure) objects that could be listened to, read, and scrutinized. We released these items once we had enough money to do so, we had no resources, and we were still students. Slowly, one record a year, against sound judgment, we put these releases together through a series of defining encounters. This handful of records was meant to be the beginning of an adventure, And in that regard, they didn't fail. . . .
These 4 first releases digitally remastered
and completely redesigned by Jon Wozencroft (1996).
all composed and played by Philip Jeck
Vinyl Coda I-III first released on double cd
in 2000
Vinyl Coda IV first released on cd in 2001
These sounds are layered with Indian cowbells and elephant bells, and hypnotic, evolving drones created with a shruti box, melodica and Moog semi-modular analogue synthesizer. Glockenspiel and electric guitar played through a swathe of effects pedals add hypnotic, looping melodic textures and soft, glowing tonal patterns.
Telefon Tel Aviv - Dreams Are Not Enough
- September 27, 2019
During the decade since, co-founder Josh Eustis has performed with, produced, mixed, and mastered countless artists, from high-profile institutions (Nine Inch Nails, Puscifer, Apparat) to underground fixtures (Belong, Vatican Shadow, Drab Majesty, Tropic Of Cancer), in addition to his own solo and collaborative work in Sons Of Magdalene and Second Woman. But years of reflection and processing gradually seeded in him a desire to revive TTA and venture a fourth full-length, in the spirit of what they started: Dreams Are Not Enough. . . . .
(Tibetan bamboo flute), and dranyen (Tibetan stringed instrument)
Laurie Anderson, spoken word and violin
Jesse Paris Smith, piano, crystal bowls, and gong
Rubin Kodheli, cello
Shahzad Ismaily, percussion
- Bandcamp Daily
Shasta Cults - ST
Imprec, November 13, 2019
https://www.emusic.com/album/5532211/James-Blood-Ulmer/Blue-Blood
Around half of the record is made up of work that was improvised on the day. The new pieces are generally obtuse electronic things that reference the likes of Oval, Mika Vainio and Karlheinz Stockhausen. They are also rather spare - rather than crowding their textures, Sakamoto & Noto allow certain sounds to linger, something which indicates two artists wholly confident in their creative relationship.
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Two is part-new work, part-retrospective and wholly impressive.
These 14 compositions, extracted from the context of the game, are among the more melodic and rhythmic in the loscil oeuvre. In contrast to loscil's recent full length Equivalents, Lifelike is comprised of brief episodes of colour and momentum primarily intended to live and evolve within the vibrant environment of the game. Outside the interactive context, the music takes on a new identity, revealing its melancholic undercurrent
If you're able to get to hear those early David Rosenboom
recordings of him using this, it's definitely worth it.
with special guest Achim G. Reisdorf
Voice: Julia Zanke
Gravel, Gravel Bed, Rocker filled with Stones, Wooden Drum filled with Stones, Stone Slabs, Pien Ch'ing Gong, Rock Gongs (Tiles, Roof Slates), Small Lithophones compiled from fragments of Stone Slabs, Large Phonolite Lithophone, Large Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone, Quartz Glass Bowls, Elmar Daucher Klangstein, Mallets (Pebbles, Small Prismatic Rocks, Wooden Sticks and Beater, Timpani Sticks), Voice
The "Klangstein" is a Scuplture by Elmar Daucher
The Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone was made by Jochen Fassbender
The Quartz Glass Bowls were manufactured by Heraeus Quarzglas GmbH
All other stone installations originate from Julia Zanke
The album title 'Inåt', translating 'Inwards', refers to the introspectiveness of the compositions, drawing inspiration from personal struggles in everyday life. The track titles and music cycles point to another layer of context with the ongoing pattern in politics, and of people turning inward, being somewhat inescapable. . . .
Erik Levander
the label just relaunched on Facebook as Laaps rec (there does not seem to be a bandcamp page yet) with an interesting new concept. Again there will be 100 releases, but this time it will be an exquisite corpse project, with each release building on continuities with the last. The first one is out Jan 20.
https://soundcloud.com/laaps-records/the-alvaret-ensemble-ea-album-preview
https://laaps-records.com/album/ea
Black Truffle, January 10, 2020
- A very remarkable collaboration . . .