- "Adam Cuthbért is a composer/performer and Michigan native who cross-breeds acoustic instruments with digital environments. Highly interested in the evocative qualities of sounds in nature, Cuthbért is experimenting with ways to use composed music to both synthesize and supplement the aesthetics of a natural environment.
As an Ableton Live practitioner and trumpeter, he has performed new works around the United States and Japan, at (le) poisson rouge, La MaMa ETC, Chashama, and the Incubator, and alongside performers such as eighth blackbird, S? Percussion, Dennis DeSantis, and Maura Donohue. His co-commission with Daniel Rhode, several rooms away from their source, premiered simultaneously in the UK, Netherlands, and US in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad.
Some recent and ongoing projects include scores for experimental opera-theatre (Pioneers Go East Collective), a trumpet/electronica solo project (KuuMA), and the Sight/Sound project, an audio-visual collective based on collaborative composing over the internet and through the lens of technology.
Outside of the NYC art world, he may also be found buried in Japanese linguistics textbooks and manga, circling Central Park’s running trails, and preparing in body and mind for the Singularity." http://adamcuthbert.com/ - Soundcloud - €music
- "85% is a collaboration between Isnaj Dui, Offthesky and Orla Wren. All three artists appeared at the Homenormalism show in London at the beginning of August 2013 where it was discovered that they shared a love for 85% dark chocolate. We hinted that an ep should be recorded on that basis and next thing Orla Wren pulls out his iPad and starts recording Isnaj Dui's flute, Offthesky's guitar and a load of other random instruments. A little while later the ep was finished..."
- Two excellent albums from Miasmah Recordings, the first one is a re-release from 2007, the next is a brand new album. Kaboom Karavan - Short Walk With Olaf - "Short walk with Olaf is Kaboom Karavan ´s debut album from 2007 that appeared as a freely downloadable album on the Mexican based imprint Umor Rex, creating a cult following in the MP3 label scene at the time. Finally now properly mastered and given a well deserved vinyl release.
Mixing influences from the Electronica and Ambient scene with Americana, Free Folk and Avant-Garde Jazz to name but a few, Short walk with Olaf is first of all an incredibly beautiful and mystical piece of work that should fall in taste with everyone interested in film music, travels, small villages & deserted places. Olaf finds his place somewhere between the atmosphere of Jim Jarmousch films, Lounge Lizards and Volcano the Bear and is a great starting point for getting into the strange sound world of Kaboom Karavan." Soundcloud
Kaboom Karavan - Hokus Fokus - "Bram Bosteels ´s Kaboom Karavan project re- appears out of the thick Belgian jungle to deliver what must be one of the strangest and most exotic records since Gultskra Artikler ´s uncatagorizable Kasha iz Topora. After the already quite surreal "Barra Barra" album on Miasmah from 2011, Bram takes his sound further into unknown yet still strangely familiar territories. Listening to Hokus Fokus feels like staring frozenly into a postcard sent from your long-lost uncle that went missing in the Amazon after an expedition gone-wrong (circa year 1935). Merge this image with the decaying sounds of an old Tom Waitz record slowly tuning out in the background and your getting close. This is not instantly gratifiable music, but rather a thick fog of details, sounds and atmospheres blended together with utmost precision and skill to create something quite unique that really shines with repeated listening and full immersion.
Coming from a background as a notorious piano- husk-experimenter, film, theatre and dance composer & regular Kreng collaborator Bram has set off to confuse and wonder us with this selection of highly amazing Kaboom Karavan alternate-universe pieces fittingly entitled Hokus Fokus. For fans of 50 ´s exotica records, Jeff Beal ´s score for Carnivale´ (the tv-show) and Andy Votel/Demdike Stare curated Pre-Cert entertainment (w/artists such as Anworth Kirk and Slant Azymuth)." Soundcloud - http://www.miasmah.com - "With Kaboom Karavan it's hard to know quite where to start the Belgian collective led by Bram Bosteels have a history in theatre, film and contemporary dance, but that doesn't really help shine a light on their music. They have collaborated with musicians all over the world including Miasmah's very own Kreng, and released a debut album on Mexico's Umor imprint, but again this probably only gives a small indicator of what the collective actually sound like. There is something effortlessly surreal about the band, and surrealism is an aspect of art often attempted and very rarely perfected. Bosteels abuses his choice of instruments (and players) to the point where the listener would barely be able to place which instruments were being used at all, in fact at times you'd be hard pressed even to place what sort of music it was.
Members : Bram Bosteels & Stijn Dickel (and the sometimes many others : Köhn, Fred Van de Moortel, Gerrit Valckenaers, Thomas Olbrechts, Joachim Devillé, Christophe Van Belle, Robrecht Kessels,...)"
Toshimaru Nakamura, Tomoyoshi Date, Ken Ikeda - Green Heights
New Nakamura release from the Japan Electronic Onkyo Music movement
kinda interesting and funner set than most...the 30 sec samples are fairly indicitive of the whole..
New from 12k:
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO + TAYLOR DEUPREE - DISAPPEARANCE
Isolation, solitude, contemplation. These are the themes that discreetly weave their way through Disappearance, the first collaboration album between 12ks Taylor Deupree and pioneering electronic composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto....The initial tracks for Disappearance were recorded at Sakamotos studio in New York City during rehersals for the April concert. The two immediately entered the same sonic mindframe that lead to hours of concentrated, hushed music. Sakamotos piano playing, both traditional and prepared, emerged as perhaps some of his most beautifully sparse in recent years, letting the sound of the room and shuffle of chairs take an active roll in the recording. Only the most minimum of essential notes, accentuated by silences and the scraping of the pianos strings, plays alongside Deuprees nuanced passages, created with analogue synthesizers, strings, and found objects. These warm, human tones became the means of communication between the two artists who effortlessly created a musical language.
MOSKITOO - MITOSIS
Mitosis begins with Wonder Particle, a track that very much sums up Moskitoos intentions: to embrace the digital with not only a human, but a distinctly feminine touch. Wispy, layered vocals swim around rhythmic fragments and warm insect-like noises. The music is strange and otherwordly, perhaps the soundtrack to an evening stroll on a warm night in a bustling alien city. There are lights, swarms of sound, a myriad of conversations blended by a thousand different stories of passers-by always on the move.
Offthesky's postcard ep "Exit To Anywhere" is a 'diary' collage of his recent travels in Europe with bits recorded in London, Halifax, Berlin and Bern.
Excellent news from Innova Recordings and quite unusual for a Innova release: Composers: Michael Murphey, Black Sabbath, Chicago, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Stevie Wonder, Gary Burton, David Byrne, Talking Heads, Dawn, Todd Rundgren, Randy Newman, Styx, Sugar Loaf, Carpenters.
Performers: Misfit Toys, Dan Moore, Matt Wilson, Paul Elwood,Robert Paredes.
- "The term Misfit Toys has become shorthand for any group of ill-fitting or otherwise wrongheaded castoffs from the straight-ahead world. It can be shorthand for oddball collections of ideas and plans that have no hope of succeeding, no chance of surviving on their own. But its also a badge of honor. And it just might be the perfect name for percussionist Dan Moores latest project.
Moores last album for innova was Cabinet of Curiosities: The Graphic Scores of Robert Moran (innova 792)an in-depth exploration of percussive improvisations drawn from Morans Fluxus-laden ruminations. So how to follow up what Arcane Candy called an exercise in gorgeous understatement? Why not a collection of 1970s pop classics and one-hit wonders re-imagined for vibes, oboe, banjo, clarinet and more? Now that the smoke has cleared and mid-life crises thoroughly enjoyed, its high time to revisit those adolescent years spent by the transistor radio, and give the dear musical icons a much-needed poke in the ribs.
Far from a lark, Moores Misfit Toys has been in the works for the last decade. Its really a labor of love, born of a desire to revisit the halcyon days of Moores youth with the help of his two friends and musical partners-in-crime, composer and banjo player Paul Elwood and drummer Matt Wilson. The key to completing Moores offbeat vision for the album was experimental composer and post-klezmerical clarinettist Robert Paredes, who joined on in 2005 to add his wry musical touch.
Mining 70s AM radio for hits and B-sides from artists as diverse as Talking Heads, Stevie Wonder, Chicago, Todd Rundgren, Gilbert OSullivan, and others, Misfit Toys spins daringly deconstructed arrangements that perform a tightrope walk back and forth from virtuosic to campy. The result is a gleefully demented love letter to lost days, made all the more poignant by the passing of Robert Paredes shortly after his work on the project was completed.
With tongue and groove firmly in cheek, enjoy your visit to this particular island of Misfit Toys. No Charlie-in-the-Box or King Moonracer here: just leisure suits, smiley faces, and a pet rock or two. Be sure to bring your mood ring." Innova Recordings Soundcloud
Mika Vainio - Electric Guitar, Processing, Metallic Percussion. Joachim Nordwall - Electronics, Electric Bass Guitar, Metal Objects, Hammond Organ, Vibraphone.
- "Mika Vainio was a member of the legendary minimal electronic duo Pan Sonic. Emerging from the Finnish industrial and rave music scene in the early 90's, they became one of the most important electronic music acts. Vainio's solo works goes from abstract drone to minimal and experimental techno, under his own name or as Ø for labels like Touch, Raster Noton, Sähkö and Editions Mego. He has worked with Alan Vega, Keiji Haino and many others. His music is always extremely physical and present. Mika Vainio lives and works in Berlin.
Joachim Nordwall runs the iDEAL Recordings label since 1998, releasing intense electronic music of various kinds and organizing club nights and festivals around the globe. He started making electronic music as a teenager in the late 80's in the psychedelic drone duo Alvars Orkester (Ash International), drifted off to sweaty avant garde punk rock with Kid Commando in the late 90s and formed the ritual rock and electronic drone group The Skull Defekts in 2005. He is also recording solo works under his own name and works with Mats Gustafsson, The Gagmen (with Aaron Dilloway and Nate Young), Mark Wastell and The Sons of God. Nordwall is based in Stockholm.
"Monstrance" is their first album together and is released June 2013 and consist of drone works and pulsating electronic minimalism but also guitar, acoustic elements, organs and metal percussion. It was recorded in Einstürzende Neubauten's Berlin studio during an intense session in early summer of 2010. "Monstrance" is a place where Vainio's and Nordwall's backgrounds as musicians and composers meet, and something new and extremely powerful is born. Something deep, raw and direct..." Touch - Soundcloud
Ambient compilation of new tracks recorded for this collection, curated by loscil and Rafael Anton Irisarri, all-star cast of artists, 2 disks/22 tracks, currently $5.99 at Amazon US.
CD 1 : Loscil Selection
01 Brian McBride At a Loss
02 Marcus Fischer A Fifth Season
03 loscil Else
04 Chris Herbert Naimina
05 Pan American Tx
06 Strategy Frog City
07 Solo Andata Before Sunsets
08 P Jørgensen 401
09 Rob Bridgett Field 3
10 Mitchell Akiyama Dirge for the Canon
CD 2 : Rafael Anton Irisarri Selection
01 Marcus Fjellström The Eroding
02 Sawako Hovering
03 Simon Scott Modena
04 Library Tapes Och natten andades redan under träden
05 Lissom Hollow of Winter
06 Mokira I love you pipecock
07 Benoît Pioulard If I could possibly tell the difference, I wouldnt care anyway
08 Eluvium Sleeper
09 Kyle Bobby Dunn La Passerelle de ses yeux
10 Rafael Anton Irisarri Black days follow me around
11 Lawrence English Cooperative Drift
12 bvdub Surrender To Your Cold Embrace (feat. Wang Lijing & Lu Yan)
Other Music Review: - "With two previous releases for Sandwell District and Line, Belgian producer Yves De Mey arrives at Opal Tapes with his most concise recording statement thus far. To call the range of Metrics cinematic is perhaps a tiresome cliché, but in the case of De Mey it might actually be the most precise way to describe his particular brand of electronic music. One of Belgium's most in-demand sound designers for films and commercials, De Mey's clinical process and technical expertise allows a captivating dramatic sound world to come to the fore, somewhere in between ambient, experimental, and IDM. De Mey is at his best when he turns the mechanics of techno upside down, as in the murky drones of opening track "Box Caisson" or the meticulously constructed tensions of "Metrics." The B-side offers a more abstract and narrative approach, with two tracks that combine noisy tape hiss with fragile beauty and eerie effects, "Eye Splice" enhancing this process by a meandering dub exposé. Although Metrics might be a bit too controlled and calculated to make this reviewer go wild, Yves De Mey nevertheless impresses deeply with his efficient hi-res sound designs, which explore rich textures and an excellent use of space."
- "Antwerp-based producer Yves De Mey has his roots in sound design and scoring for performing arts, film and installations. He released on Line, Sandwell District, Opal Tapes and Modal Analysis. De Mey is also one half of Sendai, his long-running project with Peter Van Hoesen. His main tools are an ever-growing modular analog rig and some vintage synths, combined with an avid interest in audio manipulation." http://www.knobsounds.com €music - Soundcloud - Soundcloud 2 - More Yves De Mey @ Emusers
- "Eight years have passed since Jackson Fourgeaud first assembled his Computerband and released his debut album, Smash, which fizzed away in the dead space between Daft Punk's world domination and Ed Banger's Parisian dance revival. Since then, electronic music has become a global phenomenon. But time has given the French IDM producer the luxury of disappearing into his own psychedelic universe. His followup, Glow, isn't troubled by trends: it's an eccentric, all-consuming blizzard. GI Jane is Jackson's take on pro-pop, Vista on west coast disco and Memory on classic 60s songwriting, all bathed in a wash of glitch. Where there isn't cinematic, pop-mangling loveliness, there are the superbly menacing chainsaw-electro juggernauts Arp £1 and Pump, and his thrillingly brutal ode to gabba," The Guardian
- "Parisian producer Jackson Fourgeaud is best known for two things: '80s pop singer mother Paula Moore and his glitchy 2005 LP 'Smash' as Jackson and his Computerband. 'Glow' sees him return with an equally vigorous new outing. It's an album full of melodies deployed with hard edges and a maverick spirit - a chorus that reaches for the sky and gets you in the gut on 'G. I. Jane (Fill Me Up)', whirling College-like synths on 'Vista' and eerie, otherworldly dark slabs on 'Dead Living Things'. Inventive, fun and colourful - everything pop music should be, basically. " Bleep Soundcloud
Marina Rosenfeld - P.A. - Hard Love - "On P.A. / HARD LOVE, New York based composer and conceptualist Marina Rosenfeld generates a universe of radical sonic collision.
Between 2009 and 2011, in a series of monumentally scaled sites including New Yorks vast Park Avenue Armory and Liverpools Renshaw Hall car park, Rosenfeld developed an idiosyncratic sound-system, a quasi-sculptural assemblage of customized horns and subs, which she called simply P.A. She used the system to reposition resident noise from the sites alongside traces of her own voice, and a heterogeneous palette of other electro-acoustic elements. Equal parts tuned atmosphere and active performance, the series of works was notable for its subtle yet potent exploration of voice and amplification in space; its highly iterated play of reflection and distortion; and its challenge to conventional phantasies of intelligibility and publicness in amplified sound.
In 2012, Rosenfeld invited vocalist Annette Henry, a.k.a. Warrior Queen, to contribute original vocals for an album version of the project. Recorded in Kingston, Jamaica, Henry's pointed responses to Rosenfelds compositions acted as catalysts for transformation, propelling the original compositions in new and unexpected directions. Okkyung Lees virtuosic cello, which often traces over earlier recorded iterations of itself, further elaborated the complex and contingent nature of the collaboration.
The resulting music is explicit and ambiguous, anthemic and elusive. Its spikes of uneasy beauty ask urgent questions of the listener of language and form, of intimacy and ultimately of the complexity of address, both private and public." Room40 - Soundcloud
Zwerm: Johannes Westendorp, Bruno Nelissen, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Toon Callier, guitars; w/ Eric Thielemans, drums, percussion; Bertel Schollaert, saxophone; Matthias Koole, guitar; Thomas Moore, voice-over.
- "The "one-page piece" - a written-down musical composition that fits on a single piece of paper - is appealing to a group like the Belgian/Dutch electric guitar quartet Zwerm. Zwerm and their collaborators took full advantage of the opportunity to create their own scores out of the one-page pieces, to allow their own creativity and compositional ideas to run free, to explore interesting sound worlds, and to seek out possible links between the pieces. These positive experiences are inherent to the format of the one-page piece: a composer provides a musical idea, in traditional notation, prose, graphics, or some combination of all three; sometimes this idea is rough or conceptual, sometimes more clear in its musical content and process. The rest is up to the musicians. Collaborative brainstorming is necessary, and many ideas might be tried out before settling on a particular way of realizing the piece; often, the possibilities seem endless, limited only by one's conventional training, adherence to idiomatic instrumental techniques, and musical sensibilities. This collaborative brainstorming works best when the ensemble is made up of adventurous musicians who trust each other.
One-page pieces fall into the category of process pieces. With roots in the history of American experimental music, both process pieces and one-page pieces are sometimes traced back to Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece In C of 1964. The recordings on this CD represent a crossover project in which Zwerm looks for connections between the sound worlds of blues, free improvisation, experimental rock, noise, minimalism, and many other contemporary musical ideas." New World Records - Soundcloud
- "Zwerm is a Belgian-Dutch electric guitarquartet founded in 2007.
Their first cd called The Worlds Longest Melody was mentioned by The Wire Magazine as an obvious contender for album of the year 2010. They gave concerts in the UK, Europe and the United States. Zwerm is described in the press as:
An exciting, sometimes alienating and always quirky musical discovery as you rarely get to hear (Goddeau march 2011).
A gorgeous feedback texture heavenly braided by the four guitars of Zwerm (...) If Zwerm would be listed in rocktradition, the quartet seems well in place in the vicinity of Sonic Youth and associates (Kwadratuur dec. 2010).
Ein imposantes Surround-Hörerlebnis (Kronenzeitung jan. 2010).
The boldness and the imagination of the music speaks out of their performances (De Standaard oct. 2010)."
- "I began composing solo violin music out of the desire to explore and push my relationship with the violin and to develop the seeds of pieces growing in my consciousness for some time. Over the past few years of cultivating a meditation practice along side the physical yoga practice, my vision as an individual artist has come into focus- collaboration with others has and will always be a large part of how I create, but I found a solitary place within myself to jump off from. I've played the violin for so long it is the natural extension of my voice- The nuance and complex personality; sonically, rhythmically and emotionally existing in a single instrument is fascinating to me. My love for minimalism, pop music and improvisation comes through these compositions; this is where I come from. Hero Brother is a gathering of characters in our collective mythology- the strong and weak; the secrets buried underground, played by one instrument, echoed by my own voice as plaintive companion." - Sarah Neufeld.
- " Sarah Neufeld is a violinist and composer based in Montréal, Canada. Best known as a member of Arcade Fire, she is also a founding member of the acclaimed contemporary instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre and has performed and recorded with many other groups, including The Luyas, Esmerine and Little Scream.
Neufeld began developing pieces for solo violin in a more formal and focused sense in 2011, though she has made improvisation and solo composition part of her process and practice since first picking up the instrument at a young age. Neufeld counts Bela Bartok, Steve Reich, Iva Bittova and Arthur Russell among the formative influences for her solo work, in tandem with an ear for the textures and sensibilities of contemporary electro-acoustic, avant-folk and indie rock music.
Neufeld's debut solo album Hero Brother indeed channels all of the above, flowing through shifting atmospheres and oscillating between restrained, stately ambience, emotive études, and raw kinetic energy. Small touches of wordless vocalisation, harmonium and piano supplant the violin in a few places. The album was recorded in Berlin by pianist and producer Nils Frahm, with Neufeld's performances captured in a number of locations with site-specific acoustics, including an abandoned geodesic dome, an underground parking garage, and the legendary Studio P4 orchestral recording hall at the broadcast complex of the former GDR. . . ." Constellation Records - Soundcloud.
From march 2013: Portico Quartet - Live / Remix - "Portico Quartet bring their powerful live performance to record. Drawing on the inspiration of electronica, ambient, classical and dance music, they take their strange, beautiful, cinematic, future music to exciting new vistas. Live/Remix is a double album offering a unique insight into two distinct parts of the band's personality. . . ." Real World Records
Have not seen this mentioned here yet:
The samples sound like this might be more funky Bretschneider than abstract Bretschneider, like on Rhythm. Sounds like it may be pretty good.
Erik Friedlander - Claws and Wings "What do you do when someone special in your life dies? The shock can be numbing and disorienting. Within days of the death of his wife in November of 2011, cellist and composer Erik Friedlander fell off his bicycle on a wet morning in New York City, tearing completely the UCL (ulnar collateral ligament) of his thumb, and effectively putting himself out of commission for 3 months. With concerts canceled and no practicing to be done Friedlander had a lot of time to think about difficult months he and his daughter had just gone through. Lynn, Eriks wife of 22 years, an award-winning choreographer and writer, who collaborated frequently with her husband, had suffered from breast cancer and her slow descent had been tough on everyone.
After months of rehab and soul searching Friedlander began playing again. For me it was time to back into the flow of life. Grieving wasnt over -- it doesnt really work like that -- but life is a hard-ass, it doesnt stop, Friedlander says. It was like climbing onto to a moving freight train and I was out of practice. The thing is, music had been there for me through a lot of tough times, and it was still there for me. I just needed give it some attention.
August, 2012 and Friedlander began composing again. He called to long-time collaborators Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori as well as producer/engineer Scott Solter and convened a 2-day session on the Lower East Side to record the new project. The music strongly resonates with Eriks mind-set at the time: meditating on a life lost, regaining his balance, and then moving forward with optimism." Skipstone Records - Bandcamp
- "Interior Field is a new stereo variation of a multi-channel sound work created from field recordings of a variety of small and large spaces from around the world. This work was originally presented at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC in 2012.
Through his compositional practice, Chartier utilizes the unique physicality of these environments to create a newly defined acoustic space. Interior Field is a transposition of location, focus, and experience itself.
A significant element of Interior Field (Part 2) comes from binaural recordings at the McMillan Sand Filtration Site in Washington, DC. This unique historical site, built in 1905, is currently slated for almost complete demolition and redevelopment. Chartier was given special access to record at this site during a major rainstorm. Vast vaulted catacomb chambers with floor surfaces covered in four feet of sand create an unexpectedly deep acoustic field.
Interior Field is the follow up to Chartiers critically acclaimed field recording work Fields for Mixing, released in 2010 on Room40 (Australia)."
- "Richard Chartier (b.1971), sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound which has been termed both microsound and Neo-Modernist. Chartiers minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Chartiers sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally including the 2002?s Whitney Biennial and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American Historys collection of 19th-Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration." Line Imprint - Soundcloud
Excellent news from the great Serein Label in Wales.
On music and Bandcamp: Colorlist - Sky Song
released 02 October 2013
Charles Gorczynski / Woodwinds, Synths
Charles Rumback / Drums, Bells - "Two years ago, Colorlist released 'The Fastest Way To Become The Ocean' on Serein; a four-track EP released on 10" vinyl as part of the Seasons series. The band's core members (Charles Gorczynski and Charles Rumback) were both living in Chicago at that time. Shortly after the release of the EP, Gorczynski moved west to Oakland, California, leaving the pair on opposite sides of the United States. The two have somehow managed to keep working together despite the huge distance between them, so we'll forgive the couple of years it took for 'Sky Song', the album I present to you now, to come to fruition.
Sky Song is Colorlist's third album proper and their first full length release since 2010. The music is deep, organic and involving - it feels like a spiritual successor to their 2008 album, Lists, which had a similarly robust and weighty sound. This may be thanks in part to the complement of modular synths which are present again on Sky Song. The deep, harmonic quality of analogue synthesizers seems a perfect companion to the pair's usual instruments, occupying the mid-range of frequencies between Rumback's kicks and toms, and Gorczynski's woodwinds.
As with their previous work, Sky Song traverses a rich and wide sonic terrain. It's not music that's easy to classify because of the array of influences which mould the sound and indeed the improvised nature of many of the pieces. Importantly, though, Sky Song feels focused and coherent as a whole. The album has everything; peaceful and serene passages of music that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, deep, driving rhythms that make your feet twitch and occassionally, music that erupts like a firework exploding in the sky.
Colorlist don't have to stick to one style to establish a cohesive 'whole'; there is something deeper common to these tracks that ties them all together. There is a quality to the pieces, a kind of airy, openness that I associate with being outdoors. It's a distillation of a certain feeling, walking in the woods perhaps, the sun dappling the earth below your feet, a warm breeze on the back of your neck; magical music.
Sky Song was recorded by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv and Nine Inch Nails) and John Hughes (founder of Hefty Records) at HFT Studios, Chicago. Both play important roles in capturing Colorlists music which cannot be underplayed, on this occasion they are also both credited with playing modular synths on the track, Currents. http://colorlist.net/ - https://twitter.com/colorlists
Excellent news from the French Brocoli label: Avec : Rainier Lericolais, Franck Marguin, Geoffroy Montel, Etienne Bonhomme, Olivier Cavaillé, Nicolas Jorio, David Sanson, Pierre-Yves Macé et Daniel Palomo-Vinuesa.
- "Adapting a novel to produce a concept album has been a dream of Minizza's ever since their formation in 2000.
So when French national radio station France Culture asked the band to produce a radio drama for the legendary Atelier de Création Radiophonique, they took the opportunity to adapt Joris-Karl Huysmans’s masterpiece À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), the ultimate example of "decadent" literature they’ve been worshiping since their teenage years.
This work led to the third album of the band which combines elements of « Hörspiele », real songs, and experimental music.
Huysmans's words are never referenced directly yet they form the basis for the transformation into their lyrical interpretation. The goal was to recreate the atmosphere of the novel.
- "Franck Marguin and Geoffroy Montel formed Minizza in 2000. They worked several times with Erlend Øye from The Kings Of Convenience, and their first album, Music for girls, features Edward Ka-Spel from The Legendary Pink Dots.
At the end of the 2000s Minizza became a trio when joined by contemporary artist Rainier Lericolais. Their second album, Hotel Monterey (with David Sanson from That Summer) is an imaginary soundtrack from Chantal Akerman’s movie of the same name. For their third, À Rebours, they also collaborated with the four members of That Summer (Etienne Bonhomme, Olivier Cavaillé, Nicolas Jorio and David Sanson), Pierre-Yves Macé and Daniel Palomo-Vinuesa.
Together, they write music that combines elements of pop, electronic and experimental music."
New album just out from Oval. This one has songs. Like, with vocals. Weird.
Although Oval, a.k.a. Markus Popp, is best known for his ground-breaking glitch approach to music, damaging CDs until they sounded fragmented to the point of breaking and then making new music from the sounds, Popps recent ventures have seen him interact with traditional South American music. On Calidostópia, Popps last album, released for free earlier this year, he documented a series of sessions in Brazils Salvador da Bahia, and its a theme that he continues on VOA.
(@BN, Yes, my comment above was tongue in cheek - the songs are not that weird; just weird that a Markus Popp album has singing. Not what I expect from him.)
Not everything is quite so weird in the 800-track "The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume 1 (1917-1927)," a co-production of two labelsboth owned by celebrity guitarists Jack White's Third Man Records and John Fahey's Revenant Records. There are familiar names in the set, like Jelly Roll Morton and Alberta Hunter. But, more often than not, you feel like you're listening to voices from another world. And that disparity between the familiar and the bizarre, the classic and the offbeat, is a driving force of this massive new collection. There are some artists who had a huge influence on American vernacular music, and other performerseven entire genres of musicthat have faded into the dark recesses of obscurity.
Most marvelous, or over the top depending on how you look at it, is the packaging and extras. From the original PR:
* 800 newly-remastered digital tracks, representing 172 artists
* 200+ fully-restored original 1920s ads and images
* 6x 180g vinyl LPs pressed on burled chestnut colored vinyl w/ hand-engraved, blind-embossed gold-leaf labels, housed in a laser-etched white birch LP folio
* 250 page deluxe large-format clothbound hardcover art book
* 360 page encyclopedia-style softcover field guide containing artist portraits and full Paramount discography
* Handcrafted quarter-sawn oak cabinet with lush sage velvet upholstery and custom-forged metal hardware
* First-of-its-kind music and image player app, allowing user mgmt of all tracks and ads, housed on custom-designed USB drive
"Faitiche presents Jan Jelinek's Temple. This mini-LP is the final installment in a series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of Jelinek's music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. As was the case with two tracks that appeared on the 2012 mini-LP Music for Fragments, Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain
- "While I have admittedly become a fairly serious Legendary Pink Dots fan again over the last few years, I am still far from obsessive and their voluminous 2013 output was just way too much for me to keep up with. Consequently, I thought it was probably safe to let this limited, tour-only "sister album" to The Gethsemane Option slip by me. I was wrong, of course (and I should know better by now). While Code Noir is not nearly as ambitious or epic as Gethsemane, it happily avoids almost all of the indulgences and excesses that plagued its sister and is much better (and more listenable) for it.
Code Noir opens strongly with one of its best songs, "Six Easy Pieces," which takes a pleasantly rippling loop through a series of dynamically satisfying and seamless transformations. Everything that is great about the Dots is present, as Edward Ka-Spel's prominent vocals maintain a restrained intensity and cryptic narrative while all variety of low-level surreality unspools around the edges. More important than the content, however, is the feel of the piecethe band sound atypically comfortable, focused, and relaxed. I never get the sense that Ka-Spel and company are trying too hard, passing off a meandering jam as a new song, or piling on layers and layers of weirdness for a forced psychedelic experience. Instead, "Six Easy Pieces" is just a well-constructed, hooky song that patiently unfolds for exactly the right amount of time and never ruins the spell with any wrong moves.
The Dots repeat that delightful feat again with "Life is Hard and Then...," though Ka-Spel's vocals have a bit more edge and urgency to them this time around. That can often be a deal-breaker for me, as the line separating "intense" and "shrill" can be a very thin one with LPD, yet Edward's passion feels well-earned in this particular song. Also, it certainly helps that the brooding underlying music is quite good as well, making excellent use of alternately lush and twinkling synthesizers, ominous throbs, and ghostly swells.
The rest of the album is something of a mixed bag, but it is generally an enjoyable one. "Cloud 6," for example, is a gently dreamlike piano ballad that I like much, much more than I expected to. "Spare Change" and "Testing 1-2-3," on the other hand, are very much in the '90s industrial-influenced vein of Gethsemane, though they take very different directions from one another ("Spare Change" is kind of simmering and menacing, while "Testing" has a bit of an ambient techno bent.). All three are quite likable, as is the brief closing soundscape "Two Steps Beyond," which sounds like a melancholy music box melody slowly fading away. Unfortunately, that still leaves one remaining song ("Ascension 3") to mar an otherwise wonderful album.
I am sure that there is probably someone somewhere who will think "Ascension 3" is awesome, but it represents the convergence of almost all of LPD's worst tendencies for me. In essence, it is basically a somewhat cheery Krautrock-influenced synth jam, but it is augmented with some backwards, quasi-ritualistic falsetto vocals; some clean guitar noodling; andmost egregiouslya chugging metal riff. What that ultimately amounts to is a frequently toothless and meandering instrumental jam that sounds like it is probably going to erupt into an "Enter Sandman" cover at any moment.
That said, an LPD album that only contains one song that I actively dislike is a rare treat, especially considering that this is such a seemingly minor release in a year that saw the band release 8 "new" albums (not including their various solo projects). Also, half the fun of being an LPD fan is the scavenger hunt aspect of sifting through all the dross to find the diamonds, which can appear literally anywhere. Code Noir features at least two such gems, which is great, but it is even more significant for being so uniformly solid and absorbing: with "Ascension 3" removed, i could easily loop this album for hours without ever getting bored or annoyed. I still insist that The Silverman's Finisterre is the best LPD-related release of the year, but this modest surprise is certainly a strong contender for my coveted #2 slot (though competition from The Curse of Marie Antoinette is still both ferocious and unresolved)."
- Jon Whitney @ Brainwashed
Kindly rec'ed by Jazzmine on the other board: Jason Lescalleet - Archaic Architecture
- Archaic Architecture is the latest work from Jason Lescalleet, one of New Englands most talented and dedicated modern sound artists. Over the past couple of decades, Lescalleet has released highly-regarded and quality works on labels such as Kye, RRR, Erstwhile, Chondritic Sound, and most recently on his own Glistening Examples imprint, as well as collaborating with like-minded explorers of sound such as Aaron Dilloway, Graham Lambkin, and Joe Colley. On this new full-length cassette, Lescalleet turns his ear toward extended, hypnotic melody, combining it with his own personal variety of tape-damaged concréte noise. On An Archaic Code, overlapping sheets of lush choral organ and synthesizer meld into each other, rising and falling in consequence, sweeping and pulsing through all fields of frequency. Blanketed underneath is a subdued, purring storm of crumpled tape collage, where found sounds, microscopic textures, and incidental debris delicately scratch at the melody above with coarse piano shards. With his primitive electronics and careful pacing, Lescalleet is able to inject an incredible amount of active detail and depth into a seemingly minimal body. Organ Music #3 is a hand-played piece of deep and lush organ chords, gothic and powerful in their magnitude. Shifting back and forth between light and dark, the melodies fall into an emotive purgatory, with a consequential production of unusual overtones can feel both strangely disorienting and holy at the same time. The sound has a bold and tangible warmth via tape saturation, built with what seems like the amplified air of a cathedral-like space, making for a raw and enveloping listening experience." NNA Tapes
Gabriel Saloman - Soldier's Requiem - "Delivers four pieces of intense yet restrained requiems set to Piano, Guitar & Drums with Soldier's Requiem, his follow up to last year's highly emotive record Adhere. Although touching on his past in Yellow Swans (w/Pete Swanson), Saloman continues to explore the noises within rather than the purely physical component of his former collaborator. That's not saying this is lighthearted material. Quite the contrary - this is an album that needs to be experienced on proper volume for potential heart stopping effect.
Sounding as if you may be the last person left on earth, Soldier's Requiem guides you through rain filled open spaces, epic showdowns & abandoned cities. The debris is floating and in the shadow lurks a guitar picking Vincent Gallo. Meanwhile there seems to be marching bands closing by on all fronts while a punk band playing Tim Hecker tracks is to be heard from the horizon. Soldier's Requiem confirms Saloman as a man able to further his own musicality while regaining the key elements to his recipe. This is music for modern decay and melancholy." Miasmah Recordings - Bandcamp
] - "Gabriel Saloman (GMS, Sade Sade) composes music for live performance and recordings for dance, video, film, and sound installation. His music investigates temporal abstractions, conceptual sound and gestural noise. There is a parallel concern with sound art as both liberating practice and praxis.
In recent performances and recordings Saloman’s music has been composed of percussion, tapes, mixer-feedback, guitar, keyboards, piano and voice. In particular Saloman has explored the use of found sound, field recordings, percussion and processed blank cassettes.
His sound work furthers investigations into Saloman’s concepts of art, sound and the politics of the social by focusing specifically on its function of both collective and autonomous resistance and emancipation while simultaneously contextualizing his practice in the contemporary radical milieu.
Saloman was a member of Yellow Swans and currently creates music in Diadem with Aja Rose; Chambers with MRed; and The Volunteer Ecstatic Orchestra with a number Vancouver based experimental musicians. He has previously collaborated with groups such as Bleeder; Boxleitner; Cexfucx; Yesod with Aja Rose Bond and Tusk." http://diademdiscos.com/gms/music/sadesade/
Comments
Adam Cuthbért - Dream World EP
- "Adam Cuthbért is a composer/performer and Michigan native who cross-breeds acoustic instruments with digital environments. Highly interested in the evocative qualities of sounds in nature, Cuthbért is experimenting with ways to use composed music to both synthesize and supplement the aesthetics of a natural environment.
As an Ableton Live practitioner and trumpeter, he has performed new works around the United States and Japan, at (le) poisson rouge, La MaMa ETC, Chashama, and the Incubator, and alongside performers such as eighth blackbird, S? Percussion, Dennis DeSantis, and Maura Donohue. His co-commission with Daniel Rhode, several rooms away from their source, premiered simultaneously in the UK, Netherlands, and US in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad.
Some recent and ongoing projects include scores for experimental opera-theatre (Pioneers Go East Collective), a trumpet/electronica solo project (KuuMA), and the Sight/Sound project, an audio-visual collective based on collaborative composing over the internet and through the lens of technology.
Outside of the NYC art world, he may also be found buried in Japanese linguistics textbooks and manga, circling Central Park’s running trails, and preparing in body and mind for the Singularity."
http://adamcuthbert.com/ - Soundcloud - €music
Isnaj Dui, Offthesky & Orla Wren - 85%
- "85% is a collaboration between Isnaj Dui, Offthesky and Orla Wren. All three artists appeared at the Homenormalism show in London at the beginning of August 2013 where it was discovered that they shared a love for 85% dark chocolate. We hinted that an ep should be recorded on that basis and next thing Orla Wren pulls out his iPad and starts recording Isnaj Dui's flute, Offthesky's guitar and a load of other random instruments. A little while later the ep was finished..."
Kaboom Karavan - Short Walk With Olaf
- "Short walk with Olaf is Kaboom Karavan ´s debut album from 2007 that appeared as a freely downloadable album on the Mexican based imprint Umor Rex, creating a cult following in the MP3 label scene at the time. Finally now properly mastered and given a well deserved vinyl release.
Mixing influences from the Electronica and Ambient scene with Americana, Free Folk and Avant-Garde Jazz to name but a few, Short walk with Olaf is first of all an incredibly beautiful and mystical piece of work that should fall in taste with everyone interested in film music, travels, small villages & deserted places. Olaf finds his place somewhere between the atmosphere of Jim Jarmousch films, Lounge Lizards and Volcano the Bear and is a great starting point for getting into the strange sound world of Kaboom Karavan."
Soundcloud
Kaboom Karavan - Hokus Fokus
- "Bram Bosteels ´s Kaboom Karavan project re- appears out of the thick Belgian jungle to deliver what must be one of the strangest and most exotic records since Gultskra Artikler ´s uncatagorizable Kasha iz Topora. After the already quite surreal "Barra Barra" album on Miasmah from 2011, Bram takes his sound further into unknown yet still strangely familiar territories. Listening to Hokus Fokus feels like staring frozenly into a postcard sent from your long-lost uncle that went missing in the Amazon after an expedition gone-wrong (circa year 1935). Merge this image with the decaying sounds of an old Tom Waitz record slowly tuning out in the background and your getting close. This is not instantly gratifiable music, but rather a thick fog of details, sounds and atmospheres blended together with utmost precision and skill to create something quite unique that really shines with repeated listening and full immersion.
Coming from a background as a notorious piano- husk-experimenter, film, theatre and dance composer & regular Kreng collaborator Bram has set off to confuse and wonder us with this selection of highly amazing Kaboom Karavan alternate-universe pieces fittingly entitled Hokus Fokus. For fans of 50 ´s exotica records, Jeff Beal ´s score for Carnivale´ (the tv-show) and Andy Votel/Demdike Stare curated Pre-Cert entertainment (w/artists such as Anworth Kirk and Slant Azymuth)."
Soundcloud - http://www.miasmah.com
- "With Kaboom Karavan it's hard to know quite where to start the Belgian collective led by Bram Bosteels have a history in theatre, film and contemporary dance, but that doesn't really help shine a light on their music. They have collaborated with musicians all over the world including Miasmah's very own Kreng, and released a debut album on Mexico's Umor imprint, but again this probably only gives a small indicator of what the collective actually sound like. There is something effortlessly surreal about the band, and surrealism is an aspect of art often attempted and very rarely perfected. Bosteels abuses his choice of instruments (and players) to the point where the listener would barely be able to place which instruments were being used at all, in fact at times you'd be hard pressed even to place what sort of music it was.
Members : Bram Bosteels & Stijn Dickel (and the sometimes many others : Köhn, Fred Van de Moortel, Gerrit Valckenaers, Thomas Olbrechts, Joachim Devillé, Christophe Van Belle, Robrecht Kessels,...)"
New Nakamura release from the Japan Electronic Onkyo Music movement
kinda interesting and funner set than most...the 30 sec samples are fairly indicitive of the whole..
1 1/2 min sample
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO + TAYLOR DEUPREE - DISAPPEARANCE
MOSKITOO - MITOSIS
offthesky - exit to anywhere
Composers: Michael Murphey, Black Sabbath, Chicago, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Stevie Wonder, Gary Burton, David Byrne, Talking Heads, Dawn, Todd Rundgren, Randy Newman, Styx, Sugar Loaf, Carpenters.
Performers: Misfit Toys, Dan Moore, Matt Wilson, Paul Elwood,Robert Paredes.
- "The term Misfit Toys has become shorthand for any group of ill-fitting or otherwise wrongheaded castoffs from the straight-ahead world. It can be shorthand for oddball collections of ideas and plans that have no hope of succeeding, no chance of surviving on their own. But its also a badge of honor. And it just might be the perfect name for percussionist Dan Moores latest project.
Moores last album for innova was Cabinet of Curiosities: The Graphic Scores of Robert Moran (innova 792)an in-depth exploration of percussive improvisations drawn from Morans Fluxus-laden ruminations. So how to follow up what Arcane Candy called an exercise in gorgeous understatement? Why not a collection of 1970s pop classics and one-hit wonders re-imagined for vibes, oboe, banjo, clarinet and more? Now that the smoke has cleared and mid-life crises thoroughly enjoyed, its high time to revisit those adolescent years spent by the transistor radio, and give the dear musical icons a much-needed poke in the ribs.
Far from a lark, Moores Misfit Toys has been in the works for the last decade. Its really a labor of love, born of a desire to revisit the halcyon days of Moores youth with the help of his two friends and musical partners-in-crime, composer and banjo player Paul Elwood and drummer Matt Wilson. The key to completing Moores offbeat vision for the album was experimental composer and post-klezmerical clarinettist Robert Paredes, who joined on in 2005 to add his wry musical touch.
Mining 70s AM radio for hits and B-sides from artists as diverse as Talking Heads, Stevie Wonder, Chicago, Todd Rundgren, Gilbert OSullivan, and others, Misfit Toys spins daringly deconstructed arrangements that perform a tightrope walk back and forth from virtuosic to campy. The result is a gleefully demented love letter to lost days, made all the more poignant by the passing of Robert Paredes shortly after his work on the project was completed.
With tongue and groove firmly in cheek, enjoy your visit to this particular island of Misfit Toys. No Charlie-in-the-Box or King Moonracer here: just leisure suits, smiley faces, and a pet rock or two. Be sure to bring your mood ring."
Innova Recordings
Soundcloud
Mika Vainio - Electric Guitar, Processing, Metallic Percussion.
Joachim Nordwall - Electronics, Electric Bass Guitar, Metal Objects, Hammond Organ, Vibraphone.
- "Mika Vainio was a member of the legendary minimal electronic duo Pan Sonic. Emerging from the Finnish industrial and rave music scene in the early 90's, they became one of the most important electronic music acts. Vainio's solo works goes from abstract drone to minimal and experimental techno, under his own name or as Ø for labels like Touch, Raster Noton, Sähkö and Editions Mego. He has worked with Alan Vega, Keiji Haino and many others. His music is always extremely physical and present. Mika Vainio lives and works in Berlin.
Joachim Nordwall runs the iDEAL Recordings label since 1998, releasing intense electronic music of various kinds and organizing club nights and festivals around the globe. He started making electronic music as a teenager in the late 80's in the psychedelic drone duo Alvars Orkester (Ash International), drifted off to sweaty avant garde punk rock with Kid Commando in the late 90s and formed the ritual rock and electronic drone group The Skull Defekts in 2005. He is also recording solo works under his own name and works with Mats Gustafsson, The Gagmen (with Aaron Dilloway and Nate Young), Mark Wastell and The Sons of God. Nordwall is based in Stockholm.
"Monstrance" is their first album together and is released June 2013 and consist of drone works and pulsating electronic minimalism but also guitar, acoustic elements, organs and metal percussion. It was recorded in Einstürzende Neubauten's Berlin studio during an intense session in early summer of 2010. "Monstrance" is a place where Vainio's and Nordwall's backgrounds as musicians and composers meet, and something new and extremely powerful is born. Something deep, raw and direct..."
Touch - Soundcloud
Ambient compilation of new tracks recorded for this collection, curated by loscil and Rafael Anton Irisarri, all-star cast of artists, 2 disks/22 tracks, currently $5.99 at Amazon US.
CD 1 : Loscil Selection
01 Brian McBride At a Loss
02 Marcus Fischer A Fifth Season
03 loscil Else
04 Chris Herbert Naimina
05 Pan American Tx
06 Strategy Frog City
07 Solo Andata Before Sunsets
08 P Jørgensen 401
09 Rob Bridgett Field 3
10 Mitchell Akiyama Dirge for the Canon
CD 2 : Rafael Anton Irisarri Selection
01 Marcus Fjellström The Eroding
02 Sawako Hovering
03 Simon Scott Modena
04 Library Tapes Och natten andades redan under träden
05 Lissom Hollow of Winter
06 Mokira I love you pipecock
07 Benoît Pioulard If I could possibly tell the difference, I wouldnt care anyway
08 Eluvium Sleeper
09 Kyle Bobby Dunn La Passerelle de ses yeux
10 Rafael Anton Irisarri Black days follow me around
11 Lawrence English Cooperative Drift
12 bvdub Surrender To Your Cold Embrace (feat. Wang Lijing & Lu Yan)
Yves De Mey - Metrics
Other Music Review:
- "With two previous releases for Sandwell District and Line, Belgian producer Yves De Mey arrives at Opal Tapes with his most concise recording statement thus far. To call the range of Metrics cinematic is perhaps a tiresome cliché, but in the case of De Mey it might actually be the most precise way to describe his particular brand of electronic music. One of Belgium's most in-demand sound designers for films and commercials, De Mey's clinical process and technical expertise allows a captivating dramatic sound world to come to the fore, somewhere in between ambient, experimental, and IDM. De Mey is at his best when he turns the mechanics of techno upside down, as in the murky drones of opening track "Box Caisson" or the meticulously constructed tensions of "Metrics." The B-side offers a more abstract and narrative approach, with two tracks that combine noisy tape hiss with fragile beauty and eerie effects, "Eye Splice" enhancing this process by a meandering dub exposé. Although Metrics might be a bit too controlled and calculated to make this reviewer go wild, Yves De Mey nevertheless impresses deeply with his efficient hi-res sound designs, which explore rich textures and an excellent use of space."
- "Antwerp-based producer Yves De Mey has his roots in sound design and scoring for performing arts, film and installations. He released on Line, Sandwell District, Opal Tapes and Modal Analysis. De Mey is also one half of Sendai, his long-running project with Peter Van Hoesen. His main tools are an ever-growing modular analog rig and some vintage synths, combined with an avid interest in audio manipulation."
http://www.knobsounds.com
€music - Soundcloud - Soundcloud 2 - More Yves De Mey @ Emusers
- "Eight years have passed since Jackson Fourgeaud first assembled his Computerband and released his debut album, Smash, which fizzed away in the dead space between Daft Punk's world domination and Ed Banger's Parisian dance revival. Since then, electronic music has become a global phenomenon. But time has given the French IDM producer the luxury of disappearing into his own psychedelic universe. His followup, Glow, isn't troubled by trends: it's an eccentric, all-consuming blizzard. GI Jane is Jackson's take on pro-pop, Vista on west coast disco and Memory on classic 60s songwriting, all bathed in a wash of glitch. Where there isn't cinematic, pop-mangling loveliness, there are the superbly menacing chainsaw-electro juggernauts Arp £1 and Pump, and his thrillingly brutal ode to gabba,"
The Guardian
- "Parisian producer Jackson Fourgeaud is best known for two things: '80s pop singer mother Paula Moore and his glitchy 2005 LP 'Smash' as Jackson and his Computerband. 'Glow' sees him return with an equally vigorous new outing. It's an album full of melodies deployed with hard edges and a maverick spirit - a chorus that reaches for the sky and gets you in the gut on 'G. I. Jane (Fill Me Up)', whirling College-like synths on 'Vista' and eerie, otherworldly dark slabs on 'Dead Living Things'. Inventive, fun and colourful - everything pop music should be, basically. "
Bleep
Soundcloud
Marina Rosenfeld - P.A. - Hard Love
- "On P.A. / HARD LOVE, New York based composer and conceptualist Marina Rosenfeld generates a universe of radical sonic collision.
Between 2009 and 2011, in a series of monumentally scaled sites including New Yorks vast Park Avenue Armory and Liverpools Renshaw Hall car park, Rosenfeld developed an idiosyncratic sound-system, a quasi-sculptural assemblage of customized horns and subs, which she called simply P.A. She used the system to reposition resident noise from the sites alongside traces of her own voice, and a heterogeneous palette of other electro-acoustic elements. Equal parts tuned atmosphere and active performance, the series of works was notable for its subtle yet potent exploration of voice and amplification in space; its highly iterated play of reflection and distortion; and its challenge to conventional phantasies of intelligibility and publicness in amplified sound.
In 2012, Rosenfeld invited vocalist Annette Henry, a.k.a. Warrior Queen, to contribute original vocals for an album version of the project. Recorded in Kingston, Jamaica, Henry's pointed responses to Rosenfelds compositions acted as catalysts for transformation, propelling the original compositions in new and unexpected directions. Okkyung Lees virtuosic cello, which often traces over earlier recorded iterations of itself, further elaborated the complex and contingent nature of the collaboration.
The resulting music is explicit and ambiguous, anthemic and elusive. Its spikes of uneasy beauty ask urgent questions of the listener of language and form, of intimacy and ultimately of the complexity of address, both private and public."
Room40 - Soundcloud
Zwerm: Johannes Westendorp, Bruno Nelissen, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Toon Callier, guitars; w/ Eric Thielemans, drums, percussion; Bertel Schollaert, saxophone; Matthias Koole, guitar; Thomas Moore, voice-over.
- "The "one-page piece" - a written-down musical composition that fits on a single piece of paper - is appealing to a group like the Belgian/Dutch electric guitar quartet Zwerm. Zwerm and their collaborators took full advantage of the opportunity to create their own scores out of the one-page pieces, to allow their own creativity and compositional ideas to run free, to explore interesting sound worlds, and to seek out possible links between the pieces. These positive experiences are inherent to the format of the one-page piece: a composer provides a musical idea, in traditional notation, prose, graphics, or some combination of all three; sometimes this idea is rough or conceptual, sometimes more clear in its musical content and process. The rest is up to the musicians. Collaborative brainstorming is necessary, and many ideas might be tried out before settling on a particular way of realizing the piece; often, the possibilities seem endless, limited only by one's conventional training, adherence to idiomatic instrumental techniques, and musical sensibilities. This collaborative brainstorming works best when the ensemble is made up of adventurous musicians who trust each other.
One-page pieces fall into the category of process pieces. With roots in the history of American experimental music, both process pieces and one-page pieces are sometimes traced back to Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece In C of 1964. The recordings on this CD represent a crossover project in which Zwerm looks for connections between the sound worlds of blues, free improvisation, experimental rock, noise, minimalism, and many other contemporary musical ideas."
New World Records - Soundcloud
- "Zwerm is a Belgian-Dutch electric guitarquartet founded in 2007.
Their first cd called The Worlds Longest Melody was mentioned by The Wire Magazine as an obvious contender for album of the year 2010. They gave concerts in the UK, Europe and the United States. Zwerm is described in the press as:
An exciting, sometimes alienating and always quirky musical discovery as you rarely get to hear (Goddeau march 2011).
A gorgeous feedback texture heavenly braided by the four guitars of Zwerm (...) If Zwerm would be listed in rocktradition, the quartet seems well in place in the vicinity of Sonic Youth and associates (Kwadratuur dec. 2010).
Ein imposantes Surround-Hörerlebnis (Kronenzeitung jan. 2010).
The boldness and the imagination of the music speaks out of their performances (De Standaard oct. 2010)."
- Sarah Neufeld.
- " Sarah Neufeld is a violinist and composer based in Montréal, Canada. Best known as a member of Arcade Fire, she is also a founding member of the acclaimed contemporary instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre and has performed and recorded with many other groups, including The Luyas, Esmerine and Little Scream.
Neufeld began developing pieces for solo violin in a more formal and focused sense in 2011, though she has made improvisation and solo composition part of her process and practice since first picking up the instrument at a young age. Neufeld counts Bela Bartok, Steve Reich, Iva Bittova and Arthur Russell among the formative influences for her solo work, in tandem with an ear for the textures and sensibilities of contemporary electro-acoustic, avant-folk and indie rock music.
Neufeld's debut solo album Hero Brother indeed channels all of the above, flowing through shifting atmospheres and oscillating between restrained, stately ambience, emotive études, and raw kinetic energy. Small touches of wordless vocalisation, harmonium and piano supplant the violin in a few places. The album was recorded in Berlin by pianist and producer Nils Frahm, with Neufeld's performances captured in a number of locations with site-specific acoustics, including an abandoned geodesic dome, an underground parking garage, and the legendary Studio P4 orchestral recording hall at the broadcast complex of the former GDR. . . ."
Constellation Records - Soundcloud.
Portico Quartet - Live / Remix
- "Portico Quartet bring their powerful live performance to record. Drawing on the inspiration of electronica, ambient, classical and dance music, they take their strange, beautiful, cinematic, future music to exciting new vistas. Live/Remix is a double album offering a unique insight into two distinct parts of the band's personality. . . ."
Real World Records
The samples sound like this might be more funky Bretschneider than abstract Bretschneider, like on Rhythm. Sounds like it may be pretty good.
or this, which somehow passed me by:
Erik Friedlander - Claws and Wings
"What do you do when someone special in your life dies? The shock can be numbing and disorienting. Within days of the death of his wife in November of 2011, cellist and composer Erik Friedlander fell off his bicycle on a wet morning in New York City, tearing completely the UCL (ulnar collateral ligament) of his thumb, and effectively putting himself out of commission for 3 months. With concerts canceled and no practicing to be done Friedlander had a lot of time to think about difficult months he and his daughter had just gone through. Lynn, Eriks wife of 22 years, an award-winning choreographer and writer, who collaborated frequently with her husband, had suffered from breast cancer and her slow descent had been tough on everyone.
After months of rehab and soul searching Friedlander began playing again. For me it was time to back into the flow of life. Grieving wasnt over -- it doesnt really work like that -- but life is a hard-ass, it doesnt stop, Friedlander says. It was like climbing onto to a moving freight train and I was out of practice. The thing is, music had been there for me through a lot of tough times, and it was still there for me. I just needed give it some attention.
August, 2012 and Friedlander began composing again. He called to long-time collaborators Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori as well as producer/engineer Scott Solter and convened a 2-day session on the Lower East Side to record the new project. The music strongly resonates with Eriks mind-set at the time: meditating on a life lost, regaining his balance, and then moving forward with optimism."
Skipstone Records - Bandcamp
http://erik-friedlander.squarespace.com/
Richard Chartier - Interior Field
- "Interior Field is a new stereo variation of a multi-channel sound work created from field recordings of a variety of small and large spaces from around the world. This work was originally presented at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC in 2012.
Through his compositional practice, Chartier utilizes the unique physicality of these environments to create a newly defined acoustic space. Interior Field is a transposition of location, focus, and experience itself.
A significant element of Interior Field (Part 2) comes from binaural recordings at the McMillan Sand Filtration Site in Washington, DC. This unique historical site, built in 1905, is currently slated for almost complete demolition and redevelopment. Chartier was given special access to record at this site during a major rainstorm. Vast vaulted catacomb chambers with floor surfaces covered in four feet of sand create an unexpectedly deep acoustic field.
Interior Field is the follow up to Chartiers critically acclaimed field recording work Fields for Mixing, released in 2010 on Room40 (Australia)."
- "Richard Chartier (b.1971), sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound which has been termed both microsound and Neo-Modernist. Chartiers minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Chartiers sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally including the 2002?s Whitney Biennial and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American Historys collection of 19th-Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration."
Line Imprint - Soundcloud
On music and Bandcamp:
Colorlist - Sky Song
released 02 October 2013
Charles Gorczynski / Woodwinds, Synths
Charles Rumback / Drums, Bells
- "Two years ago, Colorlist released 'The Fastest Way To Become The Ocean' on Serein; a four-track EP released on 10" vinyl as part of the Seasons series. The band's core members (Charles Gorczynski and Charles Rumback) were both living in Chicago at that time. Shortly after the release of the EP, Gorczynski moved west to Oakland, California, leaving the pair on opposite sides of the United States. The two have somehow managed to keep working together despite the huge distance between them, so we'll forgive the couple of years it took for 'Sky Song', the album I present to you now, to come to fruition.
Sky Song is Colorlist's third album proper and their first full length release since 2010. The music is deep, organic and involving - it feels like a spiritual successor to their 2008 album, Lists, which had a similarly robust and weighty sound. This may be thanks in part to the complement of modular synths which are present again on Sky Song. The deep, harmonic quality of analogue synthesizers seems a perfect companion to the pair's usual instruments, occupying the mid-range of frequencies between Rumback's kicks and toms, and Gorczynski's woodwinds.
As with their previous work, Sky Song traverses a rich and wide sonic terrain. It's not music that's easy to classify because of the array of influences which mould the sound and indeed the improvised nature of many of the pieces. Importantly, though, Sky Song feels focused and coherent as a whole. The album has everything; peaceful and serene passages of music that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, deep, driving rhythms that make your feet twitch and occassionally, music that erupts like a firework exploding in the sky.
Colorlist don't have to stick to one style to establish a cohesive 'whole'; there is something deeper common to these tracks that ties them all together. There is a quality to the pieces, a kind of airy, openness that I associate with being outdoors. It's a distillation of a certain feeling, walking in the woods perhaps, the sun dappling the earth below your feet, a warm breeze on the back of your neck; magical music.
Sky Song was recorded by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv and Nine Inch Nails) and John Hughes (founder of Hefty Records) at HFT Studios, Chicago. Both play important roles in capturing Colorlists music which cannot be underplayed, on this occasion they are also both credited with playing modular synths on the track, Currents.
http://colorlist.net/ - https://twitter.com/colorlists
Avec : Rainier Lericolais, Franck Marguin, Geoffroy Montel, Etienne Bonhomme, Olivier Cavaillé, Nicolas Jorio, David Sanson, Pierre-Yves Macé et Daniel Palomo-Vinuesa.
- "Adapting a novel to produce a concept album has been a dream of Minizza's ever since their formation in 2000.
So when French national radio station France Culture asked the band to produce a radio drama for the legendary Atelier de Création Radiophonique, they took the opportunity to adapt Joris-Karl Huysmans’s masterpiece À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), the ultimate example of "decadent" literature they’ve been worshiping since their teenage years.
This work led to the third album of the band which combines elements of « Hörspiele », real songs, and experimental music.
Huysmans's words are never referenced directly yet they form the basis for the transformation into their lyrical interpretation. The goal was to recreate the atmosphere of the novel.
À Rebours is without a doubt the most ambitious and successfully completed album of the band."
http://brocoli.org/release/minizza-a-rebours - Soundcloud
- "Franck Marguin and Geoffroy Montel formed Minizza in 2000. They worked several times with Erlend Øye from The Kings Of Convenience, and their first album, Music for girls, features Edward Ka-Spel from The Legendary Pink Dots.
At the end of the 2000s Minizza became a trio when joined by contemporary artist Rainier Lericolais. Their second album, Hotel Monterey (with David Sanson from That Summer) is an imaginary soundtrack from Chantal Akerman’s movie of the same name. For their third, À Rebours, they also collaborated with the four members of That Summer (Etienne Bonhomme, Olivier Cavaillé, Nicolas Jorio and David Sanson), Pierre-Yves Macé and Daniel Palomo-Vinuesa.
Together, they write music that combines elements of pop, electronic and experimental music."
Three Lobed Recordings - music - http://www.woodenwand.org/
New album just out from Oval. This one has songs. Like, with vocals. Weird.
Most marvelous, or over the top depending on how you look at it, is the packaging and extras. From the original PR:
Comes out next month, only costs $400 or so....
"Faitiche presents Jan Jelinek's Temple. This mini-LP is the final installment in a series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of Jelinek's music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. As was the case with two tracks that appeared on the 2012 mini-LP Music for Fragments, Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain
The Legendary Pink Dots - Code Noir
Beta-Lactam Ring Records
- "While I have admittedly become a fairly serious Legendary Pink Dots fan again over the last few years, I am still far from obsessive and their voluminous 2013 output was just way too much for me to keep up with. Consequently, I thought it was probably safe to let this limited, tour-only "sister album" to The Gethsemane Option slip by me. I was wrong, of course (and I should know better by now). While Code Noir is not nearly as ambitious or epic as Gethsemane, it happily avoids almost all of the indulgences and excesses that plagued its sister and is much better (and more listenable) for it.
Code Noir opens strongly with one of its best songs, "Six Easy Pieces," which takes a pleasantly rippling loop through a series of dynamically satisfying and seamless transformations. Everything that is great about the Dots is present, as Edward Ka-Spel's prominent vocals maintain a restrained intensity and cryptic narrative while all variety of low-level surreality unspools around the edges. More important than the content, however, is the feel of the piecethe band sound atypically comfortable, focused, and relaxed. I never get the sense that Ka-Spel and company are trying too hard, passing off a meandering jam as a new song, or piling on layers and layers of weirdness for a forced psychedelic experience. Instead, "Six Easy Pieces" is just a well-constructed, hooky song that patiently unfolds for exactly the right amount of time and never ruins the spell with any wrong moves.
The Dots repeat that delightful feat again with "Life is Hard and Then...," though Ka-Spel's vocals have a bit more edge and urgency to them this time around. That can often be a deal-breaker for me, as the line separating "intense" and "shrill" can be a very thin one with LPD, yet Edward's passion feels well-earned in this particular song. Also, it certainly helps that the brooding underlying music is quite good as well, making excellent use of alternately lush and twinkling synthesizers, ominous throbs, and ghostly swells.
The rest of the album is something of a mixed bag, but it is generally an enjoyable one. "Cloud 6," for example, is a gently dreamlike piano ballad that I like much, much more than I expected to. "Spare Change" and "Testing 1-2-3," on the other hand, are very much in the '90s industrial-influenced vein of Gethsemane, though they take very different directions from one another ("Spare Change" is kind of simmering and menacing, while "Testing" has a bit of an ambient techno bent.). All three are quite likable, as is the brief closing soundscape "Two Steps Beyond," which sounds like a melancholy music box melody slowly fading away. Unfortunately, that still leaves one remaining song ("Ascension 3") to mar an otherwise wonderful album.
I am sure that there is probably someone somewhere who will think "Ascension 3" is awesome, but it represents the convergence of almost all of LPD's worst tendencies for me. In essence, it is basically a somewhat cheery Krautrock-influenced synth jam, but it is augmented with some backwards, quasi-ritualistic falsetto vocals; some clean guitar noodling; andmost egregiouslya chugging metal riff. What that ultimately amounts to is a frequently toothless and meandering instrumental jam that sounds like it is probably going to erupt into an "Enter Sandman" cover at any moment.
That said, an LPD album that only contains one song that I actively dislike is a rare treat, especially considering that this is such a seemingly minor release in a year that saw the band release 8 "new" albums (not including their various solo projects). Also, half the fun of being an LPD fan is the scavenger hunt aspect of sifting through all the dross to find the diamonds, which can appear literally anywhere. Code Noir features at least two such gems, which is great, but it is even more significant for being so uniformly solid and absorbing: with "Ascension 3" removed, i could easily loop this album for hours without ever getting bored or annoyed. I still insist that The Silverman's Finisterre is the best LPD-related release of the year, but this modest surprise is certainly a strong contender for my coveted #2 slot (though competition from The Curse of Marie Antoinette is still both ferocious and unresolved)."
- Jon Whitney @ Brainwashed
kind of clanky. Been a fan since the release entitled chambre quand je n'y suis pas.
Jason Lescalleet - Archaic Architecture
- Archaic Architecture is the latest work from Jason Lescalleet, one of New Englands most talented and dedicated modern sound artists. Over the past couple of decades, Lescalleet has released highly-regarded and quality works on labels such as Kye, RRR, Erstwhile, Chondritic Sound, and most recently on his own Glistening Examples imprint, as well as collaborating with like-minded explorers of sound such as Aaron Dilloway, Graham Lambkin, and Joe Colley. On this new full-length cassette, Lescalleet turns his ear toward extended, hypnotic melody, combining it with his own personal variety of tape-damaged concréte noise. On An Archaic Code, overlapping sheets of lush choral organ and synthesizer meld into each other, rising and falling in consequence, sweeping and pulsing through all fields of frequency. Blanketed underneath is a subdued, purring storm of crumpled tape collage, where found sounds, microscopic textures, and incidental debris delicately scratch at the melody above with coarse piano shards. With his primitive electronics and careful pacing, Lescalleet is able to inject an incredible amount of active detail and depth into a seemingly minimal body. Organ Music #3 is a hand-played piece of deep and lush organ chords, gothic and powerful in their magnitude. Shifting back and forth between light and dark, the melodies fall into an emotive purgatory, with a consequential production of unusual overtones can feel both strangely disorienting and holy at the same time. The sound has a bold and tangible warmth via tape saturation, built with what seems like the amplified air of a cathedral-like space, making for a raw and enveloping listening experience."
NNA Tapes
Gabriel Saloman - Soldier's Requiem
- "Delivers four pieces of intense yet restrained requiems set to Piano, Guitar & Drums with Soldier's Requiem, his follow up to last year's highly emotive record Adhere. Although touching on his past in Yellow Swans (w/Pete Swanson), Saloman continues to explore the noises within rather than the purely physical component of his former collaborator. That's not saying this is lighthearted material. Quite the contrary - this is an album that needs to be experienced on proper volume for potential heart stopping effect.
Sounding as if you may be the last person left on earth, Soldier's Requiem guides you through rain filled open spaces, epic showdowns & abandoned cities. The debris is floating and in the shadow lurks a guitar picking Vincent Gallo. Meanwhile there seems to be marching bands closing by on all fronts while a punk band playing Tim Hecker tracks is to be heard from the horizon. Soldier's Requiem confirms Saloman as a man able to further his own musicality while regaining the key elements to his recipe. This is music for modern decay and melancholy."
Miasmah Recordings - Bandcamp
- "Gabriel Saloman (GMS, Sade Sade) composes music for live performance and recordings for dance, video, film, and sound installation. His music investigates temporal abstractions, conceptual sound and gestural noise. There is a parallel concern with sound art as both liberating practice and praxis.
In recent performances and recordings Saloman’s music has been composed of percussion, tapes, mixer-feedback, guitar, keyboards, piano and voice. In particular Saloman has explored the use of found sound, field recordings, percussion and processed blank cassettes.
His sound work furthers investigations into Saloman’s concepts of art, sound and the politics of the social by focusing specifically on its function of both collective and autonomous resistance and emancipation while simultaneously contextualizing his practice in the contemporary radical milieu.
Saloman was a member of Yellow Swans and currently creates music in Diadem with Aja Rose; Chambers with MRed; and The Volunteer Ecstatic Orchestra with a number Vancouver based experimental musicians. He has previously collaborated with groups such as Bleeder; Boxleitner; Cexfucx; Yesod with Aja Rose Bond and Tusk."
http://diademdiscos.com/gms/music/sadesade/