|
|
| Eccentric
|  |
Angeli, Paolo & Takumi Fukushima: Itsunomanika
Code:7792
Price:
$16.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| This is Paulo Angeli's fifth release, this time with ex-After Dinner, ex Volupuk violinist and singer Takumi Fukushima. A high quality, hi-fidelity concert performance in which Paulo and Takumi deliver an impressively well integrated, complex - and largely composed - program of sharply focused pieces, making the most of their not inconsiderable talents and, somehow, managing to sound like a much larger ensemble. In part, this is sheer virtuosity and, in part, it's the exoticism of the instrumentation - in particular, the sonorities of Paulo's extended, customized, prepared Giant Sardinian guitar, which does extraordinary, chameleonic work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola, cello, and sometimes percussion. There are some palpable After Dinner atmospheres here, but mostly the music occupies its own ambiguous, highly convincing, cultural space.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Angeli, Paolo: Tibi (Hybrid Disc - CD + Video)
Code:7779
Price:
$20.25
Quantity in Basket: none
| This disc will play in stereo on a CD player and with film and 5.1 surround sound (or stereo) on a DVD player or computer. The music, as always, is prodigious, sounding like a small band, but played by one person in real time (as the film attests). In this format, you can also see the instrument close-to - a highly rebuilt and extended giant Sardinian guitar - with many sympathetic and extra strings, motor driven hurdy gurdy wheels, whirling strings, springs and other appendages, played, like a cello, vertically, with bow, fingers, plectra and machines. However Heath Robinson it may appear, however, it is clearly, under Paulo's hands, a highly serious and extraordinarily flexible beast - that requires and has given rise to new playing techniques. The programme of compositions here navigates through highly organized additive rhythms, freer Frith-like pointillism and some seemingly impossible mini-orchestrations. The film, professionally made, follows the performance, occasionally interpolating abstract passages and processed images. A remarkable player with a unique instrument, playing a music entirely his own.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
BAKU: Symphony of Sirens
Code:7681
Price:
$47.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| These two CDs and 72 page clothbound book offer the most comprehensive presentation of the experiments and innovations in the exploration of sound by the historical Russian Avantgardes ever attempted. This publication is based around the sounds themselves. Though much was not documented at the time, and some has been lost, what remains is collected on the second CD, which centres around Dziga Vertov's prescient environmental sound composition for the 1930 film Enthusiasm..The Dombass Symphony - and also collects together for the first time 22 original recordings of Mayakovsky, Mossolov, Jakobson, Khlebnikov, Lenin, Lunacharsky, Kollontay, Trotsky, Pasternak, Meytuss, Akhmatova, Mandelstahm, Naum Gabo, Shostakovich, and others.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Berliner Ring: Orbital
Code:7680
Price:
$15.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| What the London orbital is to the English capital, the Berliner ring is to Berlin: a circular highway that surrounds the city.
The first contemporary release from Art Yard amalgamates disparate elements: electro mechanical devices, invented instruments, modified keyboards, delays, customised rhythm and string machines: a half man, half machine driven trip into the Electro-Mechanical sub-underground, built around a combination of moods and themes drawn from the Berlin landscape.
Berliner Ring work toward a brew of forms and techniques, creating geographical references and representations, 'tonal landscapes', an unfolding of ambient instrumental stereologues.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Bill Gilonis - Chantale Laplante: Zurich / Bamberg
Code:7631
Price:
$15.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| Bill Gilonis and Chantale Laplante worked on Zürich-Bamberg intermittently for three years. The CD comprises a series of pieces that fall loosely into a category that could be called "electro-acoustic Hörspiel." However, with Bill in Zurich and Chantale based firstly in Bamberg, Germany and later in Montreal, Canada, it was difficult to find a way of collaborating by conventional means. But, by ping-ponging audio file CDs between these cities they managed to develop a practical, and in some ways advantageous, composition and recording strategy. For this project conventional instrumentation has been virtually abandoned. What we hear on these recordings - collaged and sometimes manipulated via processing technology - is street noise, household clatter, fragments of radio, close-miked objects, etc. By and large the pieces are constructed from precisely the sounds that our ears are constantly and automatically filtering out; but by orchestrating these sounds into pieces to be listened to - as opposed to heard - listeners are introduced to a radically personal world.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Biota: Cape Flyaway
Code:7800
Price:
$16.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| After 5 years of extensive and careful work, the new and much anticipated CD by this extraordinary collective, who have no parallels, no rivals and no peers, is at last complete. It's a dense and indescribable orchestration of electric and acoustic guitars, clavioline, trumpet, Hammond organ, micromoog, biolmellodrone, electric and acoustic violins, bass, mandolin, accordion, piano, rubab, kit percussion and sometimes voice, layered and radically processed in the unique Biota manner. There is a leitmotif of folk elements in this piece that emerge from the roiling, swirling quicksand of sound we now expect from Biota, with texts by WB Yeats and snatches, arrangements and influences floating by way of Christy Moore, June Tabor, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, the Bothy Band and older traditional sources. Biota craft sonic worlds that relate to, but are not built like, the music with which we are familiar; for them time is a continuum rather than a sequence of events;
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Cusack, Peter: Sounds From Dangerous Places (2 CD's + 90 Page Hardback Book)
Code:7799
Price:
$37.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| Two remarkable and important CDs of very diverse site recordings, made in Chernobyl - (occupying the whole of CD1), the Caspian Oilfields around Baku (Azerbaijan), and in various UK sites, including Lakenheath, Dungeness, Sellafield, Snowdonia &c. (CD2). The CDs are accompanied by a beautifully made 90 page hardback book filled with a huge number of original colour photographs, background information, interviews and detailed documentation of the recordings, their collection, the history of the environments recorded and the curious and inadvertent inverse relation between human hazard and broader environmental recovery. This is an essential and unusual document.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Cutler, Chris: There And Back Again
Code:6909
Price:
$15.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| Like its companion 'Twice around the Earth (ReR CC2), 'There and Back Again' is derived from a selection of the 365 location recordings made for Cutler's daily Resonance FM radio programme 'Out of the Blue Radio' (2004-2005). It takes extracts from 44 of these environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. That's subtext. More important, it should make enjoyably complex listening: surprising, serendipitous, mundane but alien - the commonplace transfigured. There and Back Again offers an agglomeration of inadvertent sounds, made haphazardly by the world - and some of its inhabitants, that were never meant to survive, and were certainly not meant to be listened to repeatedly. And yet... Since about a quarter of the locations, though not the extracts are the same as those on 'Twice', reading across the two CDs adds another dimension of listening to the memory puzzle that these fleeting but permanent works explore.
Listen to a sample of this release
Listen to sample 2
Listen to sample 3
Listen to sample 4
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Drake, Bob: Bob's Drive-In
Code:7793
Price:
$16.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys... even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so - a high-information ride, but still engagingly listenable. Finished with his new CD, Bob sends the raw songs - just chords and melody - to Dave Kerman (ds), David Campbell (bs, vc) and Kavus Torabi (guit, vc) and, a few months later, they assemble at the Crumbling Tomes studio to work up the songs for a performance. Bob is in the band but the band is not being taught his interpretations and arrangements. It finds its own. After a week of rehearsals, there is a show for an invited audience, recorded live. So now we have a second great album - quite different from Bob's own. On the CD, both versions sit side-by-side, each very different, but still intimately linked to one another.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Frith, Fred: Impur
Code:6910
Price:
$15.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France involving as many of the students as possible, grouped according to their departments - early music, rock, African drumming, classical &c. Each group was set up in a different room in the school building and during the concert the public was encouraged to wander around creating their own mix, or to sit in the courtyard and listen to the sound drifting out through the open windows. For their part, each group of musicians had to play musical material Fred had prepared for them - occasionally they could improvise. In order to co-ordinate all the groups, who naturally couldn't hear each other, everyone followed a precise time-score prepared by Fred (55 minutes regulated by synchronized stopwatches). The entire event was recorded on 4 A-DAT machines, to be mixed down later, and this CD is the result: a lurching, complex and capricious beast with many heads: an orchestra tuning up; a salute to Sonny Blount; a roiling chaotic mass of sound splitting into layers, colliding back together, pullulating, ululating, roaring and sometimes mewing like a kitten.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Martusciello, Elio: To Extend the Visibility
Code:7679
Price:
$28.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| PAL ONLY (Will play in all computers) In a Limited Edition of 500 copies in North America, this DVD comes in a threefold art DVD case with a full colour 48 page book offereng substantial exegetical essays (in English and Italian) by Tim Hodgkinson and Sebastiano Giacobello) and additional artwork by Ale Sordi and Ester Curcio. It s is a fully integrated electronic composition/animation exploring and aestheticising the contemporary fact of the digital unification of visual and aural data.
This whole work is based on satellite images of our planet. We are overrun by this type of "gaze" which reaches the outer limits of the stratosphere and then turns to look back on ourselves and our 'geographies' (like looking down through the eyes of the Divine, God's)... and furthermore without recognising anything; the micro and macro having become the same. This technological extension is completely optimised to map out the globe (a form of outlining territories), to be able to 'find' each thing, each address, one's own home (as if we were 'losing' it). It doesn't take long to realise that once the curiosity has worn off (after inviting us to recognise the places we have visited, like our friends' houses) we can then just marvel at that 'other' beauty, those unrecognisable colours and strange shapes on our earth (everything seems to contain all of this century's history of painting). These images of our planet, multiplying during the "eco-debate" era, seem to darkly foresee (what is in fact a certainty) its disappearance, the irreversible pollution (which brings to mind the coincidence between the arrival of hi-fi for sound diffusion and music recording and the overall drop of all civilisation's technological and contemporary industrial environmental acoustics). In brief, a "discussion" about the planet, cosmos, God and the transfiguration of the "technological whole".
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Ratsimandresy, Nadia - Matteo Ramon Arevalos: Messiaen et autor de Messiaen
Code:7699
Price:
$15.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| A signature collection of exquisite works for onde Martinot and piano by Olivier Messiaen, N'Guyen Thien Dao, Jacques Charpentier and Tristan Murail, exploring the many voices of this extraordinary instrument. The onde (or ondes musicales or le Martenot) was first demonstrated at the Paris Conservatoire in 1928 and immediately attracted the attention of Varese, Milhaud, Koechlin, Jolivet, Honegger and Messiaen, who all wrote for it - cumulatively ensuring its survival. Although only a year younger than the theremin, the onde is a far more sophisticated, complex and versatile instrument, not least because of the combination it offers of pitched and glissando tones, and the wide range of filters and different resonating media through which it can sound: loudspeakers, gongs, sympathetic resonating strings and reverberant enclosures. The compositions here exploit every unearthly aspect of the instrument and are beautifully performed: a remarkable and exquisite collection.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
|
|  |
Sun Ra: Sub Underground
Code:7805
Price:
$16.95
Quantity in Basket: none
| A classic Saturn experimental studio/rehearsal release, starting with 8 delirious minutes of Kora and Piano frame - almost certainly the Strange Strings instruments, whatever they were... and then Ra's signature clavinet of the period and an unidentifiable double- reed instrument, probably Marshall Allen... enter the xylophone.. I sense you're getting the picture; all in all 21 great later-1960s minutes. Followed by a lyrical standard with Ra playing acoustic piano and John Gilmore saying what has to be said: a live recording, as is the next; congas, bongos, Ra on Rocksichord and singing in the Ra-African style. Some fine straight ahead jazz follows - with serious electric guitar and great tenor playing. And so it goes on, winding up with full-on Space is the Place Angel rant from Ra - not the best sound, but heartfelt. A fine, eclectic collection with enough gems.
*Free Shipping |
|
|
| | |
|
| |
