Cerca:haiku

AL presents the first musical collaboration between Hamburg based Asmus Tietchens and Japanese artist Miki Yui, operating out of Düsseldorf for almost 20 years now. Highly respected and hugely influential artist Asmus Tietchens first made his mark on the electronic music scene in the late 1970s, whereas Miki Yui debuted her sonic settings in1999.

Their first joint album NEUES BOOT envelops the listener with a poetic sound sensibility and a conceptual clarity which was processed and passed back and forth between their individual studios in Hamburg and Düsseldorf.

Asmus Tietchens: After Stefan Schneider suggested to release a Yui-Tietchens album on his TAL imprint Miki and I quickly developed some ideas towards our eventual collaboration. We agreed upon an ongoing mutual exchange of material. We have both been very familiar with each other's music for a long time and we found our individual approach towards sound design to be uniquely compatible. We do not use our electronic tools in order to merely achieve the maximum of technical possibilities, but to illustrate aesthetic necessities. This entails a deliberate reduction and refined perception of the sonic characteristics of the material. Only this approach enabled us to fully realise the complete spectrum of the sounds and noises we were working with in order to construct this New Boat. Each and everyone of my treatments is e x c l u s i v e l y based on a track supplied by Miki. I added no new sound sources. Naturally the spatial and temporal dimensions of the source material were thus altered. These transformations are exactly what makes our collaboration special and unique. Very early on we had agreed on New Boat as a working title and a guiding light . Of course in the beginning we had no idea where this New Boat might take us. Now we do know. After several months of ship-building the boat has now set sails for new sonic horizons. Ahoi!

Miki Yui: The title of the album as well as the individual tracks have been inspired by conversations with Asmus. When we had a chat after one of his concerts, he told me about Kōdō, the Art or the Way of the Scent. It is a 8th century Japanese incense ceremony. Very frequently the names of Japanese incense sticks are derived from natural themes, e.g. Bairin is the plum grove, the scent of the first blossom heralding the end of winter. This poetry, the ephemeral nature of the world reminded me of Kigo, words from a Haiku (a form of Japanese poetry), which reference a particular season or a natural phenomenon. So I chose the names of the individual pieces from Kigo as if The Boat was exploring nature whilst sailing through the seasons. Only in retrospect I realised that the titles combined create this poem:

Early spring a hazy view in the night (Oboro)
Plum groves (Bairin)
Over a Dayfly (Kagerou)
A Milkyway (Amanogawa)
Dawn (Akatsuki)
Art of fragrance (Kōdō)
On fragile thin ice (Usurai)

Needle Paw is the first solo album by Nai Palm, the lead singer and composer of R&B future soul outfit Hiatus Kaiyote. A two-time Grammy nominated singer, songwriter and musician from Melbourne, Australia, Nai Palm is a composer, instrumentalist, producer, vocalist and poet who approaches all of these self-taught disciplines with an intuitive, infectious grace. This gift has sent her and her band Hiatus Kaiyote on a journey to sculpt songs that have been received and treasured across the globe. Their success set the stage for Nai’s first solo effort.

Comprised almost entirely of her guitar playing and vocal arrangements, Needle Paw is Nai Palm’s self-imposed challenge to explore the potential for immortality and timelessness within her music by stripping away the produced layers to focus on the element that is closest to the source of the human soul: the voice.

Needle Paw is the rawest glimpse into Nai Palm’s musical world. It is dreamlike, honest, and beautifully transparent, revealing her musical ruminations to listeners with a courageous vulnerability and artistic generosity. Nai sees this album as a reminder to musicians that they don’t have to rely on production to expose their gifts.

Needle Paw features acoustic versions of Hiatus Kaiyote favorites “Atari,” “Mobius,” “When The Knife,” “Molasses,” and “Borderline With My Atoms”, as well as covers of songs by David Bowie (“Blackstar”), Radiohead (“Pyramid Song”) and Jimi Hendrix (“Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”).

Roman Flügel needs no introduction, so lets not hammer on about his lengthy history as a kingpin of contemporary German dance music, his essential contributions to the musical evolution of Darmstadt and Frankfurt, his achievements as a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist traversing genres with remarkable grace, his sense of dynamism and urgency in the construction of big-room anthems or the meticulously woven textures of melancholy found throughout his minimalist work, his ability to pay homage to pioneers of his musical heritage without diverting to pastiche, his fearless combination of familiar melody with synthesized aberration and imperfection, his approach to instrumentation as Haiku poetry where the ordinary is made profound through simple isolation, his rejection of stylistic pretense and acceptance of comforts found in the constructs of folk and pop, his contrast of cold efficiency with a warm naivete´, his yearning to return down previously-forged paths with a new accumulation of experience, the confidence to paint the room blue when it was meant to be black, his belief that a beautifully executed idea will always transcend the need for incessant polishing, the way in which he leads arrangements to the edge and only implies a resolve, his framing of musical narratives as sketches, outlines, or skeletons where the listener's perception compliments the whole, or his notion that sometimes stories might not need a clear articulation but might only come through in hints of mood, pace, and color, a language which doesn't rely on words to communicate but which paints for us in Themes. Yes, rather than hearing our attempt to elaborate on Roman's Flu¨gel's debut album with the ESP Institute, lets just simply listen.

Haiku's Raw Waxes label is delighted to welcome the famously unconventional Stanislav Tolkachev with a new track EP of experimental techno and IDM sounds. Entitled Champions' Breakfast and with brilliant artwork from German Benedikt Rugar, the releases features six cuts, one of which is a previously digital-only track landing here on vinyl for the very first time.

Haiku has long been a fan of Ukrainian Tolkachev having previously collaborated on a remix for the label, while Tolkachev has also released on Haiku's other label Inkblots. This new EP is one that not only shows off the label's willingness to take risks and put out diverse and interesting electronic music, but also one that proves Tolkachev is a truly unique artist with his own musical voice. He has been that way for more than a decade now, and has put out three long players as well as countless EPs that get heavy support from the tastemakers of the day. This latest offering contains his take on the essentialness of groove, enriched by his use of atonality, dissonance and acid-not-acid textures, all in a minimal style.

The deep 'Shady' kicks things off with spangled synth lines and eerie pads off in the distance. It's a lonely and insular piece with kinked rhythms that keep you locked. The excellent 'The Main Thing Is To Survive' is then less constrained, with kicks that rock back and forth as off kilter synth lines warp and wrap around each other in mind melting and tripped out fashion. Switching up the mood with ease, 'Fuck This Guy' is a dark and musty passage of humid ambient techno with static electricity buzzing about over smeared pads that are filled with menace, then the curious 'Hair In My Mouth' is about blurting, busted frequencies, loose and scattered drums and glassy melodies. It's a mangled and mashed up track that sounds like little else. 'Negative Space' is horror soundtrack techno with urgent, driving drums and nervy sound design that keeps you on edge, and closer 'Self Destruction' is built on broken, bristling beats. A rhythm slowly emerges from the haze and it is one that is physical and restless and sure to make a big impact in the club.

This is a varied and vital EP that oozes essential electronic invention.

BACK IN STOCK NOW!! "Volume One is the debut album. It was the only album recorded with original guitarist Justin Marler, before he became an Orthodox monk. Volume One showcases a darker sound and stronger doom metal influence than Sleep's later work. The image featured on the cover is taken from the Salvador Dali painting "Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon".
Their only album as a four piece of Al Cisneros, Matt Pike, Justin Marler and Chris Haikus

LP repressed for first time in many years.

allmusic
"For all their budding, precocious talent, Sleep's 1991 debut, Volume One, quickly betrays their still quite heavy debt to doom metal forefathers like Black Sabbath, Witchfinder, and Saint Vitus. Driven by Matt Pike and Justin Marler's lumbering mass of low-tuned guitar riffs, Al Cisneros' (still going as Luke here) serpentine bass and ragged screams, and drummer Chris Haikus' cyclopean kit pummeling, occasional highlights such as "The Suffering," "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream," and "The Wall of Yawn" prove less memorable than they are sensorially overwhelming. And yet, ironically, Sleep's rhythm guitars would never again be kept as under control, nor would their leads sound quite as refined as they do here (see the cleaner harmonies employed to good use on "Numb" and "Catatonic," for example). This was probably due to the onetime involvement of the significantly less stoned Marler, who would soon exchange the group for a monastery where he would study to become a monk. Fittingly enough, however, losing the versatility of a second guitarist was exactly what Sleep needed to focus their singular power into a crushing force, and the remaining trio would flourish immediately behind the sheer physicality of Pike's six-string style, as proven by 1993's superlative sophomore LP, Sleep's Holy Mountain."