Beats Vinyl New Releases - News

La Tragédie D’Oreste Et Électre is the high-water mark of Cranes’ work in a specifically high-art realm. Recorded before the release of 1993’s Loved, its release was held up until 1996 due to copyright clearance issues from the estate of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work is used as the album’s lyrics.

Highlights from the release include “Danse D’Electre,” a gentle piece that turns into a haunting wash of ambient sound, and the understated chills of “Au Temple,” one of Shaw’s best vocal turns on the album.

La Tragédie D’Oreste Et Électre is available on vinyl for the first time as a limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on crystal clear vinyl. The package includes a 16-page booklet containing all the story notes for the adaptation in both English and French.

Cristopher Cichocki is an interdisciplinary artist from the Coachella Valley, with an extensive body of work that examines transmorphic cycles of decay and renewal. His multi-faceted practice addresses environmental and socio-political disintegration above and beneath the surface of everyday perception.

Cichocki is as accomplished in maximalist, immersive composition as he is with painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and Land art interventions. Desert Drone Cycle returns from the Southern California desert and Salton Sea, a region which has long been a subject of his work as well as an integral source for his materials. Water recordings and windstorms are amplified and dilated into thrumming movements of ominous frequencies and hypnotic echo. Cichocki girds such sounds around a somatic rhythm akin to a heartbeat and frames the notion of the ‘drone’ both as the trance-inducing, keening sound, but also as the unnamed aircraft conducting infrared surveillance.

On one level, Cichocki’s sound research and experimental applications highlight the complexities around land use management when humanity encroaches upon sensitive environments. And on another, it stands as a harrowing document of isolationist composition paralleling that of Thomas Köner, Deathprod, Alan Lamb, and BJ Nilsen.

Entstanden aus einem Live-Auftritt, offenbart ,unfamiliar music (paris)" das Wesen der Obsessionen und des Klanguniversums von Giuseppe Ielasi - einem Musiker, dessen Zurückhaltung nur von seinem Talent und seiner grenzenlosen Hingabe an das musikalische Schaffen seit fast 30 Jahren übertroffen wird. unfamiliar music (paris) ist ein bemerkenswerter Ausdruck von Ielasis Herangehensweise, einer Herangehensweise, in der Feinfühligkeit, manchmal Nostalgie und Emotionen es verstehen, mit Zurückhaltung ein Klanguniversum zu durchdringen, das um Polyphonie und Reminiszenz herum aufgebaut ist, um Texturen und Motive, die sich mit Anmut und Inspiration verflechten, verbinden und gegenseitig antreiben. ,Sparkling or Silent" des Duos Crys Cole und Oren Ambarchi ist ein eigenständiger Moment in ihren jeweiligen künstlerischen Ansätzen, ein Schritt zur Seite, der einen Fixpunkt um eine elektroakustische Methode markiert, die zwar in beiden Werken stets latent vorhanden war, sich hier jedoch als zentrale Kompositionsmodalität durchsetzt. Der elektroakustische Ansatz wird hier jedoch nicht aus formalen Gründen herangezogen, geschweige denn als ästhetische Leitlinie. Im Gegenteil, er wird als Kompositionswerkzeug betrachtet, offen für alle klanglichen Möglichkeiten, ein Werkzeug, das es dem Künstler ermöglicht, innerhalb des Klangs selbst einen verwobenen Raum zu entwerfen, in dem Erinnerungen, Eindrücke und Empfindungen eine Erzählung am Rande der Vorstellungskraft und der gemeinsam erlebten Momente weben - eine Erzählung, in die eine komplexe und sensible Klangschicht eingebettet ist, die die Grenzen zwischen künstlerischem Projekt, intimer Reise und geteilten Träumen verschwimmen lässt.

500 copies were released of each album to celebrate CURRENT 93’s London and Hastings Channellings in May 2024.

Each title has a Risographed insert with artwork by David Tibet on front, and title and catalogue number in David's handwriting on reverse. Inserted in polythene bag. Coloured vinyl in thick card disco-bag.

There are no physical barcodes on these releases

500 copies were released of each album to celebrate CURRENT 93’s London and Hastings Channellings in May 2024.

Each title has a Risographed insert with artwork by David Tibet on front, and title and catalogue number in David's handwriting on reverse. Inserted in polythene bag. Coloured vinyl in thick card disco-bag.

There are no physical barcodes on these releases

500 copies were released of each album to celebrate CURRENT 93’s London and Hastings Channellings in May 2024.

Each title has a Risographed insert with artwork by David Tibet on front, and title and catalogue number in David's handwriting on reverse. Inserted in polythene bag. Coloured vinyl in thick card disco-bag.

There are no physical barcodes on these releases

500 copies were released of each album to celebrate CURRENT 93’s London and Hastings Channellings in May 2024.

Each title has a Risographed insert with artwork by David Tibet on front, and title and catalogue number in David's handwriting on reverse. Inserted in polythene bag. Coloured vinyl in thick card disco-bag.

There are no physical barcodes on these releases

500 copies were released of each album to celebrate CURRENT 93’s London and Hastings Channellings in May 2024.

Each title has a Risographed insert with artwork by David Tibet on front, and title and catalogue number in David's handwriting on reverse. Inserted in polythene bag. Coloured vinyl in thick card disco-bag.

There are no physical barcodes on these releases

Retinal Rivalry ist der Soundtrack zu Cyprien Gaillards neuem stereoskopischen Film Retinal Rivalry (2024). ,Es ist eine faszinierende Reise durch die deutsche Stadtlandschaft und ihre vielschichtige historische und soziale Bedeutung. Aufbauend auf seiner früheren Erforschung der skulpturalen Qualitäten dreidimensionaler bewegter Bilder geht das Werk über die Grenzen der Leinwand hinaus. Durch die Ausschöpfung des vollen Potenzials modernster Technologie bietet Gaillard eine erweiterte, geschärfte und tief bewegende neue Sicht auf die Welt um uns herum. Retinal Rivalry ist nach dem Phänomen der visuellen Wahrnehmung benannt, das auftritt, wenn das Gehirn zwei widersprüchliche Bilder gleichzeitig empfängt. Anstatt zu einem 3D-Bild zu verschmelzen, wechselt das neuronale System zwischen der Priorisierung des einen Bildes und der Unterdrückung des anderen, was beim Betrachter Verwirrung und Unbehagen hervorruft. Gaillards Film setzt sich mit diesen Komplexitäten der visuellen Verarbeitung und den Grenzen der Technologie auseinander und sammelt visuelle Informationen durch außergewöhnliche, oft augenzwinkernde Aufnahmen, die das Innere und das Äußere, das Eingeschlossene und das Verstreute sowie das Natürliche und das Gebaute miteinander verflechten. Seine Kamera nimmt ungewöhnliche Blickwinkel ein, wechselt von sanften Luftperspektiven zu einem niedrigen Blickwinkel aus der Perspektive eines Nagetiers, zu schwindelerregenden Ein- und Ausblendungen auf der knolligen Nase einer Skulptur oder zu einer langen Einstellung eines Zuges, der durch eine Landschaft fährt, und zieht uns in eine vielschichtige Erfahrung hinein, die zwischen einem schlechten Trip und unerwarteter Schönheit, die Trost spendet, schwankt. In ,Retinal Rivalry" deuten verschiedene Treppen, Spiralen und Aufzüge auf einen Zustand des ständigen Auf- und Abstiegs hin und betonen das Wechselspiel zwischen Distanz und Nähe, abgrundtiefer Tiefe und lebendiger skulpturaler Darstellung. Der Film pulsiert rhythmisch mit Bildern, die anschwellen und sich zusammenziehen, sich aufblähen und entleeren. Er manipuliert das Gefühl der Zuschauer für Tiefe, Maßstab und Textur und lässt vertraute Materialien und Orte unheimlich erscheinen, wobei er die inhärenten Ungenauigkeiten und Verzerrungen der Darstellung hervorhebt. ,Retinal Rivalry" zeichnet die gewöhnliche Welt in großartigen Details auf und versucht dabei, unter die Oberfläche der Dinge zu blicken. Der Film ist eine Darstellung von Raum und Zeit, die Darstellungsweisen destabilisiert und eine neue Hyper-Vision-Version der Realität bietet. Mit 120 Bildern pro Sekunde aufgenommen und mit derselben Geschwindigkeit projiziert - fünfmal so schnell wie im Kino üblich - fängt Gaillard mehr ein, als das menschliche Auge natürlich wahrnehmen kann. Die Filmmusik greift auf verschiedene klangliche Elemente zurück und unterstreicht so die Erforschung von Dissonanz und Synchronität. Indonesische Instrumentalmusik wird überarbeitet und mit Feldaufnahmen von rumpelnden schweren Maschinen und seltsam melodischem Würgen kombiniert. Der Soundtrack enthält auch die ersten Zeilen aus Werner Herzogs Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) sowie die dazugehörige Ouvertüre der deutschen Band Popol Vuh. Die Klanglandschaft von Retinal Rivalry steht im Kontrast zu den Bildern - was wir sehen, steht oft im Widerspruch zu dem, was wir hören. Nur in einem Abschnitt verschmelzen Ton und Bild: Ein gebrochenes Bein betätigt das Pedal einer interaktiven Orgel, um ein Stück von Johann Sebastian Bach zu spielen, das immer wieder ins Stocken gerät.

"As long as you come to my garden", the sixth release in the cherished Die Schachtel’s series “Decay Music” as well as the debut of the duo Damāvand (Gianluca Ceccarini and Alessandro CIccarelli) on the prestigious Italian label, is a tribute to the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova, through his lyrics and freely inspired by the cult movie about his life The Color of the Pomegranates (Nřan guynə, 1968, USSR) directed by Sergei Parajanov. The feature film tells the life of the poet, who lived in the 17th Century, from childhood in the royal court, to retirement until his death in the monastery of Haghpat, through a series of episodes, static like paintings that do not tell but show, evoke, they suggest through metaphors, analogies, surrealist flair, dreamlike landscapes, liturgical pauses.

The six tracks are inspired by the dreamlike imagery contained in the movie, weaving sound textures ranging from ambient to noise, to references to the musical tradition of the Middle East.

Gianluca Ceccarini and Alessandro Ciccarelli alternate, without fixed roles, with analog synths, drones, amplified common objects, generative music, audio samples from the film and acoustic instruments such as the tar - a stringed instrument of Persian origin, the trombone and the cornet. In addition, two of the songs on the album contain Sayat Nova’s poems recited in Persian by Nahid Rezashateri.

The sound materials are revealed gradually like episodes, evoking the visual suggestions staged by Parajanov in the movie. As long as you come to my garden is intended as an imaginative journey to distant spaces and indefinite archaic times.

DAMĀVAND is a musical project by Gianluca Ceccarini (electronics, electroacoustic objects, tar) and Alessandro Ciccarelli (electronics, electroacoustic objects, trombone, cornet)

Gianluca Ceccarini, guitarist, electroacoustic experimenter, luthier specialized in the restoration and construction of plucked musical instruments for early music. In 2021 his first album Starving Night was released for the netlabel Laverna and in 2022 the Sarab Label published a CD version. He also works in photographic research, video-art, graphics and independent publishing with the Sarab collective.

Alessandro Ciccarelli is an author who ranges between different languages: photography, video, sound. He is involved in several collective research projects in the musical and theatrical fields. His solo records are released under the nom de plume Elnath Project. The latest work, after six years of silence, from Italian berlin-based composer, performer and publisher (Black Letter Press) Claudio Rocchetti, and a welcomed return on the Die Schachtel imprint after the brilliant Another Piece of teenage wildlife (2008), Labirinto verticale (Vertical Maze) takes its origin from the four years long collaboration of Rocchetti with the Parma-based Fondazione Lenz, a contemporary theatre research collective/organization.

New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people. It"s a deep avant-garde echo of the legendary Bomb Squad (Locks even sounding a bit like a tape-delayed Check D on the vox), with beat artifacts spanning the whole gamut from pre to post golden era hip-hop - mixing OG Brooklyn boombox sound with the sci-fi boom-bap of late 90s Def Jux and/or Dan The Automator"s 75 Ark.

Brothers Dana and Alden McWayne, along with a troupe of multi-instrumental artists, come together to create jazzy melodies with indie sounds inspired by their unconventional upbringing in Eugene, Oregon. Dana (saxophone) is an organic farm inspector while Alden (drums) is a recent grad of Berklee College of Music. Their debut full-length album, Quiet Music for Young People, is a lush album that melds vintage sounds with the aesthetic and experience of existing in Gen Z and the digital age. Quiet Music For Young People also reminisces of the brother's childhood, summer days spent working at an apple orchard and jamming at jazz clubs on rainy Oregon nights. The experimental smooth jazz-infused album closer "Dragonfly" has been gaining traction on streaming due to trends across Instagram and TikTok.

In Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of Naples, Sotto le Nuvole, the ground shakes periodically. Between Mount Vesuvius and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields hiss volcanic gas and steam. Below the sleeping volcano, modern day Naples emerges in black and white and fills with voices, with lives. From the traces of history and the concerns of the present, Rosi documents a city immersed in its continuous past, with Daniel Blumberg’s minimal soundscape hovering in a sonic space between liquid and air.
Tasked with creating a soundscape that would suspend space within Rosi’s film, Blumberg called upon the extended technique of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to create a gossamer fabric of traces and sounds abstracted from their instruments. Having transitioned from theoretical physics to the saxophone, John Butcher has always deeply considered space in the context of his playing. His concerns are with flow, density and how the saxophone is situated in the living world. Zeroing in on the core sonic properties of the mechanical and acoustic components of the saxophone, Seymour Wright has integrated its every breath, reed vibration, keypad clatter and hissed microtone of his alto into his own, unique improvisational language. In his work with these two seminal players, Blumberg makes his most concentrated soundtrack to date - reinforcing the film's sense of overlapping time and space, and pushing at the limits of experimentation.

Initially recorded in Daniel’s flat in London, Butcher and Wright centre themselves around long, consistent tones, so soft that it seems breath is being gently pulled from the saxophone's bell by an invisible hand. Blumberg himself adds haunting bass harmonica, and recordings of Wright’s launeddas - a traditional and ancient triple pipe polyphonic reed instrument from Sardinia, Italy. Blumberg then travelled to the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii. Once a flourishing classical Roman city loved by Nero, Baia slowly sank under hydrothermal pressure, leaving the city in a kind of geological purgatory. Using specialised geophones and hydrophones, Blumberg took those initial recordings and amplified them underwater, sending them calling out across the ruins of Baia’s mosaics, Nymphaeum statues and villas.

“It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”
What emerges is deeply melancholic, tender, subtle and right at the edges of audio technology. Submerged in an aquarian mausoleum, the mysterious vibrations of the saxophone and its bell become an echo of an echo, wading from the future into the past. ‘Sotto le Nuvole’ is less a soundtrack than a process of aeration - a sonic puncture in the material of the film which allows its central message to breathe, and a remarkable experiment at the limits of the saxophone’s possibility.

Have you ever felt like you’re being watched? Have you felt unseen eyes staring at you, monitoring your every move? Composer and guitarist Daniel Davies reflects on this familiar paranoia on his new EP, Spies. Across its five stirringly atmospher- ic tracks, the frequent John Carpenter collaborator evokes the tingle you get on the back of your neck when you sense you’re under surveillance - a feeling some psychologists have dubbed the “psychic staring effect.”

The songs for Spies were composed in the fall and winter of 2020, in the depths of pandemic lockdown. Working in isolation in his L.A. studio, Davies composed the five tracks entirely alone. With no collaborators, his gaze turned inward, and the songs feel intimate and intense. Yet at the same time, they would become the most sonically expansive material he’s ever put on a solo record. His guitar and synthesizer are bolstered by double bass, cello, viola, and violin, adding a new depth to the music.

As he did for his 2020 full-length Signals, Davies teamed up with acclaimed visual artist Jesse Draxler for the artwork. The stark, black-and-white piece that Draxler contributed for the cover of Spies perfectly captures the mood of the record. Eyes are cut out, disassociated from faces, their gazes made inscrutable. Yet they seem to fix on the listener. Have you ever felt like you’re being watched? Maybe you are.

OVERVIEW: Folly is O’Sullivan’s second album under his own name and embodies a confident, evolution from his acclaimed debut VELD (2017, O Genesis), an album which distilled the multiverse into a rich and complex soundworld; textured and allusive, alive with sonic diversions, hypnotic mantras and ornately arranged songcraft.

The release will coincide with a two-night residency for The New Arts & Music Programme at Sutton House, Hackney. Set in the Arts & Crafts era wing of this Tudor manor house, using its early 20th Century Steinway grand piano, Friday 5 April will see O’Sullivan performing songs from Folly with his ensemble, with special guests from the O Genesis family, Richard Youngs and The Silver Field, supporting. Saturday 6 April will include a solo performance from Thighpaulsandra, who recorded and mixed the album while Daniel performs songs with guest appearances by Peter Broderick and Thighpaulsandra among others.

Folly was written around the birth of his son Ari and the passing of his friend Ian Johnstone, and both events were significant in the album that followed. O’Sullivan explains, “Joy is inseparable from suffering and sometimes those polarities arrive at the same moment. Music offers a vessel to contain the unspeakable.”

This cycle of twelve songs deftly illustrates O'Sullivan's ascent as a unique and multidimensional songwriter. Moving from the familiar pantheon of experimental music and arriving upon a universal narrative probing the human condition from the inside out. Both lyrically and within the intricate lattice of arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pop symphonies. Both intimate and alien, archetypal and atypical, joyous and melancholic, the aperture of Folly is wide open and light streams in. 

O’Sullivan explains the solo writing process, “Writing songs alone can take some time even if a song arrives fully formed in your mind. The execution of it involves long durations with each individual part of the arrangement until it reaches something concise. The song tells you what it needs and I try not to force ideas onto it.” and goes on to say, “These songs are outside in rather than inside out, there was always a latency between the birth of the song and my understanding of its purpose. Folly is looking at who is doing the shaping, most of these songs are about writing songs.”

Folly was recorded and mixed by Thighpaulsandra (Coil, Julian Cope Band, Spiritualized) at his Aeriel studio premises in Wales and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

Written mostly in London, O’Sullivan explains the inspiration for the title, “There's a folly of a medieval abbey in these gardens that surround where I live. My family and I spend a lot of time roaming around there, amongst the frogs, foxes, mushrooms, owls, and the many strange "introduced" plants and trees. It was landscaped to be a rabbit hole sort of place.”

Daniel O’Sullivan is a composer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist living and working in London and has been contributing a vibrant, chameleonic brew to the music landscape since the late 1990's. He has achieved international acclaim writing, recording and performing with Grumbling Fur (with longtime friend and collaborator Alexander Tucker), Ulver, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miracle, Æthenor and the recent reincarnation of This Heat in the form of This Is Not This Heat.

New record from Darksmith years away from the previous ... well, it is not easy to talk about the records of Tom, even if this difficulty, on the borders with the impossibility, validates the complete success of his work. We are not dealing with an abstract thing, reality is omnipresent in these furrows ... yet it manages to escape any attempt at semantic classification and makes even impossible the definition of an emotional tonality; rather the listening leads back to places of the familiar insignificance in which life is immersed. The two sides are both tripartite, perhaps less messed up than usual, with the usual limping of difficultly identifiable sounds, phantom appearances of music, deteriorated, elsewhere. (Francesco Tignola)

Lovely Music present a reissue of David Behrman's On the Other Ocean, originally issued as one of Lovely Music's first six releases in 1978. This newly-mastered LP is a must-have for Behrman aficionados or a perfect introduction to his work.

"I've been engaged for many years in an exploration of ways to make music and intermedia installations in which software and electronic devices interact with human performers. I've wanted to make works that have personalities, which remain distinct and recognizable, yet are open to surprising changes that can come about when they are performed or exhibited." --David Behrman

"Remarkable achievements on a purely technological level. Behrman's carefully programmed Kim-I system listens to tones played by the live performers, instantly analyzes the situation, and responds by playing back electronic tones of its own. This is undoubtedly the first time that humans and electronic sound equipment have communicated with one another with high degrees of spontaneity and intelligence on both ends of the wire. But the music that results is perhaps even more remarkable. Subtle, sustained, serene, sophisticated, super." --Tom Johnson, The Village Voice, Dec. 18, 1978

Recorded at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, Oakland, California, Sept. 18, 1977, and at the Electronic Music Studio, State University of New York at Albany, June 9, 1977. Personnel: On the Other Ocean: David Behrman - electronics; Maggi Payne - flute; Arthur Stidfole - bassoon Figure in a Clearing: David Behrman - electronics; David Gibson - cello. 180 gram vinyl, Stoughton Old Style sleeve.

First album by this duo, known separately for their work in Mouse on Mars
and Gastr del Sol.
 Two long-form pieces, utterly different from one another: one hyper-detailed
electronic music and sound poetry, and the other live-in-the-studio electric
guitar and laptop paint-peeling.
 The exciting first chapter in a long-anticipated collaboration
 David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner met in the mid-1990s when Grubbs was
playing with Gastr del Sol and The Red Krayola and St. Werner in Mouse on
Mars and Microstoria. After years of exchanging ideas, ‘Translation from
Unspecified’ marks their first time locking horns as a duo, and it’s clear this
deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue.
 In January 2020 Grubbs arrived at Mouse on Mars’ Berlin studio Paraverse
with a guitar and ‘Translation from Unspecified’, an open-ended, seemingly
self-generating poem suggesting AI, one of the themes in St. Werner’s recent
work. This became the side-length title track, a winding corridor of electronic
fanfares and spontaneous musical miniatures urging Grubbs’s slow and
steady recitation to grow wings and graduate into song.
 Who knows where this idiosyncratic mise-en-scène - day-glo, extrovert
electronics and task-oriented human - came from? Reference points - distant
ones - might include Robert Ashley and Paul De Marinis’s ‘In Sara, Mencken,
Christ and Beethoven...’ and the sound poetry of Anton Bruhin.
 Flip the record and you have ‘Soixante Ooze’, a live-in-the-studio duo for
guitar and computer more recognizably St. Wernerian and Grubbs-like that
reconfigures elements of the title track before finally morphing into needlepinning monoliths of sound.
 David Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more
than 200 releases. He was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro,
and Squirrel Bait and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros,
Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and
many others. His newest book is ‘Good night the pleasure was ours’ (Duke
University Press, 2022).
 Jan St. Werner is an artist and electronic music composer best known as
one half of the group Mouse on Mars. He has collaborated with Oval’s
Markus Popp as Microstoria and written music for installations and films by
visual artist Rosa Barba. In 2013, St. Werner released ‘Blaze Colour Burn’,
the first of a series of experimental recordings called ‘the Fiepblatter
Catalogue’. Recently his work has prioritized installation and interventions
with spatialized sound, including a number of collaborations under the name
Dynamische Akustische Forschung (DAF).

Former Orange Juice member David McClymont may have been less
noticeable than some of his former band mates over the years but that
doesn't mean he hasn't been busy - He has self-released a number of
albums and eps from his new home in Melbourne
Some months ago Stephen (The Pastels) and Ian (LNFG) were discussing how
good it would be to pull the music together on vinyl and we are delighted to
announce that David agreed. He has been working closely with Stephen to curate
a double album's worth of music and Past Night From Glasgow will be releasing
this album in early 2022.

,now i imagine a place not the same" ist eine Doppel-LP und ein neues Solo-Statement des Gitarristen und Komponisten David Torn, veröffentlicht bei Kou Records. Es kehrt zur rohen Energie seiner frühen Klangsprache zurück und treibt diese gleichzeitig mit der Klarheit jahrzehntelanger Erkundungen voran. Das Album ist gleichermaßen viszeral und schwerelos und konzentriert sich auf Torns langjährigen Dialog zwischen alternativen Stimmungen, Loop-Architekturen und berührungsempfindlicher Elektronik - eine Klangwelt, in der Melodie, Noise und Atmosphäre sich ständig ineinander verschmelzen. Als Pionier der E-Gitarren-Bearbeitung ist Torn weithin bekannt für seine Arbeit in Musik und Film, darunter langjährige Kooperationen mit dem Komponisten Howard Shore, Beiträge zu Filmen von David Cronenberg und einflussreiche Veröffentlichungen bei ECM Records, die dazu beitrugen, eine atmosphärische, filmische Sprache für die E-Gitarre zu definieren. Torn nähert sich jedem Stück als einer Form kompositionsorientierter Improvisation und behandelt alles in seiner Reichweite als musikalisches Material: Saiten, Tonabnehmer, Verstärker, externe Elektronik, Stimme, resonante Oberflächen und den physischen Raum selbst. Aufgenommen, gemischt und produziert von Randall Dunn und mit einem Schwerpunkt auf Unmittelbarkeit und physischer Präsenz eingefangen, wird die Gitarre Teil eines größeren Systems - Schaltkreise atmen, Delays wiederholen unvollkommene Erinnerungen, Töne regenerieren sich durch Berührung. Klänge entstehen durch Zufall, Geste und Intuition und werden dann durch aufmerksames Zuhören geformt, während sie sich entwickeln. Anstatt auf festgelegte Ergebnisse hin zu komponieren, lässt Torn die Form durch Feedback und Wiederholung entstehen und nimmt jeden Klang - ob beabsichtigt oder nicht - in einen sich ständig weiterentwickelnden musikalischen Körper auf. Indem er grundlegende Werkzeuge aus seinen prägenden Verarbeitungsjahren wieder aufgreift - alternative Stimmungen, Looping-Logik, Röhrensättigung - lehnt Torn Nostalgie ab und gewinnt stattdessen ihre Unmittelbarkeit als lebendiges Material zurück. Gleichzeitig intim und gewaltig fängt ,now i imagine a place not the same" einen Künstler ein, der seine einzigartige Sprache voll und ganz beherrscht: zutiefst melodisch, rigoros experimentell und verwurzelt in Vertrauen, Berührung und Elektrizität. Nicht als rückblickende Geste, sondern als gegenwärtige Erklärung bietet das Album eine kraftvolle Meditation über Vergänglichkeit, Erneuerung und das fortwährende Leben des Klangs.

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022's Pigments_icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly_and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise. By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing_driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. This year, Richard's musician father experienced mini strokes while being diagnosed with cancer; and last year, her cousin Cisco was fatally shot seven times in New Orleans. Richard channels the emotional impact of these traumatic experiences of loss into her lyrics and vocal performances, which are left bare and human here, raw and unprocessed across the album. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether. On paper, Richard and Zahn's audacious, impressionistic musical collaborations feel like a surprising match. Richard, a New Orleans-reared visionary, has had an improbable journey from late 2000s reality television and mainstream pop with girl group Danity Kane to become one of the most prolific, experimental, and visible indie R&B singer-songwriters of the last decade and a half, with seven solo albums under her belt. Zahn is an East Coast-raised multi-instrumentalist and composer working at the intersections of jazz, Americana, classical, and ambient pop. His growing solo discography includes People of the Dawn, Sunday Painter, Pale Horizon, and Statues I & II, as well as the duo's first release, Pigments. "Pigments was one of the best projects I've ever made," Richard says, "and the furthest I've ever been pushed as an artist." The album was a critical hit, hailed as Best New Music by Pitchfork and receiving praise from Stereogum as Album of the Week, NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, The Fader, Bitter Southerner, and Edition, among many other publications. The making of its follow-up, Quiet in a World Full of Noise, began in 2023 in upstate New York. Fresh from a break-up, Zahn sat at his piano and poured himself into writing and recording instrumental compositions. "I wrote all these stream-of-consciousness pieces on piano, and they were eerie, spacious piano tracks," he said. He used a piano that had been unconventionally tuned to the room rather than to standard pitch. These oddly-tuned, eerie instrumental recordings were never intended to be an album. Six months later, he listened to the recordings again and sent them to Richard who immediately recognized their potential and said, "Oh, this is the next album." Richard went into the studio the next day and wrote and recorded melodies and lyrics to Zahn's piano recordings. Zahn brought in gifted musicians like Bryan Senti on strings (violin, viola, and violoncello da spalla) and CJ Camerieri on brass (French horn, flugelhorn, and trumpet). In some cases, like on the track "Life in Numbers," Zahn used only the original first-take piano recording and scratch vocal, resulting in an intimate close-up of both Richard and Zahn.

Frog Bones is the original Frogman music that Dean sent to his mate, Supreme Vagabond Craftsman, over which to write a story over in 2015. It was predominantly composed with an EMS Synthi AKS and an Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer, plus some crunky Watkins Copicat tape echo. Much of it didn't make the final album cut. This version has been slightly edited down to a reasonable length.

Noodles is a selection of short jams and demo ideas that were/are to be the basis of a new solo project. But Dean found that these little fragments of songs sounded pleasingly energetic when randomly assembled and roughly edited together in a Faust Tapes style.

The album is presented in a spectacular red/silver pressing with beautiful cover/inner sleeve artwork from Nick Taylor.

Unlike much you have heard before, Dean Honer and Supreme Vagabond Craftsman build a creepily paranoid world of ‘objects’, which is believable and strange… and strangely affecting.

“Set in a bleak corner of the Peak District, it’s perhaps our only opportunity to hear a one-time mainstay of Pulp and a former cast member of The Tomorrow People acting together in earnest. For that reason alone, surely it must be cherished. Submerged by analogue bleeps and beats, Russell Senior and Richard Speight throw themselves into two narrated suites of glorious post apocalyptic oddness.” - Bob Fischer, Electronic Sound

Dean Honer:
In 2015 I edited various pieces of music I had written on an EMS Synthi and a tape echo, into one hour long piece. I didn't know what to do with it. I knew Will (Goddard) from his Supreme Vagabond Craftsman records. I liked his writing style, always a bit twisted. I also knew that he wouldn't be put off by my atonal discordant Synthi burblings. So I asked him to write a sci-fi story to put over the music.

He came up with Frogman. I loved that it was set locally to Sheffield in the Peak District, a place that I am very familiar with. That gentle yet dramatic landscape was perfect for an alien/viral incursion. It had the bleak English atmosphere of classics such as Quartermass and Threads.

The idea developed into a play voiced by various characters rather than a solo narrator. Therefore we adapted and created new music to reflect the characters and the narrative. But much of the original Synthi score is still present.

The Frogman became unnervingly prescient with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. The splits in society, anti vax Vs pro vax, leave Vs remain, and the fragility of a "civilised " society.

Will Goddard / Supreme Vagabond Craftsman:
Staying in a B&B on the south coast about 15 years ago, I was given a map which the owner had hand drawn and photocopied for guests to find local chippies and nice pubs. The map featured a bizarre symbol among the spaghetti of wiggly lines depicting local streets: a sort of series of circles encasing triangles within a flaming star shape. It looked faintly occult. I went to the spot indicated by the symbol hoping to find some kind of spiritual inundation. It was a lorry park.

I started to wonder what would happen if large objects appeared all over the world and seemed to draw people to them in a sort of religious pilgrimage; people walking from one to another and entering a state of ecstasy when they arrived. I liked the cosy catastrophe novels of the '60s, John Christopher and John Wyndham, and the 'slipstream' weirdness of M John Harrison. I particularly liked Christopher Priest's novel 'Fugue for a Darkening Island' and decided to rip off its fragmentary structure. I seem to remember buying a copy of Sam Delaney's 'Dahlgren' on the same trip. I liked the idea that a certain proportion of the world's population would be drawn into these religious pilgrimages and become a sort of shifting population of maligned devotees with an incomprehensible clicking language. This idea kicked around for a few years but I'm no good at writing fiction. When Dean mentioned a science fiction story with a sort of electronic score it seemed it could finally come to life.

Philosophy of Beyond, the second volume in Sound Supervisor Dean Hurley’s Anthology Resource series, continues Hurley’s experimental soundscape work into more ethereal and celestial territory. 12 tracks weave together a rich sonic tapestry built in part from comb-filtering experiments, tape loops, and sampled field excursions into unique acoustical environments. A bulk of the LP is assembled from Hurley’s sonic contributions to the recent feature film Perfect (2018, director Eddie Alcazar) as well as material made in residency for Art Gallery of New South Wales’ event Masters of Modern Sound...all of which are threaded together into a singular, cohesive dissertation on the afterlife.

Outlining a landscape beyond physical reality, the record serves as a soundtrack to the mysterious and immortal voyage of the soul into depths beyond the known and back again. What lies beyond physical reality? Beyond intellect and the system of the five senses? What do accounts of near death experiences, alien encounters, psychedelic drugs, astral projection, even strokes all have to do with this and why do each seem to share a core architecture of description?

"Witch's Ladder" is the fourth full length album from UK guitarist Dean McPhee, whose last LP "Four Stones" (2018) introduced a kick drum pulse, hypnotic loops and synth-like Ebow lines to his sparsely meditative, echo-laden solo guitar music.

On this new album he uses his Telecaster, valve amp and effects to weave an even deeper spell, as fingerpicked melodies soar over hypnotic riffs, looped basslines and cosmic reverb trails. Recorded live with no overdubs and inspired by folklore, mysticism and the landscapes of the North of England, "Witch's Ladder" represents a significant evolution in his sound, while also retaining the unique sense of depth and space that has drawn comparison with the likes of Loren Connors, Dylan Carlson and Popul Vuh. The cover art to "Witch's Ladder" features the stunning 1933 painting "The Primal Wing" by Agnes Pelton, a visionary symbolist who was not widely known during her lifetime but is now being recognised as a pioneer of spiritual abstract art alongside the likes of Hilma Af Klimt and Wassily Kandinsky. "Witch's Ladder" is to be announced on the 8th January, 2021, which will coincide with the release of a video for the opening track "The Alchemist". Directed and filmed by Harry Wheeler (Architects of Harmonic Rooms and Records), the video features breathtaking footage of Dean performing on a misty hillside at Bolton Woods quarry near his home in Bradford, West Yorkshire. (click the image below to view an unlisted link which will be made public on 08/01/21). This album is the twelfth release on the Hood Faire label, a venture overseen by Sam McLoughlin (Samandtheplants/Tongues of Light), David Chatton Barker (Folklore Tapes) and Dean McPhee.

The 180g vinyl version of the album (ltd 500 copies) was pressed by Vinyl Factory in the UK and mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering. “Over the course of the last decade, Dean McPhee has quietly and unhurriedly established himself as one of most compelling and unique solo guitar artists around, weaving gorgeously meditative reveries with a masterful use of ghostly delay effects” (Brainwashed)

 With their duo debut, Dean Spunt and John Wiese invite you to experience
the frenzy of percussive space and discreet sound found inside ‘The Echoing
Shell’.
 This is the first official collaboration between the two veteran music-makers,
though their connection goes back to 1999. As John recalls, “Dean was in a
high school arts program at CalArts. A friend and I were recording the first
Sissy Spacek demo in the design studios there, and taking a tape to my car
over and over again to check the mix. Dean was walking through the parking
lot with a Locust shirt on, we said hello, and he immediately got into a car
with two strangers to ‘listen to a tape’.”
 The tape-listening ended well, apparently. Dean and John became friends
and fellow travellers in LA circles and beyond: in 2005, John did a remix for
Dean’s first band, Wives; in 2007, Dean played percussion with Sissy
Spacek’s 13-Tet Los Angeles; John toured with No Age several times and
collaborated live with them in 2010.
 Under the Sissy Spacek name as well as his own, John’s recordings for his
own Helicopter label and many others kicked things off for him around the
end of the century; since then, he’s been constantly engaged in solos and
collaborations on record, performances, and installations around the world.
 In addition to Dean’s ever-growing discography with No Age, he curates his
own label, Post Present Medium. In 2018, Radical Documents released
Dean’s solo debut ‘EE Head’, which explored concrète and experimental
techniques in a four-part, album length piece.
 ‘The Echoing Shell’ is born of Dean and John’s shared understanding, using
John’s process common to Sissy Spacek: elaborate sound-collage works
using source material originating from punk, hardcore and improvised music.
A series of impositions, tape manipulation and edits recompose the material,
cracking open the crust of the source, freeing its implied guts to steam forth
in gushes of extreme noise. On ‘The Echoing Shell’, this is as often noise as
it is extreme intimacy, seeming at times to be sourced from within Dean’s
drumkit, at other times appearing to emanate from the capsules of
microphones and the circuits of the signal path itself.
 One may read these collaged sounds as abstraction, but there is a unique
language conveyed in their assembly, forming something like word-shapes
and meaning. And intention: the two side-long pieces, comprised of many
short sections, form a linear whole, creating alternately ripping and
discriminating music - and meaning - in the process.
 ‘The Echoing Shell’ is a fantastic conception in contemporary musique
concrète, combining incendiary post-rock power, dry humour and astonishing
depth of field. Whether projecting the sound through headphones, ear buds,
bookshelf speakers or your own personal amp stack, crank up ‘The Echoing
Shell’.

After multiple lauded album-length cassettes, 'Adaptive Emotional Use' is the first true album from Toronto-based Death Kneel. Several years in development, 'Adaptive Emotional Use' is a maturation of the project. Exhibiting a markedly harsher sonic palette, Death Kneel takes a turn towards violence and tragedy. Presented in heavyweight 350gsm printed sleeve. Black vinyl edition of 250.

Comparsa is the third studio release by the musical group Deep Forest. The group consists of the duo Michel Sanchez and Éric Mouquet and are known by composing a style of world music, mixing ethnic with electronic sounds and beats. Comparsa features a pronounced focus on Latin and Caribbean grooves, provided by musicians from Cuba, Belize, Mexico and Madagascar, among other places. It became #8 French export album of 1998 and was certified Platinum by SNEP Export Awards, with more than 500,000 albums sold outside France.

As the years go by, the ranks of Degiheugi's fans continue to swell: each time a new solid-gold disc is added to their already impressive discography, the result is a unique and impressive work in the French beatmaking landscape.

Endless smile, the sixth instalment, once again proves to be a great vintage, immediately limpid, but above all long in the mouth, charged with intense melodic persistence and loops that take the ear hostage.

And what a variety of aromas in the art of sampling: languorous strings, oriental flutes, bouncy brass, exotic percussion, intimate piano, samples of antediluvian blues or forgotten French chanson. This Grand Ouest varietal finds its perfect balance in a classic, timeless hip-hop spirit that runs like a red thread throughout the album.

When other beatmakers give in too quickly to the sirens of the dancefloor, Degiheugi always transports us back to his first hip-hop loves, for the pure pleasure of the “beautiful loop”. And he knows how to surround himself with the right people: his guests, whether faithful compatriots (Ghostown, Andrre, Astrid Van Peetersen) or newcomers (Ceschi, Josh Martinez), join in the party with high-flying featurings. The album title sounds like a prophecy: smile eternally as you listen to Degiheugi.

Produced by Dan Austin, (Biffy Clyro, You Me At Six) 2021’s Fatal Mistakes made No 5 in the UK national album chart which is the 6th top 10 for Del Amitri and the highest charting album since Twisted in 1995. The album also made No 2 on the Independent album chart and No 5 on the vinyl album chart. Fatal Mistakes also achieved the band’s highest chart position in Germany to date Throughout their first chapter, Del Amitri released a succession of hits - including ‘Nothing Ever Happens’, ‘Always The Last To Know’ and ‘Roll To Me’ - which became international radio staples, propelling a career that accomplished five UK Top 10 albums and 6 million sales. Justin speaks about the track When Iain presented me with this psychedelic swamp blues it called out for the stream-of-consciousness treatment. Sadly I’m no Dylan and this pathetic attempt to summon the spirit of Subterranean Homesick Blues refracted through the streets of Glasgow ended up in the outtakes pile. The only thing I can say in mitigation is that it’s ALL TRUE, EVERY WORD.

Sophomore album from Delmer Darion featuring both the most accessible and ambitious music they’ve created yet. There are some compelling features from Kiran Leonard, Bingo Fury, Anna B Savage, Mabe Fratti and the second half of the album features spoken word from Morfydd Clark who was the lead actress in the new Lord of the Rings series on Amazon.

Ein Zyniker könnte die Vorstellung vertreten, dass die Neuauflage eines Albums mit dem Titel "Es ist eine fremde und seltsame Welt" zu diesem Zeitpunkt mit schmerzlicher Genauigkeit den Nagel auf den Kopf treffen würde. Keine Zyniker hier, sondern nur Musikliebhaber. Wir sind Bureau B und wir haben bereits vier klassische Alben von Der Plan wiederveröffentlicht: Geri Reig - BB104, Normalette Surprise - BB105, Die letzte Rache - BB129 und Japlan - BB 130. Es ist uns eine große Freude, die Neuauflage Nummer fünf zu präsentieren. Zeitgleich veröffentlichen wir mit "Die Peitsche des Lebens" die Nummer sechs und damit auch den (vorläufig) letzten Teil unserer kleinen Reihe klassischer Neuauflagen von DER PLAN-Alben.

Ein Zyniker könnte die Vorstellung vertreten, dass die Neuauflage eines Albums mit dem Titel "Es ist eine fremde und seltsame Welt" zu diesem Zeitpunkt mit schmerzlicher Genauigkeit den Nagel auf den Kopf treffen würde. Keine Zyniker hier, sondern nur Musikliebhaber. Wir sind Bureau B und wir haben bereits vier klassische Alben von Der Plan wiederveröffentlicht: Geri Reig - BB104, Normalette Surprise - BB105, Die letzte Rache - BB129 und Japlan - BB 130. Es ist uns eine große Freude, die Neuauflage Nummer fünf zu präsentieren. Zeitgleich veröffentlichen wir mit "Die Peitsche des Lebens" die Nummer sechs und damit auch den (vorläufig) letzten Teil unserer kleinen Reihe klassischer Neuauflagen von DER PLAN-Alben.

With »Roto«, Derek Piotr revisits the aqueous terrain first explored in his 2016 album »Drono«, where the paradox of water’s stillness and perpetual motion was refracted into looping voices and glitching textures. Conceived as a »spiritual successor« and recorded in 2019, the album has lain dormant for six years before surfacing on Discreet Archive. That stretch of silence seems to have deepened its charge – the sound feels unearthed rather than made, like a whirlpool biding its time in obscurity until now.

Unlike »Drono«’s mosaic of shorter pieces, »Roto« unfurls as two expansive half-hour tracks, allowing Piotr to probe repetition with greater intensity. Vowels accumulate until they shimmer with alien sentience, drones grow dense and psychoacoustic, and the smallest digital artifacts flicker like neural sparks. The result is a work that denies familiarity; recurrence here only breeds strangeness, unspooling into a procession of hidden pulses and altered voices that resist prediction, drawing the listener deeper into a submerged, otherworldly space.

Derek Piotr is a folklorist, researcher and performer whose work focuses primarily on the human voice. His work covers practices including fieldwork, vocal performance, preservation and autoethnography; and is primarily concerned with tenderness, fragility, beauty and brutality. He has collaborated with artists including Scott Solter, Nathan Salsburg and Thomas Brinkmann across various disciplines.

He is lead archivist and creative director of the Fieldwork Archive.

10 years after their debut, City Of All Times audio-visual enquirers John B McKenna and Richard Greenan re-appear as Devonanon, to share the findings of a decade-long sonic experiment. Like its predecessor, Richard & John is a living, breathing collection of field recordings and compositions, gathered gradually from remote corners of the pair's lives. Familiar waypoints - interwoven microtonal synths, regurgitated live performances, polite whispering, and the gurgling hum of vehicles (land and sea) - all fold into the perpetual stew.

Where City read like a crumpled postcard account of fraternal reportage, Richard & John is a tone poem on something more amorphous, and out of time - a garbled history of human closeness, upheaval and mark-making, that seems to buckle and creak like a tapestry with no beginning or end. No two spoonfuls are the same, as our story reels through kosmische library stylings ('Wilderness Engine'), to cortex-quieting free association ('Generate Countryside'), and baroque instrumentation ('Blood Laughing', which features beautiful turns from Masayoshi Fujita on vibraphone, and Rosa Juritz on bassoon).