[ aquarius records — 20th Century Composers ]

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Showing results 251 through 300 of 652.

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Well, it would be nice to see as well as hear what's documented here, but it's still pretty interesting... this Harry Partch-ish music was part of a audio-visual Planetarium show, and was originally released on LP by Folkways in 1959.

Local treasure and sometime AQ-customer Joan Jeanrenaud spent twenty years playing cello with the Kronos Quartet, who if you don't know already produced some of the most lovely and adventurous 20th century new music, collaborating with not only established musicians and composers like Astor Piazzolla, John Cage, David Byrne and Terry Riley, but also bringing to greater light the musics of Africa, Mexico, etc. In '99 Jeanrenaud left the quartet to concentrate on her own work. Here she presents pieces by Philip Glass, Mark Grey, Hamza El Din, Karen Tanaka and Steve Mackey. It's a lovely record. Jeanrenaud's playing is vigorous and bright, active and propulsive -- never muddy, never boring, never melodramatic. The pieces are stylistically distinct -- from the Glass track's repetitive poignancy to her own "Altar Piece," a swirling maelstrom of deep bass notes, insistent and dramatic. Sounds like Joan's gonna be just fine on her own.

RealAudio clip: Altar Piece
RealAudio clip: Metamorphosis Four

Warner Jepson was one of the pioneering electronic composers of the 1960s, working in the San Francisco Tape Music Center and later at the shortlived organization called National Center for Experiments in Television (seriously, there was such a place!). Through both of these small think-tanks, Jepson had the good fortune to work with an incredible amount of early electronics, most notably the Buchla synthesizer. Despite some choice commissions and some friends in high places, Jepson's explorations with electronics only amounted to one proper album - the avant-garde electronic Totentanz recorded as a score for the San Francisco Ballet in 1967. The album was originally pressed up in an edition of 300 copies and sold almost entirely at the stagings of that particular ballet. Nonetheless, Jepson purported to have hundreds of hours of material on cassette that he made during his heyday in the '60s and '70s. The story behind this cassette's discovery and release is a pretty good one too, as Mr. Sanity Muffin himself was trawling through the cassette bins at Urban Ore - a storied recycling and junk shop located on the industrial outskirts of Berkeley, California, and spied the name Warner Jepson handscrawled on the spine of a tape next to the random home dubbed tapes of REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Carole King albums. The tape turned out to be one of those lost Jepson recordings, and Sanity Muffin has seen fit to release this cassette exactly as it was found. One of the many commissions on Jepson's resume was for the David William's installation Tullian. No idea really what that was, or if this is excerpted music for that piece, or if the Tullian Beach Bum was just a riff on that title. But the sounds within are a delirious polyphony of semi-rhythmic, semi-melodic squiggles across the Buchla with echoing patterns at various timbers, reverberations, and pitches swirling throughout the sound design. There are plenty of similarities in the painterly serialist and programmatic approaches that were commonplace in the high-minded works of academic composers from the mid-20th century, all mapped out on the Buchla and tape machine. But there's also plenty of wide-eyed sci-fi expansiveness through zoner-patterned synths that have all of the awe of a Jovian sunrise seen for the first time by human eyes. Fans of Daphne Oram and Tod Dockstader will have a field day with this stuff.

Sitar raga music from Sweden? Sure! On the Swedish label Kning Disk, who last brought us cds by Wolf Eyes and James Blackshaw -- so we'd expect just about anything (interesting) from them. Composer/arranger Jerry Johansson is a sitar player (who studied with sitar master Roop Verma, who was taught by Ravi Shankar). Here he presents his piece "Next Door Conversation", in two parts, 53 minutes total. His sitar is the lead instrument, and in traditional style he's accompanied by santour and tambura -- but also by a violin/violin/viola/cello string quartet from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra! Shades of Kronos, eh? It's a dreamy, slowly unfolding, sitar n' strings soundscape, the Eastern twang of Johansson's sitar calmly contrasting with the more cinematic sweep of the string quartet, each recontextualizing the other. With sounds from the subcontinent and Swedish folk motifs both incorporated, this is a gorgeous East-West hybrid indeed, and crosses over other borders to somehow remind us of everything from Spaghetti Western soundtracks to Chinese orchestral music. Gosh, there's not much more to say other than, enjoy!

MPEG stream: Next Door Conversation Part I (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: Next Door Conversation Part I (excerpt 2)

On the same label (part of the Hundertmark Art Gallery in Germany) that released the last Hermann Nitsch document, comes 'Solar Music' from composer Joe Jones. A gauzy and cloudy shimmering wash of keening high pitched whines, hums and whirrs, and simple and

RealAudio clip: Solar Music 1

This is the second cd documenting composer/inventor/sound artist Joe Jones' Solar Music released on the same label (part of the Hundertmark Art Gallery in Germany) that released the last Hermann Nitsch document. This disc is live and was recorded in the "A gauzy and cloudy shimmering wash of keening high pitched whines, hums and whirrs, and simple and slow, calculatedly tribal percussion. At times it sounds like Pelt or Skullflower, at others an ethereal otherworldly hippie jam ala Taj Mahal Travellers." Totally essential for drone fanatics!

RealAudio clip: Solar Music At Sierksdorf, Ostsee

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Six maximalist guitar pieces played by Seth Josel, who performs compositions by James Tenney, Lois V. Vierk, Phill Niblock, John Cage, and himself. Vierk's composition for five guitars is sheer chiming hypnosis much like the symphonies of Glenn Branca. The one by Niblock is a lengthy white hot drone spanning 30 minutes. Josel's own pieces are incendiary jams a la Caspar Brotzmann.

RealAudio clip: Guitar Too, For Four (performed by Phil Niblock)

The RVNG Int'l label has been killing it lately with 3 incredible archival releases in a row highlighting the marginal worlds of second generation avant-garde ambient electronic auteurs. The first two were the spacey electro-industrial "folk" productions of Craig Leon and the blithely elusive Eno-worship of Seattle's K. Leimer. But it's this third release that we have been most excited about and that is the rare early recordings of France's Ariel Kalma, a polymath musician and spiritual explorer whose sonic endeavors cross-pollinate multiple genres of music including free jazz, minimalism, musique concrete, experimental tape music, long-form ragas and proto-new age devotional ambience. We made Kalma's 1978 masterwork of rainforest field recordings and atmospheric horn and organ textures, Osmose, Record of The Week when it was finally reissued back in 2006. There his interest in the correlations of sound and nature culminated brilliantly after years working with avant-garde musique concrete titan Pierre Henry at the legendary Institut National Audiovisuel, Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM) studios � the same sound laboratory that spawned masterpieces by members Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, and Bernard Parmegiani. But Kalma's restless wanderlust led him to travel, first to India, where he mastered circular breathing to be able to play the saxophone in continuous looping repetitions, then to New York where he briefly joined the mysterious musical spiritual collective, Arica, meeting one of his heroes, Don Cherry along the way. Evolutionary music spans a fertile period of little heard recordings between 1972 and 1979 that were culled mostly from private press lps and rare cassette releases. Terry Riley-ish organ repetitions, Percussive pieces, Experimental vocal tape recordings, ragas, interplanetary jazz motifs and spacious gorgeous ambient drones. A beautiful collection of head music that comes of course highly recommended!!!!

MPEG stream: Almora Sunrise
MPEG stream: Ecstasy Musical Mind Yoga
MPEG stream: Rainy Day
MPEG stream: Les Mots de Tous Les Jours (R�ves Etranges)

Spooky 20th century classical stuff here from composer Kang. Performed by an Italian choral ensemble, singing Latin texts (by Giordano Bruno, "Marbod of Rennes"), with help from Mike Patton (voice), Jessika Kenney (voice), and a whole bunch of Italian musicians on guitars, sitar, trumpets, tuba, trombone.

MPEG stream: Pure Nothing
MPEG stream: The Narrow Garden

Number seven in Table Of The Elements Lanthanides series comes way out of left field. Mike Kelley has been rocking the art world for a while now with his irreverent pop art, often featuring stuffed animals and toys, but those of you less art inclined might know him from his cover/art for Sonic Youth's Dirty album (there's even a picture of a young, greasy haired, pimple faced Kelley on the inside sleeve). But some of you may remember that Kelley was a member of seventies audio terrorists Destroy All Monsters. While that band trafficked mostly in noise rock and audience confrontation, Kelley's contribution to this series is much more 'academic'. And to be honest, its appeal depends heavily on how you feel about spoken word. A thick miasma of hiss and static swirl ominously in the background, while Kelley emotionlessy spews a litany of 'Oh God...' and 'Wow....Wow....' and 'Rolling cigar shapes....' Kinda silly, would have been a whole lot better instrumental as the background is dense and intense. But cool nonetheless. And obviously you gotta buy em all! ----* ----* Two releases from grim black metal genius Xasthur : ----*

The Czech artist Milan Knizak began his art career without much success, getting himself thrown out of Pedagogic Uni Prague, Preliminary Art School Prague, and Art Academy Prague in quick succession. But during the mid '60s, Knizak affiliated himself with

RealAudio clip: Composition N. 1
RealAudio clip: Composition N. 3

Gottfried Michael Koenig is a German-born composer who had spent a decade in the '50s and '60s working for the West German Radio (WDR) assisting the likes of Stockhausen and Ligetti. During this time, he became one of the pioneers of mid-century composition, showing the most panache for electronic composition, all the while maintaining a purist ethos for serialism and modernity as a whole. From the mid '60s until 1986, Koenig had also served as the director for the Institute of Sonology in The Netherlands. This 2cd compendium is an excellent overview of Koenig's work. Even if his compositions for piano and string quartets are slightly tedious, just skip those in favor of the electronic work, especially when Koenig pushes close to Xenakis territory on Terminus X (1967) with its growling electric tones and extended ruminations on static. Suite (1961) is a much more subtle piece with its minimal gestures of gurgling tone patterns coated in a plastic perfection.

MPEG stream: Suite
MPEG stream: Terminus X

Man, do we at ever AQ love that Japanese '70s group the Taj Mahal Travellers! Masters of organic drone, utilising bowed cymbals, violins, loudspeakers, tape loops and all sorts of unique source material. And we've been blessed of late with the reissue of lots

RealAudio clip: Mano-Dharma '74

Latest release from this Bay Area composer, electronic musician and dronologist Gregg Kowalsky. A one sided lp documenting part of his Master's Thesis, which entailed taking one of his electronic compositions, scoring it for a live ensemble and then conducting the performance. Kowalsky enlisted the Contemporary Performance Ensemble, directed by Fred Frith, who also contributed violin. Recorded in 2005 at Mills college, the result was sublime. A gorgeous organic piece that references Feldman and Part and Melnyk as much as Kowalsky's previous works. The strings are low and buzz and throb dramatically, the piano is minor key and delicate, fluttering in brief little flurries, streaks of high end run through the swirling moodiness, over the top voices soar in choral fragments, washes of cymbals sizzle, horns moan, all manner of instruments are smeared into a heaving organic whole, shakuhachi, vibraphone, flute, a sonic cloud constantly expanding, intensifying chordal whir, like some moody rock band with the bones pulled out, leaving just a gloriously amorphous sound shape, slithering and drifting, creeping and billowing, building and building, some sort of classic chorale stretched out into a shimmering dreamlike blur. On the surface, it's a dark drift, but beneath the surface, sounds are roiling and churning, a sonic sea of tension and emotion, subtly psychedelic, a gorgeous, organic, orchestral drone. Packaged in a thick cardstock sleeve, with a Xeroxed yellow paste on cover. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!

The first release from Kreng since 2011, but well worth the wait. While the sound sources on The Summoner are quite the departure from his 2011 release Grimoire, the dark and disorienting atmosphere is still here. Here Kreng (aka composer Pepijin Caudron of Belgium) conducts a dozen string players, creating a twisted and droney orchestral mass that explodes and dies without warning, bringing to mind the terrifying works of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The song titles here, too, tell Caudron's story as the five stages of grief, going from "Denial" to "Acceptance". The first four tracks are dark, twisted, orchestral soundscapes, dynamic and haunted that slowly goad you into Caudron's warped world. The climax of the album is without doubt the titular track, sandwiched between "Depression" and the somber "Acceptance". The 15-minute long track features Belgian doom band Amenra (whose album Mass V we reviewed back in 2013) providing the slow, crushing trudge (with maybe the slightest, SLIGHTEST hint of uplifting melody) to bring the whole piece to a bombastic, epic zenith. Very few out there can capture the range of emotion and atmosphere that Kreng can - terrifying, cathartic, bleak, and maybe just a little bit uplifting. For fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, The Caretaker, and anything on the Miasmah label.

MPEG stream: Anger
MPEG stream: Depression
MPEG stream: The Summoning

The Kronos Quartet maps the world of sad nomadic musics from Yugoslavia, Portugal, India, Mexico, Romania, Iran, Lebanon, Argentina, and the semi-real land where Terry Riley is from (you know... California). Pleasant background music for white people who like to get drunk on sangria, then lie about how intoxicated they are, all the while dancing like a rhythmless idiot and talking on a cell phone to some poor sap who can't get them off the phone.

Legendary San Francisco ensemble tackles grand sounds from around the globe.

In this latest outing for the Kronos Quartet, the fab four team up with Azerbaijani composer / pianist Franghiz Ali-Zedeh. Like her home country, which lies on the crossroads of Europe and the East, Ali-Zedeh's music is an amalgam of European chamber music and the traditional folk music of her country and the multitude of cultural influences that criss cross paths there. This collection includes three pieces commissioned for the Kronos Quartet between 1993 and 2001 and one solo piece for piano performed by Ali-Zedeh.

MPEG stream: Apsheron Quintet
MPEG stream: Mugam Sayagi

With tracks recorded in various Mexican locations and at Skywalker Ranch up in Marin County, the Kronos Quartet have released another revelatory album of new music that takes its inspiration not from dusty ole classical shite (the territory of most string quartets), but the reality of the world around us, right here right now. And the peripatetic Kronos are no strangers to world travel, this time touching down in Mexico. An amazingly broad spectrum of Mexican music is lovingly performed / collaborated on / reinterpreted by Kronos (although why they imported an Argentinian producer is a headscratcher): There's a cover of a tune by the recently-deceased king of space age bachelor pad music Esquivel. There's a STUNNING version of the classic "Perfidia", with Kronos sounding like a '50s movie orchestra playing hugely and sentimentally in the background while a one-armed street musician named Carlos Garcia plays the MUSICAL LEAF. That's right. It's an ivy leaf. And it's so sweet and cute it might make you cry. There's also a version of "Tabu" (Taboo) where Kronos is accompanied by clickety clackety wood percussion. A medley of music from three popular Mexican tv shows! A piece where they've retuned their strings to correspond with the scale of the accompanying "plasmaht" (an instrument whose strings resonate in response to electromagnetic waves from the surrounding environment), and then play them zither-like with pencils! A collaboration with the hugely popular Mexican rock group Cafe Tacuba! And even (gasp) a dance mix... joyously delivered by Plankton Man of the Nortec Collective... and my god there's still more. Whew, it's a lot to handle isn't it? But the brilliance of Kronos is that somehow they manage to hold the thing together so well. It's a combination of respect for the musicians / cultures they borrow from and collaborate with, plus the sound of a string quartet that has always expanded the boundaries of what a modern string quartet can do, and mean. I *strongly* recommend you go to http://www.nonesuch.com to read the very detailed stories behind each track, because they're unfortunately not included in the liner notes..

RealAudio clip: El Sinaloense
RealAudio clip: Perfidia
RealAudio clip: El Llorar
RealAudio clip: El Sinaloense (Dance Mix)

Double cd with previously-released selections from Henryck Gorecki (that's pronounced ~goretsky~, folks) to Arvo Part to Astor Piazzolla to Tigran Tahmizyan. Disc #2 features 4 songs never released before: pieces by Jimi Hendrix, Scott Johnson, Michael Daugherty, and Raymond Scott.

We've already sold a ton of these. It's not hard to see why. Everybody loves Bollywood film music, and Asha Bhosle is the queen of Indian cinema singers. And the always-adventurous chamber group the Kronos Quartet are pretty cool as well, aren't they? So the idea of Kronos teaming up with Bhosle to record a bunch of the best film songs written by famous Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman (1939-1994) is a fine one, and it's worked out marvelously on this disc. Rather than the hyperkinetic, energetic style of music that accompanies the big production dance numbers so often characteristic of Bollywood film, these tracks are of a more languid, moody variety, full of tender sentiment and romantic yearning. Perfect for the sad yet uplifting strings of Kronos (with help on tabla and other percussion from guest Zakir Hussain, and also Wu Man on pipa). And of course perfect for the lovely voice of Bhosle, who sang so many of these songs originally. We said "moody" but these moods do range widely, from sad to seductive to joyous. This package (which comes ensconced in a nice metallic cardstock slipcase) includes a thick booklet full of detailed notes and photos. You get lyrics and even a synopsis of each of the films in which these songs first appeared, generally back in the early '70s. All in all, gorgeous tribute to Burman and his classic Bollywood ballads, and mostly likely a worthy introduction to them for many.

MPEG stream: Dum Maro Dum (Take Another Toke)
MPEG stream: Mehbooba Mehbooba (Beloved, O Beloved)
MPEG stream: Nodir Pare Utthchhe Dhnoa (Smoke Rises Across The River)

MPEG stream: Formations

Continuing to dig into the vaults of 'new music' composers, Ampersand offers another reissue from the collaborative team of Christina Kubisch and Fabrizio Plessi. Just as their previous outing "Two and Two" centered conceptually around the primal

RealAudio clip: Tempo Liquido 1

This CD is the same disc that accompanied the recent monograph that Edition RZ published about the lifework of German electro-acoustic composer Christina Kubisch. With the exception of the first piece which dates back to 1988, "Vier Stucke"

RealAudio clip: Altgerauscharchiv

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. "Two & Two" is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and Italian experimentalist Fabrizio Plessi. Basing their four pieces on the four prime elements - earth, fire, air, and water - Kubisch and Plessi each played a single instrument / object with a perpetual repetitive motion. The two had amplified the objects in a specific manner, to extract more unusual characteristics than sounds usually associated with voice, metronome, steel drum, ventilators and water jet. The resulting continuous sound streams have a beautiful organic quality not far from David Jackman's stunning arsenal of bowed metal in Organum. This is the original late 70s pressing from the Cramps Records offshoot.

A few months back we were able to pick up a few copies of the original Cramps '70s vinyl of this album, but now the hardworking Ampersand label has reissued it on CD. Two & Two is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and

RealAudio clip: Air
RealAudio clip: Earth
RealAudio clip: Fire

Another great document of 20th century (verging on 21st in this case) classical music, on the always-pretty-amazing German label Kairos. This disc features three pieces from the 1990s by Kyburz, a Lagos-born, German-educated Swiss composer who currently

RealAudio clip: The Voynich Cipher Manuscript pt.4
RealAudio clip: Parts pt. 1

Lovely has done a good thing and reissued some classic Joan La Barbara recordings from the seventies along with some rarities from the eighties to boot. When it comes to extended vocal technique, La Barbara is the queen. Not only can she boast a lengthy career as one of the top vocal performers in the avant garde and a strong resume of academic compositions, but she's even got a film credit as the voice of one of the evil baby aliens in Alien Resurrection. How many performers of her stature in academia can claim to have voiced a slimy little puppet? Not many we'd guess. The set is divided up into an "Explorations" disc and "The Music" disc, and includes her entire 1976 self-released album "Voice Is The Original Instrument". The "Explorations" half is all live, and/or real time, solo voice performances. None of them use any form of processing (digital or otherwise) of the voice and as such are not just intimate, but down right claustrophobic to listen to. Reactions here in the store (from customers and staff alike) range from extreme discomfort to uncontrolled mirth. Andee said that this was the kind of stuff he liked to do as a kid. La Barbara's vocalizations range from slow hooting glissandos like a breathing exercise gone awry to feral animal-esque growls. The second disc, while including much of the same vocal techniques as the first, contains La Barbara's studio works using multi-tracks to over lay multiple overdubbings of growls and such on tape. A definite must for fans of sound poetry. MPEG Download: "Circular Song" [/audio/joanlabarbcircular.mp3] MPEG Stream: "Circular Song" [/audio/joanlabarbcircular.m3u]

MPEG stream: Circular Song
MPEG stream: Twelvesong

Another winner from AQ fave Phil Niblock's always eclectic and engaging IX label. While sometimes stuff on IX tends a little too much toward the academic (and maybe this one is no different), the music on 'Ten Thousand Shades Of Blue' sounds much more

RealAudio clip: Bronze Cloud Disk

Those artists, musicians, misanthropes, and just plain weirdos who not only exist musically on the fringes but have planted their entire existence on the edge have long been the greatest inspirations of Aquarius Records. For proof, you could scroll through oddball recordings that have earned the honor of Aquarius Record Of The Week. There was the Finnish sound artist Terje Isungset who crafted not just one album, but two from untreated percussive instruments entirely made of ice. Hans Edler thrilled us with his 1970s transformation from teen idol into short-circuited electronic composer. The protracted ululations of the profoundly cracked Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant were as transcendent as anything that Lamonte Young had to offer, yet also had that creepy cult of personality vibe to boot. And who could forget Kathy McGinty? But one of the earliest recordings that truly made our collective jaw drop was the 3" cd from French-Canadian composer Jean-Francois Laporte called Mantra. Here was a mighty fine 20 minute composition of delicious vibrations, rattles, mechanical hum, and industrial drones that came with a particularly alluring back story: the source material to Mantra was a Zamboni -- the unusual machine only found at hockey rinks responsible for resurfacing its ice. The one catch to Laporte's Zamboni sourced masterpiece was that we could never verify that a Zamboni was the actual source material. We heard from 'reliable sources' that Mantra is the sound of a Zamboni; and we wanted so desperately to believe that this was the case, just because the Zamboni is such an amazing and eccentric beast of industrial engineering. Before this turns into a dialectic on epistemology, we here at Aquarius discovered that we had been duped by a couple of mischievous DJs on KPFA without the knowledge or consent of Jean-Francois Laporte. It turns out that Laporte used nothing but a common air-compressor in composing Mantra. This factual unveiling should not in any way take away from the splendor of that piece. Here's what we had to say about Mantra many moons ago: "Mantra opens with a trio of motors starting up and emitting a gentle purr. As these engines warm up and shift through various perfunctory cycles, a wide spectrum of metallic vibrations slowly spins through the stereo field. After a marvelous set of transitions between drones, there is the rattling sound as if a screw or bolt had been loosened by the vibrations, with two pieces of metal beginning a clamorous bell-ringing arrhythmia. When these motors finally are shut down, those pieces of metal still resonate for a beautifully sustained coda." That 3" cd came out almost a decade ago, became a classic, and went out of print. Thankfully, 23five Incorporated has rescued Mantra from the dustbin by issuing the first major compendium of Laporte's work in the form of Soundmatters. While we've already sung the praises of Mantra, the remainder of Soundmatters is well worth investigating on its own. The opening track "Electro-Prana" is a pristine set of field recordings of a wind that ripped through Montreal, when the city was silenced by a winter time blackout. It's a pure, chilling sound of whistling wind overtaking the urban landscape. The next piece is the only digitally rendered composition on Soundmatters, yet Laporte brings his intuitive expressionism to a series of spiraling drones that easily rival those of your favorite minimalist (e.g. Niblock, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Xenakis, etc.). For those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing Laporte's live concerts, the third piece will certainly be familiar. He's built an instrument with a series of car horns and elongated trumpet bells attached to an air compressor with each of the valves controlled by foot pedals. This instrument can generate infinitely sustainable, blaring drones from each of the horns; and Laporte craftily layers these sounds for incredible, dynamic results. Well, for this recording, Laporte lugged this instrument into the hull of a giant cargo ship and recorded this composition using the massive reverb of that space and the results are simply jaw-dropping. Imagine the most Nordic bellow from a Wagner symphony stretched out into its melancholic, raw sound and allowed to decay in space and time. Wow! Following this is the aforementioned Mantra; and then Soundmatters' final piece which explores a quiet, yet thoroughly rich harmonic tapestry produced by a quartet of saxophones that could be Laporte's imagined summit between Evan Parker and Morton Feldman with rasping breaths of sound breaking across a silent event horizon with the ghostly energy of subatomic particles flickering and dissolving in a cloud chamber before amassing into a delirious swarm of Tony Conrad-esque acoustic dissonance. It's all utterly magnificent and one of finest collections of 'serious' composition that we've come across.

MPEG stream: Electro-Prana
MPEG stream: Boule qui roule...
MPEG stream: Danse le ventre du dragon
MPEG stream: Mantra

For RVNG's third installment in their archival series (the other two being the great Harald Grosskomp and Sensation's Fix collections), the focus is on lesser known American ambient visionary, Kerry Leimer (or, K. Leimer, the abbreviated initial a nod to Kafka's Joseph K from The Trial). Hailing from Seattle, where he began his Palace of Light imprint in the late seventies (one of the first experimental labels in the region), Leimer had an almost savant-like obsession with generative music largely spurred on not only by the influences of Dada and Surrealism but also the works of Cluster, Eno, Terry Riley and Robert Fripp of which he saw a musical corollary, in that the tape loop became its own instant but fatalist structure. Realizing the potential to compose his own music with little background or training, Leimer used second-hand tape machines, a mini-moog and other cheap instruments and developed a vast archive of recordings. He took cues from the DIY cassette culture of the burgeoning new wave and punk scenes of Seattle and began carefully packaging and releasing his own records as well as cultivating a scene of experimental artists and releasing their works as well. Instead of reissuing Leimer's Palace of Light recordings, RVNG digs deeper into his archives to highlight unreleased works from as early as 1975 to reveal a wide range of styles and forms: billowy, delicate and glacial as well as pensive, rhythmic and nervous, but all of an elegant unified voice. It never seems like Leimer is trying on hats, but rather investigating the possibilities of sound given limited parameters. This is an amazing release that is sure to bring Leimer's work out of the shadows. Highest Recommendation!

MPEG stream: Porcelain
MPEG stream: Eno's Aviary
MPEG stream: Assemble and Diffuse
MPEG stream: Lonely Boy

This is a reissue of one of those deep "in-the-know" records that we're perplexed that we had somehow never heard of before now, especially given its pedigree. It seems to be one of those weird anomaly recordings that when it's not acting as a "proto" example of genres that now exist today (dub-step and minimal techno), it works as a bridge between genres we never imagined being connected before (new age and industrial music, minimalist composition and new wave, minimal synth and ethno-folk music). It's a rare six-degrees-of-separation record that bafflingly connects Suicide to John Fahey, and it's utterly gorgeous to boot. Craig Leon may not be a well-known name to most, but he was the producer or co-producer behind many of the bands of our youth including Blondie, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Suicide, The Weirdos, DMZ, The Zero's. The Bangles and 45 Grave. But he's also a classically trained composer and orchestrator who has worked with Lucio Pavoratti, Sir James Galway and The London Symphony Orchestra. Nommos was the first album of his own material, originally released in 1981 on John Fahey's Takoma label and there really is just nothing quite like it. With evocative titles like "Donkeys Bearing Cups", "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife" and "She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap", Leon uses minimal synthesis to explore repetitive rhythm and texture in hypnotic trance inducing compositions. The opener, "Ring With Three Concentric Circles" explores a kraut-y kosmiche sound employing cosmic synth washes over skeletal mechanical rhythms, but it's the second track, "Donkeys Bearing Cups" that prognosticates many of the production tropes of modern dubstep and minimal techno, the shuffling almost dance-y mechanized rhythms, as well as the squelched siren noise that opens it. Many of the tracks could be paired down backing tracks for Suicide songs, minus Alan Vega's vocals and Martin Rev's knack for propulsion. Instead Leon seems to dwell on the nuance of his robotic rhythms, tweaking the reverb and decay in bass pulses and cymbal clangs, but encasing them in a beautiful floating stasis. The longest track at nearly 12 minutes, "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife", seems to have the least going on. It's plodding hiccupping rhythm stretching for minutes before we notice a woman's voice almost operatically singing way off in the background. Her voice almost feels like another synthetic texture in the composition and we at first had to turn the volume down to see if we were hearing things, but it's just another impeccable detail that Leon is carefully layering and weaving into seemingly bare-bone compositions making us ever conscious of the meditative nature of the work. This is definitely a producer's record, and an incredible one at that! If you are a fan of modern techno composers like Vladislav Delay, Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, anything on the Dead-Cert label, or even outlier composers like Moondog, Julius Eastman or Barton Smith, this is essential! Download card included!

MPEG stream: Ring With Three Concentric Circles
MPEG stream: Donkeys Bearing Cups
MPEG stream: Four Eyes To See The Afterlife

The usually academic-oriented XI label ventures into the "underground" with this release from the singular New York guitarist/critic/sometime indie-rocker Alan Licht. A New York Minute sees Licht exploring two muscial approaches, with one of these two discs revolving around studio-only projects and the other documenting live work. The studio compositions are, we must confess, a mixed bag of conceptualism, opening with the title track, a tape collage of weather reports broadcast by a NYC radio station during the month of January 2001. Licht's intent was to reveal that these weather reports are mediated experiences far removed from the actuality of the weather. Perhaps too obvious an idea, and it really just sounds like you've got the radio on. But things get much better for the remainder of the disc, as Licht ventures into a more satisfyingly "musical" zone of fragmented minimalism scribed from multi-tracked guitar, organ, and bass drones. Disc two is where Licht really shines, live with no overdubs. Here he presents a series of guitar based compositions/improvisations that suggest the maturation of indie-rock into minimalist mantras. Unlike the guitar symphonies of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca, Licht's pieces are incredibly intimate and quiet meditations, with repeated phrases from his chiming guitar occasionally accompanied by a dissonant fuzz or a whistful minor chord tone. These two very long pieces are pleasant recapitulations of the drone-rock godhead prowess of Thurston Moore (as per his "Psychic Hearts" avant-jangle mode, not his big muff improv freak out mode), the monochromatism of Henry Flynt, and even the spartan blues solos of Loren Mazzacane Connors, with whom Licht has collaborated on a number of occasions. These transcendent drones of jangliness more than make up for the conceptual inadequacies found on disc one. Really nice.

MPEG stream: A New York Minute
MPEG stream: 14, Second, Fifth

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

As decreed by the dual monarchs of the Kingsdom of Elgaland / Vargaland (those being CM von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren), Swedish composer Rune Lindblad should be held in the same canonical reverie as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Pierre Schaeffer. For Lindblad engaged the spirit of ardent innovation, brash risktaking, and an unwavering social agenda that could easily be found in The lp is much more loose in its interpretation of Lindblad with Brommage Dub pulling off a good Monolake / Chain Reaction piece of minimalist techno, and Jean-Louis HuhtaJ offering some leftfield electronica a la Two Lone Swordsmen or Plaid. Nice work, but doesn't really hold much insight into Lindblad's work beyond distant samples. Nevertheless, this is an excellent overview of Lindblad's work and his influence over contemporary Swedish experimental electronics.

The Swedish composer Mats Lindstrom is the studio director for the storied EMS studios in Stockholm, whose mission for the advancement of electro-acoustic music and sound art began way back in 1964. BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, Brian Lustmord, and Stephen O'Malley all passed through the studios in their respective careers, alongside a plethora of more composerly types who we're not all that familiar with. While the connection was never made all that clear, it was probably during O'Malley's residency at EMS when he first met Lindstrom and became familiar with his work, which is now anthologized for the first time on O'Malley's imprint Ideologic Organ. Lindstrom's aesthetic harkens back to the classic era of musique concrete and post-serialist electronic composition from the '60s (e.g. Pierre Schaefer, Xenakis, Nordheim, etc.), playing with the metaphors of his sounds much more than the semantic detachment that usually embodies such acousmatic practices. Take for example the title track, which must refer to the Russian fighter jet, as the track was commissioned for an aviation museum in St. Petersburg and races forward and backward with jet engine roars, possibly simulated, possibly recorded, all of which is surgically cut with mechanical clank and industrial hum. The two IBM tracks clatter away with the anachronistic sounds of typewriters, rigorously collaged with bizzaro scrapes, gratings, and atonal tactile events more in keeping with the irr. app. (ext.) / Nurse With Wound realm of sonic fuckery. The finale is a demonic tape-piece of continuously ascending violin notes that could practically be a brilliant reworking of the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T soundtrack in the style of Penderecki. Excellent stuff!

MPEG stream: Mig
MPEG stream: IBM I
MPEG stream: Children Of Paradise

Controversial as always, Brooklyn's Liturgy, the band 'troo' black metallers love to hate, is back. And it's not just purists who have found Liturgy's self-proclaimed 'transcendental black metal' (and accompanying manifesto) to be way too pretentious, arty, overly intellectual and dare we say hipsterish. And yeah, sure, Liturgy ARE intellectual and/or pretentious, but they also make some freaking amazing, weird music. So let's get all that out of the way by saying, they can call it whatever they want, just don't expect us to read the manifesto. To us, ok, maybe we wouldn't really consider them a bonafide black metal band, but the music they make wouldn't exist (probably) if there weren't such a thing as black metal. It's a part of their sound that they, well, have transcended? They're definitely their own 'thing' whatever it might be, a thing that beyond the black metal elements also incorporates math rock and academic new music and IDM electronica and other strange stuff besides. Totally up our alley in other words - although making The Ark Work an aQ Record Of The Week was also was a wee bit controversial here, 'cause we'll admit right off the bat that this isn't an easy album to sit through all at once. It's just so tripped out and CRAZY and exhausting, as you mentally process what you're hearing. But even if you can't take it all in one sitting, it's the sort of thing where we swear you'll be compelled to play individual tracks on repeat, over and over, just to get your head around 'em, and because certain parts can be so intense and mesmerizing, you want to really try to fully absorb/understand the awesomeness of them before experiencing the next draining yet uplifting track. So Record Of The Week it is, none can deny that it's an impressive piece of work and unlike anything else really. It's gonna have you going, what IS this? Very aQ-worthy, indeed. Liturgy's bandleader, guitarist/vocalist/composer Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (whose name is only slightly less plausible than, say, Guy Mann-Dude, anyone remember that '80s metal shredder?) is one ambitious & talented dude... man... guy. Some pretentiousness may be a side effect of that, but whatever. It's not like we're paying attention to the conceptual lyrics about who knows what (though you might, they could be worthwhile). We're just busy being blown away by all the choppy stop-start arrangements; the symphonic horn parts; the insectoid guitar buzz that sounds like a Glenn Branca guitar orchestra made up of a whole bunch tiny, tiny, pygmy-like black metal guitarists; the mesmeric, trance-inducing drumming by the inhuman Greg Fox (Guardian Alien); the glitchy digital stutter that, seizure-like, grips bits of these tracks occasionally; the post-rocky, sea-saw way these tracks can build and build; the sheer proggy/mathy grandiosity of the whole thing, and all the other surprises, including, despite this music's difficulty-factor, some really beautiful, blissful parts too. There are bagpipes, too, along with the trumpet and trombone, all played by guest musicians, but in addition there are also synthesized MIDI horns on here, the latter giving a bit of the vibe of an outsider composer realizing his epic opus with DIY bedroom recording technology. Then there are the processed vocals, also kinda melodic, but chant-like, a mantric supplication, sorta sounding like Om, but with the tape sped up perhaps or otherwise manipulated, and still quite emotive. Yeah, we said they sure came up with something that doesn't sound like anything else, at least not anything that exists, though we can come up with some this-meets-that, hybrid of this-and-that esoteric band math equations to try to describe it, like, um, Orthrelm doing their version of Om (if Om attended the Church Universal and Triumphant), or Phantomsmasher goes to conservatory... or how 'bout this: the track "Vel Valhaal" sounds like a song by outsider epic metallers Realmbuilder, remixed by Venetian Snares, with a gamelan thrown in for good measure, mashed up with a Herman Nitsch aktion. How's that? We're trying. If all that's not ridiculous enough, oh then there's the fact that Liturgy recently they appeared on an episode of NBC TV show The Blacklist, with freakin' Peter Fonda behind the drum kit. WTF? If haters gonna hate anyway, you might as well cash in with surreal shit like that. You've got your whole life to listen to this Liturgy album, so don't delay, get it now! While maybe we can't say yet for sure, we think it's one we will be coming back to when some other, more acceptably 'troo black metal' albums are long forgotten. Oh, and 'cause we told 'em we were making it a Record Of The Week, Thrill Jockey has kindly offered a special BONUS for folks who buy it from us, and only us, this week. While they last, we'll be including a download coupon with each purchase that gets you an mp3 of the crazy remix that Soft Pink Truth (Drew from Matmos) did of the track "Vitriol", which is otherwise is only available on the version of the cd released in Japan. It's not as if Liturgy isn't already insane and fucked up enough sounding, but you can imagine what SPT does to 'em. FYI the swank gatefold double vinyl version includes a download of the full album, too, while the gatefold cd version has no need of that.

MPEG stream: Follow
MPEG stream: Vel Valhaal
MPEG stream: Quetzalcoatl

60 composers from 18 countries commissioned to score 60 second pieces for piano (and occasionally tape). Go! Quick!! FASTER!!!