Category: Releases

Source: Unexplained Sounds Group.

Music For Abandoned Monasteries (preview)

There is something a bit creepy about an abandoned building, knowing that it was once full of life and is now empty, often crumbling and taken back by nature. It’s even more haunting when it’s a monastery. These architectural marvels stand empty and abandoned, providing a fascinating, mysterious and sometimes creepy look not only into the past, but also into their ghostlike present. Eighth Tower invited 15 musicians from all over the world to create music and soundscapes inspired by abandoned monasteries and aiming to evoke the psychological effect they have upon us. https://www.patreon.com/eighthtower

Anthology Of Electroacoustic Music From Finland

There is a long tradition of Electroacoustic music in Finland beginning in the 1950’s with the experimentation of tape music. Finland’s first electronic musical instrument the “Sähkövalopiano” or “Electric Light Piano” was built before this in 1894. It was constructed in the Polytechnic Institute (now Aalto University) in Helsinki. Finland also has a tradition of blending archaic traditional music in the contemporary music scene. Unexplained Sounds Group is proud to investigate that area of music research by publishing an anthology focused on it.

https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-electroacoustic-music-from-finland

Source: New World Records.

JAMES MOORE: DESOLATION POPS

UNSETTLED CHORUSES: A TERRAIN OF HUMMING AND PHONETICS 1930-1974

I, A.M. – ARTIST MOTHER PROJECT: NEW WORKS FOR VIOLIN AND ELECTRONICS

Source: The Quietus.

The recordings featured on Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy were captured during Coltrane’s 1961 residency at New York jazz club Village Gate, for which he was joined by a lineup of musicians that included Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones

Source: Cyclic Law.

SUTEKH HEXEN & FUNERARY CALL “P:R:I:S:M” CD / 2LP / DL (114th Cycle)
We’re proud to announce renewal of our relationship with raw black power ambient ritualists Sutekh Hexen in announcing the band’s colossal new 2LP “P:R:I:S:M”, a full collaboration with Canadian nightmare-weaving enigma Funerary Call (AKA field recording and experimental soundscaping artist Harlow MacFarlane), to be released this summer in collaboration with our good dearest frequent co-conspirators from the US Sentient Ruin.

SHIBALBA “Dreams Are Our World Of Experience” CD / LP / DL (222nd Cycle)
SHIBALBA’s music is saturated with the mysticism of the East. It’s richly detailed and multidimensional, while layered with chanting and broadly defined elements of traditional ritual and shamanic music.
Apart from contemporary synths and guitar drones, the band makes use of bones and skulls as percussion instruments, Tibetan Horns, Tibetan Singing Bowls, bone & horne trumpets, Darbuka’s (goblet drums) as well as ceremonial bells and gongs, to name a few.

The Spirits behind the Shamanic Halls of Shibalba are V.P. Adept & Aldra-Al-Melekh.

Source: Sonic Transmissions Records.

Guts & Skins
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten & Paal Nilssen-Love

Morning Light
Maria Norseth Garli

Heaven Hill Fragmentarium
Nicolas Leirtrø / Ståle Storløkken / Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Source: RogueArt.

Over the course of 200 pages Singularity Codex presents the work of Shipp and his numerous collaborators within the broader jazz and free music continuum, and covers in detail the pianist’s 25 current/forthcoming albums for RogueArt (and one book with poet Steve Dalachinsky). Neither a strict biography nor a discography, this volume includes numerous interviews, photographs, and aesthetic meditations that frame the music, its connections, and surrounding philosophy and history. Whether or not you are familiar with Shipp and his work, this book is a fascinating read.

Source: all that dust.

Aaron Einbond ‘Cosmologies’ (CD and downloads), performed by Séverine Ballon, Alvise Sinivia & Riot Ensemble
What may seem like conventional objects and situations are turned inside out in Einbond’s Xylography and Cosmologies. Closely and ambiently miked, physically and electronically manipulated, from these instruments issue the sound of their materials and of their human music-makers. Listeners feel as up-close as the players, and perhaps even closer, as if they are virtually inside the instruments.

Rósa Lind ‘Kandinksy Kunstwerke’ (CD and downloads), performed by Geoffrey Gartner, Laura Chislett & Mark Knoop
This album features three works from a four-work cycle, each of which has as its starting point a canvas by Wassily Kandinsky and travels on to reflect and refract mythological and scientific views of astronomical phenomena. The common thread is one of perspective: Lind observes a similarity in ‘the way the eye approaches either Kandinsky’s painting or scans the vastness of the sky in search of stellar focal points of light in the black sea of night’.

Soosan Lolavar ‘Every strand of thread and rope’ (binaural download), performed by Sarah Saviet
‘Music in one place.’ Lolavar’s description of how she thinks of this series of pieces at first seems counterintuitive. The musicians involved are based in different cities (Lolavar in London, violinist Sarah Saviet in Berlin) and their creative process draws together practices from Iran and Europe. Yet this is music about shared experience; of creating a particular sound-world together.

Alvin Lucier ‘Wave Songs’ (binaural download), performed by Juliet Fraser
The potential for disorientation is enormous, as the sensation of the air throbbing (whether in the room or in the ear) overwhelms the sense of stable pitch. The microtonal tuning here is no melodic affect but, rather, an exercise in a scientific phenomenon. Through the course of Wave Songs the pitches of the sine tones move ever closer together, seemingly hemming the singer in until she changes the rules of the game.

Newton Armstrong ‘The Book of the Sediments’ (binaural download), performed by Juliet Fraser
Armstrong uses Rachel Carson’s imagery as a prompt to contemplate ‘the interactions between the momentary and the vast, and of endless process as a form of saying’. Performer and listener are invited into this contemplative state in which musical materials, like the ocean sediments, drift in semi-regular motion.

Source: Colectivo Casa Amarela.

Istmo
by Sal Grosso

Recorded during the great pandemic crossing of 2020 – 2021, “Istmo”, Sal Grosso’s third record, retains the naive spirit of his previous works: there are 9 tracks of free structure that constitute as many soundscapes made of sugary melodies and undulating synthesizers – always captured on the first take. The record thus walks in such disparate – but close – territories as Ellen Fullman’s drones, Lyra Pramuk’s experimentations, Steve Hauschildt’s psychedelic ambient, or the atmospheric jazz of Supersilent or The Necks. Make no mistake – this is a powerful, heartfelt record that perfectly illustrates the remarkable musical growth of Sal Grosso over the last couple of years.

Vandoma
by Ricardo Nogueira Fernandes

Vandoma is fog, it is rain, it is white light, it is granite. Vandoma is Portugal, it’s France, it’s England. Vandoma is the beaches of Gaia, it is Serra de Valongo, it is Cabo do Mundo. Vandoma is patron saint. Vandoma is Fontainhas. Vandoma are 14 tracks that evoke the genius loci of 13 places in the city of Porto, Portugal in their spatial and emotional dimension. Each song dialogued with the space to which it was destined. Each song was played and the confrontation between it and its space was recorded. Vandoma is noisy ambient, like Porto.