In 1976 the fairly square “Movieplay S.A.” imprint (via their slightly hipper “Serie Gong”) quietly issued this monster of a live-electronic / psych-freakout opus (oddly, alongside canonic titles by Inti-Illimani, Victor Jara, et.al ... all considerably more “Inside”) by the then-unknown composers Eduardo Polonio & Horacio Vaggione, recording under the name It. Predating the latter’s canonic Cramps-label debut “La Maquina Del Cantar” by a couple of years, this is miles away from the controlled generative transfixiations of said, instead figuring around the more iterative synthesizer, organ, guitar, and bass basheries laid down by the pair & post-processed heavily into something more in line w/ the best of Krautrock’s studio-excesses (Günter Schickert’s less rhythmically conservative work & the more outré Faust experiments come to mind, but there are also sections that are heavily reminiscent of Seeselberg, Anar Band, & even some of Schnitzler’s early solo outings) ...Unbelievably great, one of the (unheralded) missing links in the Electronic-Psych canon, brought out into the open after remaining a (well-guarded, I’d literally never heard of this until now) secret. This Creel Pone Edition recreates the original edition's gatefold via a snazzy metallic, pearlized 6-panel booklet. --- Creel Pone, 2007

Continuing in the Igloo appreciation thread, here is a replication of IGL 008; Jacques Bekaert's 1981 eponymous LP - following 1979's "Summer Music" for Lovely - containing three tape pieces composed between 1969 & 1978, featuring contributions by a who's who of 60s & 70s Avant Garde & Fluxus figures - Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, David Behrman, David Rosenboom, Maggi Payne, George Lewis, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Ryo Koike, amongst many others. The extended "Late Lunch" - at 28 minutes barely fitting onto an LP side - was composed in 1978; it's a bizarre pastiche of instrumental Concrète figures, subtly tape-delayed per each stereo channel & bordering on the inaudible at times that has, in spots, the same aleatoric Tape-Collage energy of pieces such as Dub Taylor's "Lumiére" or Luis De Pablos's "We (Nosotros);" yet retaining a more composerly lilt that makes me think of another recent Creel Pone "Graduate" - David Cope's "K • Weeds." "A Summer Day At Stony Point" was composed in 1969 Brussels' Studio de Musique Electronique APELAC & comes out of the gate with all pistons firing via a spectacularly bleep-oriented phase of errant electronics & backwards-masked squawks before heading into a long section of tape-echo'ed insectoid formations & vague held-tone Oscillator drift. Finally, "Mon Petit Album" was prepared in 1974 at Mills' CCM - Center of Contemporary Music & consists of Bekaert & Kosugi's flute & violin phrasings wrapped around a subtly transfigured array of processed sounds, both alienating & simultaneously quite welcoming. Both "Late Lunch" & "Mon Petit Album" were used as scores to experimental films by Akiko Iimura. An amazing selection of pieces that straddle the divide between Ensemble Composition, Live Electronic augmentation & GRM styled assemblage of constituent instrumental playing; if you've only heard the - frankly, tepid - Lovely outing, this should rewire your brain suitably as to Bekaert's range & prowess. --- Creel Pone, 2007

At the top of my personal holy grail list for a number of years has been this unobtainable side of Agitprop Musique Concrète by the Composer Ivan Pequeño, composed from 1973-1975 at Paris' Studio de Musique Expérimentale du Centre Americain & at Belgrade's Studio de Musique Electronique du Treci Program-Radio & issued on Aldo Pagani's mythic Eleven label - home of Franco Leprino's "Integrati… Disintegrati", amongst other gems. The A-Side's "¡Ahora!" ("Now!") weaves the Composer's interstitial, claustrophobic narration of Wilhelm Reich & Pablo Neruda texts (done with a certain "mic down the throat" immediacy) into a series of transfixing synthesis patterns - not too removed from the sheets of sound simultaneously being conjured by François Bayle & Bernard Parmegiani on the other side of town - into quite an aggressive mix of full-blown Electronic Histrionics incorporating heavily treated recordings of Fidel Castro's 1962 "Second Declaration of Havana" speech."Y Removiero Con Sus Alas El Tiempo Estancado" - translated by Pequeño himself via email as "Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows... and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside" - wraps García-Márquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch", read by Sara Bourasseau & Francisco Zumarque, around a stellar array of diffuse, precision electronics, recalling Dieter Kaufmann's "Herbstpathetique" & Luis De Pablo's "We (Nosotros)." This is an absolutely incredible document of Political Electronic Music, on par with Max Keller's "SMI," Ilhan Mimaroglu's "Sing Me a Song of Songmy" and the like; one of the real highlights in the late Creel Pone campaign, close to three years in the works. Included for reference is Pequeño's only other appearance on record; in a synthesizer duet with Oliver Lake. --- Creel Pone, 2007

Amazingly well-timed compendium of See/Hear 1 & 2, both released exactly 49 years ago this month (well, going on 50 actually, in September 1968; this one's been in the works for a few months, mainly due to the insanely effort-oriented reproduction of all of the printed ephemera present in the inner pocket of "The First See + Hear" - all recreated here in perfect 5/12 scale in the form of ten separate inserts grouped into four "folios") &, other than Bill Bissett & Th Mandan Massacre's canonic "Awake In Th Red Desert" comprise the entire discography of the label / series. Covering a who's who of the Canadian Sound Poetry & Avant-Garde figures including Bp Nichol, Jim Brown, Wayne Carr, Ross Barrett, Al Neil, Lionel Kearns, and the Australian Composer Bruce Clarke, the first half here collects a scattershot array of early work from everyone involved, dovetailed a fashion similar to "Iowa Ear Music" into a continuous mode. The second covers "Oh See Can You Say", credited solely to Brown but heavily featuring Carr & Barrett, essentially continuing in the same trajectory. It's not too far off from "Indeterminacy" in that Brown's stream-of-consciousness Sound/Poetry narratives are often interjected by Carr's abstract & frankly dynamite Psychedelic synthesizer work. Ross Barrett's solo track weaves chill sitar zones through the matrix, but it's mostly in & of the voice/electronic amalgam, with a few choice zaps straight from the cortex of the acid-damaged late 60s milieu.  SEE/HEAR is a RECORD MAGAZINE, a quarterly publication of recordings of contemporary sound arts. Contemporary sound arts are usually discussed in terms of certain categories such as electronic music, experimental acoustic music, sound poetry, projective verse, chance music, improvised forms and so on, however what should probably be recognized is that sound arts are continually evolving and to create categories only restricts the way in which we think about sound. Mixed media, combinations of sound and visual arts, or combinations of different modes of sound art, are easily seen as results of our electric environment, and are as valid as the already accepted sound forms. Comes with insert about the recordings. From the insert: A1 for Lennon and Mccartney. A4 was commissioned for the Adelaide 1968 Arts Festival by the Melbourne ISCM, fragments of poetry were chosen at random from the unpublished works of the late Ann Pickburn. A5 is a 30-minute dramatic cantata written for a Masters composition recital and performed at the University of British Columbia in the spring 1968. B4 made September 1968. --- Creel Pone, 2018

An absolute masterpiece by OTO favourite Malverne Brume All tracks recorded live with some processing after. Made using synthesiser, sampler, found objects, bells, metal objects, voice and cassette recorder --- Mastering by Mark Klon Images by Malvern Brume Layout by Ben Waggett and Malvern Brume Music & Mixing by Malvern Brume in 2021 --- Infant Tree, 2021

If its broken, don't fix it. Further recordings made during the mess of the past year which you may hear as a shining pathway out of the shit, or a "Back to the egg!" warning cry. Pour yrself a drink, put on those headphones and let the gamble commence. Featuring tracks from Hobo Sonn, Muyassar Kurdi & Ka Baird, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, A.S, Raymond Cummings, Hardworking Families, Stone Cornelius, Dora Doll, Duncan Harrison, LDSN, Angela Sawyer & Ethan Marsh, Glands Of External Secretion, Tania Caroline Chen, Mark Groves, Staubitz & Waterhouse, Kraus, Kate Armitage, Constance/Nyoukis and RRS. --- Chocolate Monk, 2021 --- Artwork - Bill Nace

Another snapshot of lockdown life here on the shitty Brexit Isles, This time Odie ji Ghast aka Greta Buitkute (Labas Krabas, Historically Fucked etc) invites you to their abode in the thriving creative hive of Gateshead (don't call it Newcastle, ya bam!). Multitracked vocals (both gibber and song) get mixed in with dictaphone, home appliances, keyboards and "loud thoughts". An intimate insight into the clutter revolution."2020 summer full of domesticity that's soaked in time slow moving back and forth between arising direction and reflections on past crumbles" - Odie ji Ghast --- Chocolate Monk, 2021

More processed surreal appeal from Wino Lodge's hardest working dweller. The words are garbled, but the tapes and gadgets are in enough oscillation to keep your ass anodic. It's hard to believe Miss Constance's craft graft wasn't always so strong but two chance meetings at a early age set her on the path of prevelance. Firstly meeting the Tartan Lads in Blackburn Chemists at the age of 7 where "Scotland's top performing duo" informed her "even a wee lassie can wear a skirt of many colours." and just a few years later a caged Myna bird in a pub in Coldingham told her "the life of an artist is a fucktards waddle!" or maybe it was the other way about, either way she implores you to fill your boots with fruits & vegetables, create and be damned. Heed. --- Chocolate Monk, 2021 --- CDR, Edition of 60

With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak. Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted (almost) hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. --- Mastered by Julian Tardo at Church Road Studios. .Edition of 150 --- Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society, 2021

A sparse and subtle jungle comprises the pieces that make up "pietra e oggetto". It is subtle, as such it remains in the memory. Thanks to the device of silence, which is like the air in between things, it allows time for what we have heard to imprint on our acoustic sketchpad. Like closing your eyes to preserve a memory and then moving on to the next. We feel a certain privilege in listening to these undecidable environments; these composite and hybrid objects filled with synthetic biodiversity, on the threshold between nature and culture. We access this privilege thanks to the cutting operation, a coring practice that cuts out salient acoustic narratives, fished (and then triggered) from a potentially limitless flow; rooms of occurrences and dark pink rustles from the undergrowth. --- Luciano Maggiore is a Palermo-born, London-based musician whose work is characterised by the use of speakers and several analogue/digital devices (samplers, CD players, walkmans, tape recorders) and addresses the performativity of the musical act, the perception of it, and the obscurity that emanates from it. His main interests include mechanisms of sound diffusion, performance, repetition, endurance, non-humananimal languages, dance, folklore. With Louie Rice, he started NO-PA/PA-ON, a project that deals with performing score-based works, both acoustic and amplified. His works are published by Balloon & Needle, Boring Machines, Consumer Waste, Hideous Replica, Kohlhaas, Palustre, Senufo editions, 1000Füssler, TakuRoku, Triscele Registrazioni and Tulip records. --- Recorded and edited between May 2019 and May 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Liner notes by Gaspare Caliri, translated by Laura Matilde Mannino. Cover drawing by Luciano Maggiore. Design by Matteo Castro.

Matt 6-page Digipack with drawings by Luciano Maggiore on the inside panels. It contains one long track. --- 150 copies limited edition. Recorded and edited in London between November 2020 and April 2021. --- edizioni luma, 2021

9 short pieces, based on cassette recorders and small electronics. Recorded and edited between August 2017 and February 2018. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Luciano Maggiore (Palermo 1980) lives and works in London. Active musician in the field of electroacoustic music, in recent years he has developed a strong interest in the mechanisms of sound diffusion, using speakers and several analogue and digital devices (walkmans, CD players, tape recorders) as principal instruments. His interest is focused on the architectural and psychoacoustic as well as dynamic and directional values of sound with a strong emphasis on fixed sounds. His works are published by Balloon & Needle, Boring Machines, Consumer Waste, Hideous Replica, Palustre, Senufo editions, 1000Füssler, Triscele Registrazioni and Tulip records. --- Senufo Editions, 2018

Z'EV has been exploring and breaking ground in the audio and textual fields since the mid 1970s. Although best-known for his metal-based percussive performances, uns, his electronics and vocal-based whirlwind, was one of the most innovative (and individual) audio experiments of the early 1980s. uns's combination of sound poetics and voice treatments with dense sonic landscapes resulted in challenging, unique, and rewarding audio.A historical testament to the challenge uns presented appears on the first track of this 2 CD set, when some of the audience members -- in addition to repeatedly shouting 'Die!' as the set concluded -- shout out for Flipper. Given the ire Flipper drew from their audiences, the fact that the audience preferred that disconnect to the disconnect uns was creating speaks volumes about the gauntlet uns had thrown down. Even when uns was active (1980-83), recordings were extremely difficult to come by and live performances were infrequent. This new 2 CD set presents four live performances, with only fractional snippets previously released anywhere. For fans of: uns, Z'EV, Lieutenant Caramel, sound poetry, musique concrete. --- Crippled Intellect Productions, 2010

Michael Winter's extraordinary composition from 2015, a seven-part canon which starts off fast and gradually slows down over its 45 minute duration. Performed by Liminar, Mexico's leading ensemble for contemporary music. The cover image cover and corresponding caption are reprinted from the book Matters Computational by Jörg Arndt --- Another Timbre, 2021

5 chamber works by James Weeks, beautifully performed by Explore Ensemble. An album of interlinked pieces that form a sequence. James Weeks says "I was aware of tying the pieces together as a set, by continuing and extending certain poetic ideas, ways of using and combining instruments, and ways of thinking about material....Things like the use of mixed instrumental duos, which comes from Violet-Violute, the use of a slow-moving or static background harmonic layer, which comes from Summer, the overall very soft and intimate instrumental idiom based on long, breath-length sounds, which appears in all the pieces other than Durham. And finally of course the poetic idea of a piece as opening up an imaginary (or remembered) space: music which unfolds as an area or a field, for the listener to wander in without having to follow a complex series of narrative events." --- Another Timbre, 2021

5 chamber works by UK-based composer Oliver Leith, performed by Explore Ensemble   --- Cover drawing by Susan Te Kahurangi King Performed by Explore Ensemble --- Another Timbre, 2021

A 40-minute composition for sextet and field recordings, combining harmonies taken from the music of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe with field recordings made on Whadjuk Noongar boodja (country), Western Australia. --- Josten Myburgh (composition, alto saxophone & electronics) Jet Kye Chong (percussion) Jameson Feakes (electric guitar) Stuart James (piano, electronics) Djuna Lee (double bass) Kirsten Smith (flutes) Cover image: still from the film 'Night Parrot Stories' by Robert Nugent (2016) --- Another Timbre, 2021

Portuguese pianist Tiago Sousa follows 2015's solo piano album "Um Piano nas Barricadas" with this heady set, based on themes of nostalgic escapism, repetition, temporality and other existential concepts. Don't worry if that sounds like too much to get stuck into now, the tracks here are pensive, but can be enjoyed without having a working knowledge of  Heidegger, Camus or Kierkegaard. Souza's skill is in his attention to the texture of the sounds he works with - the anxious squeal of the clarinet, the distant rush of cymbals, the familiar twinkly of piano - and his arrangements are minimal, but always engaging. "ANGST" is a pensive and expressive exploration of the modern condition and it's enchanting --- Released: Discrepant, 2021