An amazing adventure of a musicological and botanical research on the psychoacoustic qualities of the Green World recorded in 1986-89. It’s the investigation of an organic symbiosis, real and mysterious at the same time, between the pharmacological properties of the plant and the sound emitted by the same material essence. From the single natural element comes the vibration permeating the whole Universe; an indissoluble binomial for which "everything that makes up existence contains the information of itself in all its parts". Here, the visionary Walter Maioli (Aktuala, Futuro Antico, Synaulia) collaborates with the music therapist and eclectic composer Agostino Nirodh Fortini, for more than thirty years specialist in the field of sound and video applied to body therapies and meditation. By exposing the archetype breath of the stem, slowing its speed and manipulating and filtering it electronically, the two explorers get a bath of harmonic games with purifying and regenerating powers; a deep and nebulous drone inhabited by insects, alien sounds similar to the vibrates of Fender Rhodes or tonal interludes with plays of stones in the water, on the surface of an inner lake, learning to observe and dive into love and awareness.  

Originally released on tape by Sound Reporters in 1986. Het Jacoba Prieel is a very weird compendium of imaginary soundscapes, in which every coordinate seems lost and totally deviated. Fred Gales, in collaboration with Walter Maioli and Pit Piccinelli, presents his idea of ​​a concrete organic music, a diary of signals and sound impressions inspired by the great tradition of primitive music, an extreme investigation of love on the primordial beauty of sound expression. Travelling into the properties of all matter of the sonic environment, the members of the legendary Sound Reporters generate, transform, mix, filter and modulate natural and electronic sounds in the magical analogical studio of the Utrecht Institute of Sonology. From a single movement of sound fragments are opened catalyst flows and circuits, flickering sequencers and oscillations of luminous channels. Futuristic tribalism, hypnotic fossil percussion, alien sounds, dreamlike trips in the jungle, echoes of rustling and rumbles otherworldly, rain waterfalls and shells in the pond, calls of animals and insects, heart beats and radar waves. Everything is just pure sound and surrounds us

Double LP version. Four long and vaporous unreleased tracks that document the Juri Camisasca's first mystical afflatus, bringing to light the moments of "collective meditation" of some events in 1978, including the recordings drawn from the exhibition "L'evoluzione interiore dell'Uomo", which took place at the Villa Reale in Monza. After his participation in the Telaio Magnetico project in 1975, and in parallel to his contribution in works like Franco Battiato's Juke Box (1978) and Lino Capra Vaccina's Antico Adagio (1978), and in Raul Lovisoni and Francesco Messina's Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo (1979), a more general syntony of Camisasca for different aspects of Eastern philosophies seemed to conceive his first personal form of music as a "celestial ocean" in which to break the eternal divine love. The mantra nature of deep drones of a natural reverberated harmonium literally introduce you to another level of consciousness; harmonic chants of dhrupad inspiration expanding the ethereal voice in the transcendental plot of all, while Roberto Mazza's oboe intervenes to paint this perfect osmotic sound echoing motifs of ancient medieval saltarello. For Camisasca, "the vibration of sound is something primordial which contains the mystery of creation"; and in this sense "the musician is a medium through which the Nature is expressed". This makes Evoluzione Interiore an intense minimalist work where singing generates a universal and archetypical spiral of purity and candor that suggests the Pandit Pran Nath's lesson as well as dialogues in concept with the mutability flux of seminal works as Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972), Peter Michael Hamel's The Voice of Silence (1973) and Nada (1977), or with research on the overtones as that of Roberto Laneri's Prima Materia. Includes liner notes with archival photos.

The explorer Walter Maioli makes his most amazing adventure, the journey to the center of the Earth. Retracing the exploits of the Platonic demiurge, he identifies in the cave the deepest meaning of myth. Primordial sounds, not shadows, are at the center of this magical path straddling geology and Paleolithic polyphony. The recordings between 1985 and 2002 capture the sonic imperceptibility of the great subterranean womb, investigate the secret dialogue between the trickling of pond waters and the faint percussive reverberation of stalactites and stalagtites. Rocky sediments are played as tubular organs, glockenspiels, xylophones or stone marimbas. Crystalline timbral variations and subtle microtonal passages recall the chimes of Tibetan gongs and bells, of the scales of Java and Bali. Amidst muffled pauses and silences, trills and rings, echoes and tremolos, hisses and pops of vibration, Maioli builds his most imaginative niche of sound, a magnetic and telluric chant that is pure symphony and archetypal synaesthesia. Co-produced with Holidays Records.

An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, with the desire to merge the knowledge and stimuli gained during numerous travels across the World in a single sound experience. Don's pocket-trumpet is melted with the beats of the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki. A pure hippie aesthetic, like in an intimate ceremony, filters a magical encounter between Eastern and Western civiliziations, offering different suggestions of sound mysticism: natural acoustics in which individual instruments and voices are part of a wider pan-tribal consciousness. A desert Western landscape marries Asian and Latin atmospheres. Indigenous contributions with berimbau explorations find fossil sounds of rattles and clap-hands invocations. Influences of Indian mantra singing are combined with eternal African voices or with folkish-Latin guitar rhythms , while flute and drums evoke distant dances. In the Organic Music everything becomes an act of devotion and love, an ecstatic dwell in the dimension of a sacred free-rejoice.

Opus 17 (1970), 96' Processed tape recorder feedback Realized in the author's studio in Paris. Premiered on May 23 1970 at the Centre Artistique de Verderonne, for the “Fête en blanc” (“Party in White”), a happening curated by Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra. In 5 parts: - Étude - Maquette - Épure - Safari - N°17 “Opus 17”, a major turning-point in the musical course of Éliane Radigue, was finished in 1970, and consistes of five distinct scenes. It was the last work composed with feedback materials. It is also the one in which Éliane Radigue returned to definitive time-frames, after several years of building “Musique sans Fin” (Endless Music) intended for ad libitum broadcast in a specific space (gallery, museum), an approach which intuitively joined music and the visual arts. From that experimental period “Opus 17” preserves the plastic character : a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. Its vibrations structure the air surrounding the listener with densities, thicknesses, indeed with palpable movement. And yet one must recognize that Éliane Radigue has given her life to an essentially artificial material. One so very simple from which she has known how to draw out colours, tastes, and unheard-of intensities. Her procedures, of feedback and slowed-down by working with magnetic tape, are intrinsically animated: they have their own voice, lyric quality, “expressive force” as Éliane Radigue tells us. In other words, before she began composing she learned how to produce sounds which live and sing and touch us. Her compositions are frames which let us hear these phenomena, open frameworks from the sonic installations of her “Musiques sans Fin” (cf. “Feedback Works 1969-70” double LP) and here reinserted in the five scenes making up “Opus 17”. Éliane Radigue probably feels that the infinite can nest itself in a reduced time-scheme, which she will work on her whole career. In 1970, in her studio of very rudimentary means, she developed personal techniques for a completely unique body of work. She defines this work as being centered on sounds produced by feedback. “Opus 17” has the quality of showing off the sum of the achieved techniques and methods. Éliane Radigue’s music has never been rooted in ideas but in practice, the intimate experience of things in the wild which she has known how to tame. This dialog both intense and poetic which she keeps up with the solid matter of sound finds a remarkable concretization in “Opus 17”. This work starts off with a surprising “Étude” : several notes played on the piano flow from the speakers, it is something by Frederick Chopin…! The fragment, as a loop of a few minutes, comes back again but never completely identical; it is inexorably transformed until becoming unrecognizable after some repetitions. Éliane Radigue used a procedure to alter the loop which has become famous through Alvin Lucier’s masterpiece “I am sitting in a room”: played into a room and picked up by a microphone from the speakers, which recording becomes in turn played-back and recorded, to be done again, and so on… until the original signal ends up by being swallowed up by the room resonance. The result is a tranquil flux articulated by the original forms inscribed on the tape. Knowing the biography of Éliane Radigue, from the piano lessons of childhood taken in secret from her parents, to her passion for certain works from the classical repertoire, it seems to me evident that this “Etude” contains a selfportrait both intuitive and prescient in a certain sense: we are slowly directed from her first lessons to the large electronic waves which will make up a large part of the work to come. Intrigued by what could have led to the choice of such a technique, I asked her if she had been inspired by the work of Alvin Lucier. To which she replied : “No….when I wrote that piece I did not yet know Alvin Lucier, only after did I get to meet him…..His piece is magnificent and I remember being struck when I saw ‘I am sitting in a room’ because it was the same technique! You know, it was one of those studio techniques of the time, well known to all who worked in electronic studios. We did not yet have all these electronic effects—you had to have imagination to get something. And the possibilities were not infinite, so sooner or later you came across something used by someone else. I remember calling that technique “electronified erosion”. I think you can understand what's going on this way, isn't it?” The second piece, “Maquette”, uses the same technique, but only exposes the point where the original signals are already altered. Éliane Radigue has for a long time made a mystery of the source material for that piece, but finally admitted what was the original music: “I took an extract from ‘Parsifal’, I think the transformation scene… the theme at that moment could be correctly made into a loop. I worked it over a bit by mixing and electrerosion in order to keep only those parts transformed by the process. It was my homage, my ‘thank you Mr. Wagner!’” Unrecognizable, to tell the truth, the original source transforms into a phenomenal swell, of a climate heavy, slow, and imposing. There is something magical, immemorial even, which is in play in this “Maquette”. “Épure” follows, built on the astonishing sonorities which ER knew how to make from the feedback of two tape recorders: electro-organic pulsations, vast currants of thick and lively soundwaves. “Épure” as the name indicates, is a very simple piece: Pulsations a little like agitated heartbeats slowly change into a homogeneous enveloping flux, a progressive passage from an artery to a river… A minimalist structure harking back to her first work, “Jouet électronique”, written in 1967 at the Apsome Studio when she was Pierre Henri’s assistant. The fourth piece, “Safari”, really deserves its name! After opening with a groan which could be that of a fabulous dream creature, the piece develops in a stupefyingly polyrhythmic dance, a whole world of percussion and chant… you would think to be hearing the striking of wood and skins, voices, and wind instruments! While here too feedback is the only material. The work ends with “N°17” which is composed with sound sources coming from the entirety of the techniques introduced in the four preceding “études”. It is to be underlined that here Éliane Radigue inaugurates a technique of composition which will be her footprint, her trademark: “imperceptible transformations”. For that she has developed a technique of meticulous mixings, based on the slow passage from one section to the next. Imperceptible, all during the piece, we pass, ceaselessly and without noticing the changes, from one frequency flux to another. Time is suspended, smoothed out, stretched… It is this technique which ER will be essentially using for all the electronic works to come and which she will never cease to refine and render always more subtle. “Opus 17” is the great panoramic voyage through material sound, its electronic phenomena detailed as if in a microscope. Could feedback really contain such a universe? “Yes”, the work of Éliane Radigue answers, but that exploration was not that easy: one had to learn to “listen”. It required Éliane Radigue’s great demands on listening which led her to the discovery of such treasures. Unknown riches in a material often rejected as trivial. Emmanuel Holterbach, June 2013 Éliane Radigue (1932-) Éliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied Musique Concrète techniques at the “Studio d’Essai” of the RTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1956-57). She was married to the painter and sculptor Arman and devoted ten years to their three children. She then worked with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio APSOME (1967-68). She was in residence at the New York University School of Arts (1970-71), the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts (1973) and Mills College (1998). She has created sound environments using looped tapes of various durations, gradually desynchronising. Her works have been featured in numerous galleries and museums since the late 60s and from 1970, she has been associated to the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and tape through many compositions from “Chry-ptus” (1971) up to “L’Île re-sonante” (2000). These include: “Biogenesis”, “Arthesis”, “Ψ 847”, “Adnos I, II and III” (70s), “Les Chants de Milarepa” and “Jetsun Mila” (80s) and the three pieces constituting the Trilogie de la Mort (1988-91-93). Since 2002, she has been composing mostly acoustic works for performers and instruments. Her music has been featured in major international festivals. Her extremely sober, almost ascetic concerts, are made of a continuous, ever-changing yet extremely slow stream of sound, whose transformation occurs within the sonic material itself.

Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades.  Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM Ensemble. “Lucier speaks first of a sonority, and only then of a chord. He discusses the chord, its notes and their disposition, but what haunts him is a “particular sonority.” A sonority is the product of physical action on physical materials: the instruments, the registers in which they are activated, the breath of the musicians, the waveforms thus produced, their merging and interfering, and finally the moment and place of these actions. An energy field, certain to vanish completely once the musicians put down their instruments. However concrete and real the actions and materials, the sonority they produce is a phantom.”   

1. Alvin Lucier: August Moon (2015)2. Morton Feldman: Two Instruments (1958)3. Alvin Lucier: Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba (2008)4. Morton Feldman: Three Clarinets, Cello And Piano (1971)5. Alvin Lucier: Step, Slide and Sustain (2014)6. Morton Feldman: Durations 2 (1960) Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present this collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, August Moon and Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier.   “For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that’s at the onset of every piano sound leaving only the sinusoidal pure after-sound. It’s as if he invented electronic music with the piano.” Alvin Lucier from liner notes.      “Lucier manages to hear a layer of acoustical physics in Feldman’s music that perhaps no one else would hear. He’s hearing something in Feldman that is actually coming from his own musical world; in a way, hearing his own music in Feldman’s, and drawing inspiration from that.”  

Preorder! Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, his first major solo outing since Community (Kye, 2016). Recorded mostly during the early winter months of 2022, in post-pandemic New York and post-Brexit London, Aphorisms assembles the sonic detritus of daily life into hauntingly intimate aural soundscapes. Made between Lambkin's residence in East London and Blank Forms in New York, Aphorisms superimposes the two spaces onto one another creating an imaginary stage where his musical dramas unfold. A transatlantic mediation on the rooms where Lambkin has lived and worked, Aphorisms summons up hallucinatory vistas by way of the composer’s collage technique, layering field recordings, piano, guitar, percussion, vocal fragments, and repurposed elements on top of one another in double, triple, and quadruple exposures. Like the Shadow Ring’s Lindus (Swill Radio, 2001)—recorded between Folkestone and Miami—Aphorisms ruminates on estrangement and displacement, catching Lambkin as he returns to London after two decades of living in the States, in his words, “leaving home to return home.” Aphorisms continues Lambkin’s synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate and unique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space. At the heart of his practice is the illusion of form, whereby Lambkin combines sonic elements, documenting the moment that they coalesce into music only to disintegrate back into incidental sound. The album is centered around two pianos, one in New York and one in London, sounding together as if through the ether, creating a spectral atmosphere that Lambkin fills with melodic snippets, fragments of songs, spoken-word musings, and guttural barks or “the animal purity of voice,” as he has it. The superimposition of the two spaces is maximized in the album's closing titular track, where, much like on earlier works such as Salmon Run (Kye, 2007) and Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) fragments of familiar melodies float through the mix as though being played from afar. Aphorisms is Lambkin at his best, extending methodologies only hinted at previously and taking his now-idiosyncratic mission statement to a new chapter. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

For her first album releases as a soloist, nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, "Music for Cello and Humming," features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann’s own “Humming Suite” and “Study for cello and humming.” Having arisen intuitively from Hamann’s investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism. Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies’ “Loss,” a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis’ storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can’t do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, “Loss” casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies’ signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould’s 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann’s humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable. Accompanied by an essay on "Music for Cello and Humming," as well as its companion piece "Shaking Studies," by Nora Fulton. Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse based project, ‘Materialities of Realisation.’ She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O’Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada’s Duets, Graham Lambkin’s Community, Alvin Lucier’s Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. 

VINYL IS DELAYED TIL NOVEMBER. CDS READY TO SHIP.  ---- In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers’ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales. That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer Göran Freese—who later recorded Don’s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs—invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummelnäs, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months’ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don’s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessionsare finally available over fifty years after they were recorded. On July 20, the musicians gathered at Freese’s summer house included Bernt Rosengren (tenor saxophone, flutes, clarinet), Tommy Koverhult (tenor saxophone, flutes), Leif Wennerström (drums), and Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) from Don’s Swedish group; Jacques Thollot (drums) and Kent Carter (bass) from his newly formed international band New York Total Music Company; Bülent Ateş (hand drum, drums), who was visiting from Turkey; and Don (pocket trumpet, flutes, percussion) himself. Lacking a common language, the players used music as their common means of communication. In this way, these frenetic and freewheeling sessions anticipate Don’s turn to more explicitly panethnic expression, preceding his epochal Eternal Rhythm dates by four months. The octet, comprising musicians from America, France, Sweden, and Turkey, was a perfect vehicle for Don’s budding pursuit of “collage music,” a concept inspired by the shortwave radio on which Don listened to sounds from around the world. Using the collage metaphor, Don eliminated solos and the introduction of tunes, transforming a wealth of melodies, sounds, and rhythms into poetic suites of different moods and changing forms. The Summer House Sessions ensemble joyously layers manifold cultural idioms, traversing the airy peaks and serene valleys of Cherry’s earthly vision. In the Swedish Jazz Archive quite a few other recordings from the same day were to be found. Some of the highlights are heard as bonus material on the CD edition of this album. The octet is augmented by producer and saxophone player Gunnar Lindqvist, who led the Swedish free jazz orchestra G.L. Unit on the album Orangutang, and drummer Sune Spångberg, who recorded with Albert Ayler in 1962. The bonus CD also includes a track without Cherry featuring Jacques Thollot joined by five Swedes including Lindqvist, Tommy Koverhult, Sune Spångberg, and others. --- With liner notes by Magnus Nygren and album art featuring a cover painting by Moki Cherry: Untitled, ca. 1967–68 --- Blank Forms, 2021

VINYL IS DELAYED TIL NOVEMBER. CDS READY TO SHIP.  --- In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don’s extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician, and represents the start of his communal “mystical” period, later crystallized in recordings such as Organic Music Society, Relativity Suite, Brown Rice, and the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The musicians in Don Cherry’s New Researches, hailing from Brazil, Sweden, France, and the US, converged on Chateauvallon from all over Europe. The five-person band—Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard “Doudou” Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos— performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki’s carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air. The music in the Chateauvallon concert aspired to a universal language that would bring people together through song. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the Indian theta “Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na,” and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance—including pieces that would later appear on Don’s albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out)—all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia from the puppeteers. “Relativity Suite, Part 1” notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau. A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos’s masterful demonstration of this single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work to come as a member, with Don, of the acclaimed group Codona. The sounds of children playing on the ensemble’s achingly tender rendition of Jim Pepper’s oft-covered beacon of spiritual optimism, “Witchi Tai To,” lends the proceedings an especially intimate, domestic glow. Given the context of the star-studded international jazz festival, the concert’s laid back, communal vibe feels like an attempt by the Cherrys to show Don’s jazz audience that he was moving on. At the same time, however, Don was extending a warmhearted invitation for them to come along for the ride. --- With liner notes by Magnus Nygren. --- Blank Forms, 2021

The fourth release in Blank Forms Editions’s initiative to chart the ever-expanding musical practice of Catherine Christer Hennix, Solo for Tamburium captures the composer’s most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. This piece, documented in Berlin at MaerzMusik 2017, carefully draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. Densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtone collisions create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium or a distinctionless state of being. Since the late 1960s, Hennix has created a massive and innovative body of work spanning minimal music, computer programming, poetry, sculpture, and light art—pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of these media toward singular ends. She was part of the downtown music school in New York and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. In the ’70s, Hennix studied the nature and use of harmonic sound as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music. The exceptionally designed tamburas of Pran Nath were central to her intensive investigations, as was the devotional practice of carefully tuning and sounding the instruments in a continuous and even flow—both have guided her work with sound ever since. In 1976, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Hennix presented a pair of groundbreaking works that came to define her ensuing practice. With the Deontic Miracle—a group composed of Hennix, her brother Peter, and the Swedish percussionist Hans Isgren—she performed a series of modal compositions for Renaissance oboes, sheng, and harmonic feedback distortion. On this same occasion she premiered an equally significant body of solo work for keyboard, including the only public presentation of The Electric Harpsichord (1976), a piece that marks the beginning of Hennix’s characteristic style of playing, where dense sonic textures gradually emerge from the multilayered interplay of harmonic construction and dissolution. Solo for Tamburium represents a pointed revisitation of her endeavor to map the non-gravitational harmonics of modal musics—among them raga, maqam, and the blues—onto a tuned keyboard. Since the debut of this piece in 2017 she has continued to develop the work, reshaping and presenting it in a variety of contexts, including at Blank Forms in New York and the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris in 2022. For Hennix, to approach modality as a dynamic process is ultimately a contemplative practice. Through it, embodied attunement to harmonic vibration gives rise to epistemically transformative states, opening new ways of knowing and being. 

The first vocal album by beloved Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - profound and deeply moving home cassette recordings made amidst political upheaval and turmoil. These are songs of wisdom, loss, mourning, and exile, sung directly into a boombox and accompanied by Emahoy’s unmistakable piano. Though written and recorded while still living at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, Emahoy sings of the heartache of leaving her beloved Ethiopia, a reflection on the 1974 revolution and ensuing Red Terror in her homeland, and a presentiment of her future exile in Jerusalem. In the 21st century, Emahoy has become known worldwide for her utterly unique melodic and rhythmic style. Commonly misinterpreted as “jazzy” or “honky tonk,” Emahoy’s music actually comes from a deep engagement with the Western classical tradition, mixed with her background in Ethiopian traditional and Orthodox music. These songs, recorded between 1977-1985, are different from anything previously released by the artist. Rich with the sound of birds outside the window, the creak of the piano bench, the thump of Emahoy’s finger on the record button, they create a sense of place, of being near the artist while she records. Emahoy’s lyrics, sung in Amharic, are poetic and heavy with the weight of exile. “When I looked out / past the clouds / I couldn’t see my country’s sky / Have I really gone so far?” she asks in “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?” Her vocals are delicate and heartfelt, tracing the melodic contours of her piano on songs like “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” “Tenkou! Why Feel Sorry?,” a career highlight that closes out her self-titled Mississippi album (MRP-099), is revisited here with vocals. Originally composed for her niece, Tenkou, the lyrics clarify the song title we’ve wondered about for so many years. “Don’t cry / Childhood won’t come back / Let it go with love Emahoy dreamt of releasing this music to a larger audience before her passing in March of 2023. We are proud to release this music, in collaboration with her family, now, in what would have been her 100th year. LP comes with a 16-page booklet full-color booklet. Gold cover first edition, pressed in both black and gold vinyl editions.  All songs composed and recorded by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, Addis Ababa, 1977–1985

Since its formation in 1984, there have been several distinct phases of Kapotte Muziek in which the group changed. The group commenced as a duo of Frans de Waard and Christian Nijs, and operated as such until 1987 when Nijs left and started to learn to play the guitar. Then followed a phase in which De Waard actively searched for other musicians to contribute sounds to be used as source material. In 1993 a new phase commenced when the group were invited to play a series of concerts in the USA. Initially, this was a tour with the Dutch group THU20, and Kapotte Muziek planned a show with pre-recorded tapes and slides. One by one, the members of THU20 backed out of the tour, leaving only Peter Duimelinks in the end, at which point it was decided to play as a duo under the name Kapotte Muziek. Having spent the first week of the tour in New York purchasing equipment and rehearsing, a general plan of '15 minutes of drone, 15 minutes collage-like music and 15 minutes of noise' was formulated. As the tour (17 concerts) progressed, however, new elements were incorporated into the music, with the lineup for the first number of performances expanded to include Daniel Burke's long-running post-industrial group, Illusion of Safety. In 1995, the duo became a trio, adding Roel Meelkop (also from THU20). Since then, the trio (sometimes duo, once solo) has played 121 concerts in Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia and Japan. The group took something of an informal hiatus in 2017 after a duo concert by Peter and Frans in Norway, but regrouped on December 30th 2023 to perform as a trio again (for the first time since 2012) in Germany.Until 2004, Kapotte Muziek also released studio recordings by Frans de Waard, although these recordings had very little connection with the live sound. It was decided to stop these studio-based activities, and Kapotte Muziek would exclusively play live. Recordings of concerts would be released, with very minimal editing in most cases, on CD, cassette or vinyl.The 2017 concert in Trondheim, Norway mentioned above is particularly significant in the Kapotte Muziek trajectory, not only as it marked the beginning of a period of live inactivity. The concert took place at Klubb Kanin on its 20th anniversary, the group also having performed at the opening of the venue in 1997. To mark the event, the group were asked to do a cassette to document these two concerts. To fit both performances onto a single cassette, the 1997 recording was heavily cut up, leading to the current phase of Kapotte Muziek. One thing that has been a constant factor for Kapotte Muziek is the recycling of sound - in concert, by using junk from the streets, and in the studio, through the continuous re-use of sounds. In the first phase, Christian Nijs recorded sounds and instruments, and Frans de Waard created collages using these recordings. The intensive editing of the 1997 Trondheim recording led Frans to a natural conclusion, that live recordings from the group's history could be used as source material for future releases. After three trial pieces for compilations, an entire album came to life. The result is 'Discon', a made-up word for 'distilled from concerts'. Each of the 13 pieces is created by cutting, pasting, superimposing, and editing one concert. No other electronic treatments were used, no granular synthesis, etc. The cover is a collage from the booklet that came with Kapotte Muziek's release, 'Columbus, Ohio', from 2004, which was created from a black and white painting Frans exchanged with an unknown painter for some merchandise at that concert.  Released: Krim Kram, 2024

Originally compiled as a two cassette release by Archivio Diafònico in 2016, now reissued as a double CD for optimum playback at your next MRI scan. Samling documents the earlier, "noisier" years of Arv & Miljö, collecting all compilation appearances from the project's inception in 2010 up to 2015. The project has since moved to a more ambient sound, having recently completed a stunning tetralogy of seasonal themed LPs (Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid, 2018; Himmelsvind, 2020; Ensam Är Nattens Rymd Över Vita Vägar, 2021; Vålnad Av Fornskog, 2022). While the release of the first instalment in this series, Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid, in 2018 seemed to signal a radical departure from the gritty, claustrophobic sound documented here, the use of environmental recordings, primitive melodic synth tones, and fragile failing electronics all remain a defining characteristic of the project, from the early concrète industrial years to the broken new age music explored in more recent times (there were other clear signposts to the direction the project would later take too of course, notably the track 2415 Dagar from The Palermo Protocol 3CS compilation released by Posh Isolation in 2014 and also included in this collection).Arv & Miljö is the solo project of Gothenburg-based Matthias Andersson, member of the groups Enhet För Fri Musik and Heinz Hopf, and label operator extraordinaire (Discreet Music, Fördämning Arkiv, Förlag För Fri Musik, I Dischi Del Barone). Released: 2024, Krim Kram

Zalhietzli is the experimental noise project of French artist, Jean-Baptiste Lévêque. This release is the first CD by the project and follows a recent string of excellent tapes on Satatuhatta, Narcolepsia, and Bent Window Records. Employing tapes, effects, microphones, junk metal and computer, Étreinte presents a set of meticulously executed harsh noise compositions incorporating a diverse range of styles, from skillfully manipulated junk metal recordings to blown-out ripping and fluttering textures (always on the verge of implosion/explosion).The CD comes in a 4-panel digisleeve with a full colour fold-out poster (35cm x 35cm). All artwork by Zalhietzli. Released: Krim Kram, 2024

Michael Speers and Luciano Maggiore make music contemplating the kernel of black metal.Michael Speers is a musician from Portaferry (NI), currently based in Neuilly-Plaisance (FR), who works with natural & synthetic sound material - using drums, computer, microphones, feedback - towards performance, installation and composition. Collaborations include: John Wall, Louise Le Du, Luciano Maggiore and Paul Abbott (as yPLO). His work has been published by Anòmia, Takuroku, Wasted Capital Since 2013 and C.A.N.V.A.S.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-human animal languages, dance, and 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 have been published by Balloon & Needle, Consumer Waste, Hideous Replica, Senufo editions, and Xing, among others. The wonderful adhuman label, based out of Brighton UK, very recently released an utterly essential CD of Luciano's long-standing duo with Louie Rice (album of the year, or any other year, round these parts by a long shot).