Kindred spirits Passepartout Duo and Inoyama Land embody the essence of play – charting a new chapter and reinvigorating the environmental music and electronic landscape.Passepartout Duo is formed of Nicoletta Favari (IT) and Christopher Salvito (IT/US), who since 2015 have been on a continuous journey travelling the world’s corners, engaged in a creative process they term “slow music”. Having been guests of many notable artist residencies and with live performances in cultural spaces and institutions, their evocative music escapes categorisation. With no fixed abode their musical pilgrimage brought them to Japan first in 2019, which prompted a deep connection to Kankyō Ongaku ‘environmental music’, a genre in which Inoyama Land is often associated with, soundtracking the duo’s first immersive experience. In 2023 the duo revisited Japan and set out to reconnect in particular with the music of Inoyama Land, performed by Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita. The highly revered album ‘Danzindan-Pojidon’ (1983) produced by Haruomi Hosono amongst other well publicized and acclaimed reissues (Light in The Attic Records’ Grammy-nominated compilation ‘Kankyō Ongaku’), produced a global resurgence and admiration of the environmental music movement. Nicoletta took the lead to seek out Inoyama Land and in making contact successfully their intrigue and eagerness to meet was warmly reciprocated, and the group scheduled to meet in the form of a spontaneous improvisation session.“We’re deeply concerned with what it means to be a duo, and what it means for people to connect through music.”'Radio Yugawara' was recorded in 2023 in Makoto Inoue’s hometown of Yugawara where his family runs a kindergarten, whose space has doubled as a Sunday recording studio. Upon arriving a circle of four tables was set up in the school’s auditorium - the tables were carefully populated with children’s instruments: a full set of handbells, a glockenspiel, a xylophone, recorders, melodicas, and harmonicas. Surrounding the tables were racks hanging all sorts of bells and wind chimes and within this environment each performer set up their own electronic instruments. Dialling into each other, a simple set of playground ‘game rules’ was devised where time was divided into three separate sessions (1) ‘only electronic instruments’, ‘only acoustic’, and ‘a mix of both’, (2) ‘revolving duets’ each taking turns to play through a cycle of ‘four duos’ and (3) ‘anything permitted’, accumulating to more than three hours of material which was then carefully distilled into succinct tracks. The alluring album opener ‘Strange Clouds’ oscillates into view, setting a lush scenery built from a bed of synthesisers and the first glimpse of the chromaplane, the hand-built analogue instrument designed by Passepartout Duo, featuring a touchless interface and endless organic sounds that underpin the album’s 11-track inlets. Percussive pulses act as the heartbeat to ‘Abstract Pets’ before earthy sub-swells open the pathway to glistening glockenspiels and wind chimes. The atmosphere shapeshifts with ‘Simoom’ and ‘Tangerine Fields’ with swirling synth lines and subliminal beats resembling changes in weather patterns. At the centre points the idyllic ‘Observatory’ and ‘Mosaic’ could illuminate the deepest oceans before the hypnotic, arpeggiating synth lines in the otherworldly ‘Xiloteca’ propel the album towards ‘Solivago’, with its gentle lullaby of playful ambience. The reflective closer ‘Axolotl Dreams’ resolves their somewhat chance meeting with elegant pastoral chord strokes and uplifting synth swells, sending final signals upwards into the ether. 'Radio Yugawara' is a unique one-off transmission from a specific place and point in time, unlikely to ever occur again. The respective duo’s approach can really be described as “tuning in”, a tuning into each other, to themselves, and to the surrounding nature of Yugawara. Like waves that travel off-world, sounds travel through the universe and can be lost forever if we don’t seek them out. In finding a harmonic affinity within their instruments and a spiritual kinship in their interwoven performance, Radio Yugawara at its core is an interpretation of feeling, of close human interaction and the true essence of discovery. “The album is both a transmission from a location, but also a tuning into the surroundings and to each other. Music in this kind of ephemeral moment is much less about active creation and more about discovering something which is already there in the air.”  

Brilliant Experimental album by the Merzbow co-founder, recorded in 1989 - with sticker and insert

Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert

After two and a half years out of print, Corsano/Orcutt's most popular album, Made Out of Sound, returns in a limited edition pressing. Best of 2021 — The Guardian, Pitchfork, Wire, Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Magnet & Raven Sings the Blues.Pitchfork : "It’s a joyful noise. This is one of the more uplifting records of experimental music in recent memory. There’s something about how Orcutt and Corsano push each other that leads to work that pulses with the life force—these pieces bring to mind sunlight hitting a maple leaf, cells dividing under a microscope, a deep thirst quenched. Mark Richardson"Wire : "When you listen to Made Out Of Sound, you feel encouraged to immerse yourself in every note, cherishing the beauty of this otherworldly space. Joshua Minsoo Kim"

Finally on CD!!!  In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked — or, as Orcutt puts it, "a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record" — it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes). I've written before of the immediate misapprehension that greeted Harry Pussy on their first tour with my band Charalambides — that this was a trio of crazed freaks spontaneously spewing sound from wherever their fingers or drumsticks happened to land — but I'll grant the casual listener a certain amount of confusion based on the early recorded evidence (and the fact that the band COULD be a trio of crazed freaks letting fly, as we learned from later tours). But to my ears, the precision and composition of their tracks were immediately apparent, as if the band was some sort of 5-D music box with its handle cranked into oblivion by a calculating organ grinder, running through musical maps as pre-ordained as the road to a Calvinist's grave. That organ grinder, it turns out, was Bill Orcutt, whose solo guitar output until 2022 has tilted decidedly towards improvisation, while his fetish for relentless, gridlike composition has animated his electronic music (c.f. Live in LA, A Mechanical Joey). Music for Four Guitars, apparently percolating since 2015 as a loosely-conceived score for an actual meatspace guitar quartet, is the culmination of years ruminating on classical music, Magic Band miniatures, and (perhaps) The League of Crafty Guitarists, although when the Reich-isms got tossed in the brew is anyone's guess. And Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) it is. The album's form is startlingly minimalist — four guitars, each consigned to a chattering melody in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively pulled in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama over the course of 11 brief tracks. It's tempting to compare them to chamber music, but these pieces reflect little of the delicacy of Satie's Gymnopedies or Bach's Cantatas. Instead, they bulldoze their way through melodic content with a touch of the motorik romanticism of New Order or Bailter Space ("At a Distance"), but more often ("A Different View," "On the Horizon") with the gonad-crushing drive of Discipline-era Crimson, full of squared corners, coldly angled like Beefheart-via-Beat-Detective. Just to nail down the classical fetishism, the album features a download of an 80-page PDF score transcribed by guitarist Shane Parish. And while it'd be just as reproducible as a bit of code or a player piano roll, I can easily close my eyes and imagine folks with brows higher than mine squeezing into their difficult-listening-hour folding chairs at Issue Project Room to soak up these sounds being played by real people reading a printed score 50 years from now. And as much as I want to bomb anyone's academy, that feels like a warm fuzzy future to sink into.. — TOM CARTER 

Originally released and sold on their fall 2009 US tour, Flower-Corsano Duo’s “The Chocolate Cities” stands as one of the group's most spirited releases. Recorded live in Cambridge, England and Geneva, Switzerland these recordings capture the power and energy being harnessed by the duo at a time of frequent touring, just after the release of their monumental double-LP “The Four Aims.”Michael Flower is perhaps best known for his work in Vibracathedral Orchestra, along with a slew of other bands, collaborations, and solo work. Meanwhile, Chris Corsano is well known as one of the premier drummers of modern times, and a frequent collaborator of Joe McPhee, Bill Orcutt, Bill Nace, Paul Flaherty, and many more. As a duo Flower and Corsano present an endlessly shifting and transforming sound, meshing elements of free jazz, drone, and ecstatic psychedelia into something all its own. While Corsano guides with his nimble and dynamic drumming, Flower plays amplified Japan Banjo (also known as a Shahi Baaja) providing melody, lead, and drone, often simultaneously. Gripping even in its quietest passages, thoughtful even in its most unrestrained crescendos, “The Chocolate Cities” documents a duo at the height of their collective prowess.Saved from the obscurity of its original CDr format and presented for the first time on vinyl with stunning new artwork by Chris Corsano, “The Chocolate Cities” stands as testament to the power of two magnificent players even 15 years on.

Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what in turn drew John Lennon to visual art? Why, in 1980s West Germany, did Joseph Beuys record a pop single and artists such as Walter Dahn, Albert and Markus Oehlen, and Michaela Melián form bands? What role does utopia play in the pop music and art of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, and Fatima Al Qadiri? And, vice versa, did dystopias of transgressive imagery and noise lead the artist group COUM Transmissions to make music as Throbbing Gristle? In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Ever since Duchamp’s readymade und Hugo Ball’s sound poetry, the definition of art has widened and dissolved to a point where nearly anything geared toward an art audience can be considered an artwork. Today it has become convention to praise art as a way of questioning conventions, not least in regard to conventional borders between disciplines, media, and genres. However, heroic claims of dissolving borders have become a way of kicking at doors that are already wide open—in a political and economic environment defined by neoliberal deregulation and flexibilization geared toward new markets, and permeating every social and cultural sphere. It has thus become increasingly important to discuss the relationship between different fields of cultural production. This book does just that, looking closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. Historically, these figures provoked cognitive dissonance, but the seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop and art from the 1960s to the present, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while pointing toward radical alternatives.

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways, reflecting the vitality of water, from source to sea. A diverse group of artists and writers set out to trace river systems from the sierras and forests of southern Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, proposing new routes for collaborative research and knowledge-production. In newly commissioned texts and a selection of influential essays—including a transhistorical dialogue between the twelfth-century mystic, Ibn ‘Arabī  and the renowned essayist, Sylvia Wynter—as well as lyrics, scent, recipes, critical-contemplative writing, and guided meditations, Meandering combines rich visual documentation with insights from the fields of art, visual culture, environmental humanities, ecotheosophy, mysticism, critical theory, and decolonial studies. This volume offers a practical and poetic toolset for a dynamic reconciliation between action and imagination to address the pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. This publication is part of an art and ecology research program of the same name curated by Sofia Lemos at TBA21–Academy. By exploring social and environmental justice through the lens of community-oriented practice, it presents a case for the role of artistic research and public programs in revealing our interbeing, and shapes new convergences between interdisciplinary and interfaith studies.

Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated. Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.