At the top of a carpeted staircase in a Georgian country home a blue wooden rocking horse stands completely still in front of a closed window with a view out onto the green hills and trees and fields beyond. A child rides a stationary wooden horse and travels to faraway places without ever leaving the security of his room. The movement of a rocking horse is similar to that of a cradle, or a swing, or a lullaby. Its about being quiet, its about balance, its about being at home and thinking of elsewhere The Horse Stories is the soundtrack to Going places sitting down, a film by Hiraki Sawa, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Bloomberg London, for Waterloo Sunset, the Dan Graham Pavilion at the Hayward in November 2004. It is a piece about make-believe journeys to far-away places (at the tips of your fingers, between the cracks in the floor at your feet, on the edge and behind the door, right here where you are, close-by...) For the soundtrack I used sounds belonging to the country house and garden in which Sawa filmed - water running in the upstairs bathroom; rain water dripping on the stones outside the kitchen door, sparkling water in a glass on the table, the wind-chime and the clock and the record player... And then the sounds of music boxes being played - one elaborate antique music-box with bells the shape of bees and a miniature hollow drum, and other simple music boxes, playing only one tune each, tiny naked metallic combs and drums and handles. At the core of all my sound work lies a deep interest in ideas of aliveness, of space and the awareness of time passing, of breathing and being still and of listening. And of the possibility of grace.

Bo’ Weavil is totally psyched to have the opportunity to release the second album by Reines d'Angleterre. This time a thoroughly studio affair. Reines d’Angleterre is a fascinating collaboration between avant outsider musician Ghédalia Tazartès and two electronic botanists, èlg and Jo aka Opéra Mort. This LP covers more of the wild ground the band started with on “Les Comores” released back in 2010, but going further into a musical terrain that defies definite description…a slow trip into wizards intimacy, synthetic jungles, underseas zoos and tibetan-industrial complexes. It feels like one has stumbled into disturbing dreams from a different realm. A quality of mystery, trickery and halucinatory movements slip and shift across the recording. This is out there music, experimental music with no fixed abode with a unique quality that defies most things today.

Recorded in New Zealand in 2004, is the duo recording of New Zealand guitarist Donald McPherson and Japanese guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama. A beautiful meeting of 2 virtuoso acoustic guitarists, both thoroughly schooled in the vast world of improvising. This record finds Tetuzi and Donald playing melodic folk improvisations that grow and morph into compositions that on each listening uncover some new layer of beauty. Both playing on acoustic guitar, they have a level of communication and understanding of each others playing, that allows a musical connection to grow and blossom into a full-length recording of delicate melodic mayhem. ‘The LP is limited hand numbered edition of 500

For over 50 years, Kan Mikami has stood as a master of the Japanese blues and outsider folk. His unmistakable, powerfully evocative voice and surrealistic poetry reveal a gritty, transgressive life on the margins shot through with evocations of sex and violence, religion and romance. Released in 1991, I’m the Only One Around was Mikami's first album with Tokyo's legendary P.S.F. Records and heralded an artistic renaissance. It marked the beginning of an incredibly productive and wildly creative era for Mikami that extends to the present day. This opening salvo presents the essential core of Mikami’s music; With nothing but his voice and a stripped down electric guitar the album is a powerful, effortlessly emotional statement filled with moments of both brutal passion and gentle revelation. It is unrestrained, direct, brutally honest. It embodies Mikami’s philosophy: “If you’re going to make music, stake your life on it - it’s worth it. Making music is an intensely human act.” In the newly translated notes to the album, Hiroyuki Itsuki, one of Japan’s most renowned writers perhaps put it best: “What erupts here is all the fury and grief of Jōmon Man (the prehistoric people of the Japanese archipelago), lobbed into the middle of a 1990s city. Kan Mikami is unchanging, yet definitely in motion. He advances not forwards, but backwards. Not a retreat, rather he consciously progresses backwards. At the final destination for his full-steam astern poésie lies a massive, gaping black hole, exuding a dazzling, black light. This is the image evoked by the world of Kan Mikami that you can hear on this album.” Mikami would go on to release 15 solo albums with P.S.F. as well as numerous collaborative efforts with other giants of the Japanese underground including Motoharu Yoshizawa, Masayoshi Urabe and Keiji Haino, with whom, along with Toshiaki Ishizuka he formed the group Vajra. Black Editions is honored to present the first ever vinyl edition of Kan Mikami’s “I’m the Only One Around” featuring lyrics translated by Drew Stroud and newly translated notes by Alan Cummings. Remastered and cut to vinyl at Elysian Masters Los Angeles, pressed by RTI, packaged in heavy Stoughton tip-on jackets with insert featuring textured paper, gold foil stamping and metallic inks. 

'The latest entry in An’archives’ ‘Free Wind Mood’ series, Ki is a trio that pits long-time collaborators Tamio Shiraishi (saxophone, voice) and Takahashi Michiko aka Mico (drums, voice, vocoder, melodica, piano, percussion) against drummer, percussionist and vocalist Fritz Welch. They each bring a wealth of experience, from Shiraishi’s early moves in the Japanese underground of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – he was a founding member of Fushitsusha, and played with Taco and Machinegun Tango – to his legendary, late-night solo New York subway performances; he and Mico also spent some time playing with No Neck Blues Band, while Welch, currently based in Glasgow, has a long history taking in stints with Peeesseye, Lambs Gamble and FvRTvR. Tearful Face Of My Cute Love (Is Begging To Me), named after a yakuza song, is Ki’s first LP, after CD-Rs on Chocolate Monk (Ki No Sei, 2009) and Unverified (Stops Dropping, 2010). Documenting two live performances from 2008, it’s a startling, wild freedom chase, each piece stretching languorously across one side of the vinyl, giving the trio maximum space to thunder their way through space and time. Their West Nile 2008 show, on side one, opens with a battery of drums, fierce and livid, before Shiraishi’s unmistakable and remarkable whinnying, high-zone tone slithers into earshot. The stage is set, the battle moves forward, yet there’s remarkable simpatico between the three players, with Mico and Welch volleying guttural vocal exhortations at each other. When it does offer respite – see the sudden swoop into near- silence at around 12:30– everything’s still tense; who knows what’s around the corner? For all its fury, though, Tearful Face Of My Cute Love… is full of oddly lyrical moments, too – see the sweet melody that winds out, with gentle melancholy, near the very end of the West Nile performance. This lyricism also haunts the second side of the album, a performance from Glassland, Brooklyn, which seems more focused on the intersection of incidents, from clattering cymbals to ghostly swarms of sax scream, to dive-bombing spirals of vocoder. There’s an appealing sense of audio verité here, as though you’re in theroom with the performers, shaken and stirred by every movement, lost in the interlocking maze they’re weaving in real time. It’s a bracing, thrilling document of very immediate, human music – of three bodies moving through the world, sounding their environment.' - John Dale

It’s been almost three decades since Japanese guitarist and songwriter Masami Kawaguchi first broke cover, with his group Broomdusters and their debut album, 23 hours 30 minutes (Purifiva, 1997). In the intervening years, Kawaguchi has maintained single-minded discipline, through his membership of some of the Japanese underground’s greatest groups (Miminokoto, LSD March, Los Doroncos, Usurabi, and his projects with Keiji Haino: Aihiyo and The Hardy Rocks); the exhilarating music made by his own band, New Rock Syndicate; and a small clutch of intimate (mostly live) solo recordings. But nothing in his history has been quite as distinctive, nor as singular, as Self Portrait. The title’s a strong clue, of course, but the real tell is in the consummate nature of the eight songs here – this is Kawaguchi articulating most clearly his vision of what rock music could and should be, and what it means to him. His first studio solo album, it’s both dedication and hymn to the music that keeps Kawaguchi moving. Deftly crafted and sweetly intimate, Self Portrait is bursting with great songs, shufting from gorgeous acoustic folk-blues melancholy – see “Visions Of Marianne”, and the dreamlike closer, “On The Rooftop”, which Kawaguchi describes as his answer song to the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By” – to storming rock monsters. To that end, it’s a goddamn thrill to hear Kawaguchi and friends jamming on a James Brown riff through “Awake”, squeezing all the nuance out of its stop-start, staccato rhythms. Elsewhere, Kawaguchi lazily strums a psychedelic air, on the Syd Barrett-esque “Blindfold Blues”, and rifles through his backpack to find one of his earliest songs, the strung-out, levitating “Nothing”, which he wrote when he was nineteen years old. “Song For Golden Hair” pays tribute to the psychedelic sixties; “Drinking With Mr. K” remembers Japanese psych-rock legend Jutok Kaneko of Kousokuya. Kawaguchi’s been playing the long game, slowly whittling away at a unique and personal take on rock and the blues, one that’s equal parts reverent and forward-thinking, playful and deeply committed. Self Portrait is the clearest articulation yet of his dedicated vision. And it’s a total blast.  --- An'Archives, 2021

Albedo Gravitas is an extension of Albedo Fantastica (released on An’archives in 2018), the duo of Keiko Higuchi and Sachiko (Kousokuya, Overhang Party, Vava Kitora) Both of them are well known names to those who are evolving in the Japanese underground waters since each has been involved in many projects and each has a consisting discography on labels as Musik Atlach, Improvising Beings, Utech. Their respective backgrounds are maybe a little bit different but they share a common interest in different genres from jazz and rock to free improvisation and have collaborated with a cast of various musicians in the likes of Cris X, Fukuoka Rinji, Kawaguchi Masami, Shin-Ichiro Kanda… For Albedo Gravitas, Shizuo Uchida joins on bass. A peripatetic member of the Japanese underground, having played with groups such as Nord, Onna-Kodomo, Hasegawa-Shizuo, Kito Mizukumi Rouber and Keiji Haino’s Nijiumu, he most recently turned up on An’archives as one half of UH, alongside sax player Takayuki Hashimoto (of KMR and .es). While this is Albedo Gravitas’s first album, they play together with intelligence and sensitivity, but also with a strong capacity for the unexpected; there are many moments here where you’re wrong-footed, caught askance by the way the music comes together, and comes apart. Higuchi’s and Sachiko’s instrumental armory is multiple : piano, drums, melodica, electronics. Maybe their most remarkable presence, though, comes through voice – the glottal contortions, heart-rending sighs and moans, and chopped’n’screwed real-time vox improvs that soar across the album’s unpredictable musical terrain. Uchida works here with temporal disruption, there with heavyweight bass punctuation; drums plot out the most welcome rudimentary anti-rhythms, as electronics and melodica shoot arcs of white light through the air, lending an avant-chamber charm to the music here. Most startling are the dynamics of the two side-long pieces, and the way the group use silence and stilted landscapes to suggest all kinds of routes previously unnavigated. In its capacity for disorientation, it feels indeed like a surprising kind of psychedelia, one far from generic constraint, and much closer to the sidereal suspension that that most overused of terms should rend through your head.  --- ALBEDO GRAVITAS [ Keiko Higuchi + Sachiko + Shizuo Uchida ] --- An' Archives, 2021

First LP from Japanese free improvising duo MAI MAO. Consisting of Shizuo Uchida of Hasegawa-Shizuo, Albedo Gravitas, archeus, Kito Muzukumi Rouber, TERROR SHIT, UH, etc. on bass, and Kyosuke Terada, of HUH (who have their own release due on An’archives soon), TERROR SHIT, Bay City Rolaz, Praymate, The Obey Unit, etc. on guitar, they’ve previously released two wild cassettes, Curvature Improvement Plan (Haang niap, 2020) and Folk Dope Rally (2021), both documenting one-take improvisations from live gigs. Ricshari was recorded by Nobuki Nishiyama in January 2021, and is proof, if any was needed, that this duo is one of the most fiercely unique, out-there units currently extant – in Japan, or anywhere, for that matter. The music of MAI MAO seems to proceed by opposites and juxtaposition, shifting from frantic, hectic runs of splattering note spray to moments of granular stasis, where Uchida and Terada coax their instruments into and out of deep wells of silence, or rest, temporarily, in a lagoon of fermenting fuzz. Spiralling kinetics are largely the order of the day, though – the opener, “Chew a flying flash prayer”, skitters here and there, guitar and bass jumping over one another in games of leapfrog and Twister, finding new ways to perplex and puzzle the listener, and perhaps each other in the process, Uchida and Terada fully committed to the short-circuiting spirit of the moment. The energy here is hyperactive, but it also speaks of a curious and committed attention to improvisatory responsiveness, one that’s just as likely to fork off into different directions in a split second – it’s real edge-of-the-seat stuff, as though the hands are moving too fast for the mind to follow. That’s all the better, then, to let the gush of genuinely free-thinking, devoted duo improvisation to fly at its most playful and intelligent. File next to the likes of Davey Williams & LaDonna Smith and their TransMuseq companions, or the wickedly perplexing bass-synth/trombone duets of Dave Dove Paul Duo, and you’ve some idea of what’s going on here, provisionally at least, ‘cos this one’s an enthralling, yet welcoming, head-scratcher of the highest calibre. 

Newcastle (UK) based 3 piece Beauty Pageant are Helen Papaioannou, Daniel Dixon and Marie Thompson. They make a big loud raucous circus like clatter comprising of pounding drums, detuned guitar, gnarly baritone sax and sticky banshee vocals. Sometimes playful, sometimes minimal, always noisy! Beauty Pageant’s searing new EP drives home the bands’ desire to offer you something out of the ordinary. Trouncing waves of distortion are delivered over a bed of vigorous clunk and interwoven with sporadic invasions of erratic baritone sax. Revered in their hometown for their unbridled live shows, Beauty Pageant’s unique and chaotic sound has been expertly captured on ‘Torso‘

Altaat is a Finnish duo by Niko Karlsson & Miki Brunou, that has been active since 2011. On this album they are playing with Jari Koho, who is known from his own solo projects, and also from Vapaa, Keijo & The Free Players, Aan, Uton etc. Their track "Palava palaava" was recorded in 2014 - and now finally released on Altaat's first vinyl release. 20 minute long improvised track, with bowed strings & droney synths, melting in a cosmic mind. Euter is a mysterious duo, and these two tracks are from their recordings from 2019-2020. Experimental psychedelic noise - droning, crackling and rumbling from various sound sources. Strange encounters with a charm & carefully composed. --- Released January 4, 2021, IKUISUUS

Nowadays, information is circulating through cables and codes, however, before the advent of technology, the very acoustics of amphitheatres and religious buildings fulfilled this transmission function. The cathedral is one example. Partly conceived to enhance voice and music, it offers a wide resonance to support the religious discourse. These unique acoustics are part of its characteristics. This massive air volume is being enclosed and defined by stone. It acts as an amplifier of noise and forces listening and attention. The behaviour of the visitor/audience going through the building is thus being altered. The architecture constraining this air volume is complex and ruled by doctrine. The shape it is drawing constitutes both a symbol and an element of hierarchy for the listening situation within the space. “Stones, Air, Axioms” is a sound work based on the relationship between the architecture and acoustics of St Pierre Cathedral in Poitiers. It is articulated around informal acoustic experiments and a study of the site. It is restricted by the range of noises potentially generated by the site : on one hand the specific sonic environment of the building and on the other hand the organ used here as a sound generator. The use of the instrument has been defined by calculations combining metric measurements collected on site and the speed of sound in the air. Each time, the instrumental performance is being recorded on location and constitutes a great part of the material the piece is made of. This work has been developed into four distinct parts, each dealing with one aspect of the relation between sound and architecture. This piece has been specifically created as part of the MicroClima festival in 2010. It has been supported by the Poitou-Charentes council, the Espace Mendès-France and the MicroClima festival. 

"Before sitting down and listening to this new release by UK-based, Canadian artist Xenia Pestova Bennett, one is immediately struck by the vibrant, compelling images on the cover design. This is one of those exceptional instances where the sonic expression found therein sounds just as its extramusical inspirational sources look: stunning chemical elements that glow and pulsate. From Pestova Bennett’s liner notes: “Radium is an element which glows pale blue, Plutonium glows deep red, Tritium is green and the gas Radon is yellow at its freezing point, and orange-red below. I added the fifth, obsessively-repetitive loop… this element is silvery-white, glowing blue.” Glowing Radioactive Elements, the five tracks that correspond to the colours depicted, unfold in a well-curated and scintillating arc. The beauty of sound that emerges from Pestova Bennett recording this music on a piano with magnetic resonator – designed and trademarked by Andrew McPherson – enhances the sound world and draws the listener in, through dips and heights of pianistic gesture. The effect is akin to watching slow-moving landscapes in isolated, unfamiliar parts of our globe. The range of expression and musical material here is impressive: spontaneous at times and focused, personal and singularly driven at others. This disc rolls on to its significant final track, featuring the Ligeti Quartet in a companion work to the first, Atomic Legacies. Pestova Bennett directs the action in a florid series of closely connected gestures, deconstructing Haydn’s music and her own."

  Beyond The Black Crack by Anal Magic & Rev. Dwight Frizzell   Wishlist supported by telstar23 What a marvelous din.   Black Crack And The Sole Survivors 00:14 / 12:36         Record/Vinyl + Digital Album Includes unlimited streaming of Beyond The Black Crack via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ships out within 3 days     £17 GBP or more          Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album CD in jewel case. Comes with 12 page booklet Includes unlimited streaming of Beyond The Black Crack via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ships out within 3 days     £9 GBP or more        Streaming + Download Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.     £7 GBP  or more       1. Black Crack And The Sole Survivors 12:36   buy track   2. Fredrik's Cosmic Spaced Out Blues Band And Orchestra/Hot Fudge 01:11       3. Get It Out Of Your System 06:18       4. Chilli Supper Polka 02:20       5. Journey Of Turtles 06:31       6. Pre-Transformation Of Bird To Turtle 05:27       7. Nocturnal 02:04       8. Fly By Night 07:50       9. O What Joy It Is To Know You Have A Turtle Heart 04:11       10. Embryonic Music 03:34       11. Copulation Of Basilea And Hyperion 04:50       12. Family, Birth Of Helio And Selene 06:47       13. Destruction - Slaying Of Hyperion, Drowning Of Helio, Suicide Of Selene And The Wandering Madness Of Basilea 02:24       14. How To Avoid Simultaneity 02:54     about Beyond the Black Crack was the concept of Reverend Dwight Frizzell, a musician, film maker, Doctor of Metaphysics and minister in the Universal Church of Life. It remains a little known classic, and one of the most unique listening experiences in modern experimental music. Recorded between 1974 and 1976 in locations as diverse as factories, the pyramid opposite Harry Truman's grave site as well as more 'conventional' concert settings. Beyond the Black Crack is a dark, dizzying and exhilarating journey through free jazz, electronics and environmental sound, all shattered by Frizzell's radical tape editing. This CD re-release adds further material to the original LP: - "The Wandering Madness of Basilea", a suite from 1977 unheard until now, as well as unreleased material from the Black Crack sessions. Beyond the black crack was originally released in mono in an edition of 200 copies by Cavern Custom in 1976 (cat. no. 6104-12), to commemorate the First Annual End of the World Celebration, November 18 1976.

Peter Behrendsen (b. 1943) is a Cologne-based radio producer, performer, and composer of experimental music. He started concerning himself with electro-acoustic music in 1972, was a member of Josef Anton Riedl's ensemble and assistant to Klaus Schöning at the WDR radio play studio (Studio for Acoustic Art). He organized numerous concerts and festivals for experimental music in Cologne, most notably BrückenMusik, a series of concerts in the box girder of the Deutz bridge. After Nachtflug / Atem des Windes in 2017 (ET 628-05LP), this is his second LP on Edition Telemark. 10 x 15 = 30 is the vinyl mix of a concert for Behrendsen's 75th birthday at the LOFT in Cologne. The full-length recording has been released on CD by Obst Music with the title Fünf Mal Dreißig Ist Sechzig (5 x 30 = 60). The players were: Peter Behrendsen (electronics), Dietmar Bonnen (prepared piano, glockenspiel), Andreas Oskar Hirsch (carbophone), hans w. koch (axoloti, blippoo box), and Lucia Mense (recorders). What Behrendsen had in mind for the concert was not a program of solo pieces but a collective improvisation with musicians and visual artists. Being skeptical about conventional "free" (psychodynamic) improvisation, he decided to go with an approach that John Cage called "with the head in the sky -- and the feet on the ground": between individual freedom and preconceived rules. The total length of the concert was set to 60 minutes, each player had 30 minutes in sections between two and ten minutes. Their length and distribution was decided by chance. Within their sections, players had individual freedom: Musical communication was not mandatory but possible, emerging musical relationships would often be unintentional. Simultaneously, five videos by visual artists were projected in random order, again without any intended correlation between sound and video. For the LP, the concert recording had to be adapted in length, i.e. reduced to two parts of about 15 minutes each. To maintain the character of a whole, the 60-minute concert was cut into two equal parts, mixed down and cut into two halves for both sides. The result is a new piece: denser but still transparent, the relationships between the musicians even more abstract -- a new composition. Regular version comes in glossy sleeve with artwork by Dietmar Bonnen; edition of 240.

Yoğurt is the second album of Blutwurst collective: three highly medative tracks focused on electroacoustic exploration of hypnotic sound textures. Blutwurst ensemble focus their musical research on sustained tones, unisons and drones. The apparent formal stasis generates dilated and tonally complex sound environments where the exploration of the timbral possibilities aims to create an organic integration of acoustic and electronic sounds.   released November 15, 2016 Cristina Abati: viola; Marco Baldini: trumpet; Maurizio Costantini: double bass; Daniela Fantechi: accordion & gong; Luca Giorgi: sine waves, analog synthesizer, no-input mixer & tape recorders; Michele Lanzini: cello; Edoardo Ricci: bass clarinet; Luisa Santacesaria: harmonium & singing bowls.

Formed through a complex web of friendships in and out of the improvised music scene and contemporary art world B.C.F.W are bonded by a common love of musical exploration. In 2018 they all made arrangements to meet in New York City. The fruits of this meeting are the freaked out jazz tracks contained on this album. Melted and dreamy reeds, gurgling synths, clattering drums, and silky guitar weave in and out of each other in an electrifying dance. It is a jazz album… but one that is at the further reaches of composition and expectation. B.C.F.W is Andrew Barker (synthesizer and cello) Daniel Carter (tenor sax, soprano sax, and trumpet), Pat Foley (guitar), and Fritz Welch (drums).Available in a limited vinyl pressing of 500 copies. Cover photograph by Chase Allgood.

unreal. brain warble/garble. its bells. bells? bells. its hypnotic in the quit smoking way. i'm down to 2 a day. can't speak for anyone else's vices or poisons. this isn't a sermon just where this music takes me. here's a more clear headed perspective from Miles Bowe: "A bell rings and we see a bell. Whether its chime seeped from a speaker or floated through an open window, that bell is now in front of us. With each strike, its resonance, symbolism and physicality impacts us before we’ve even perceived these sounds as “music”. To our ears, this is not immediately an instrument — it’s a bell. On Bell Formations, arriving on vinyl this spring through Ryley Walker’s Husky Pants label, sound artists Max Eilbacher (of Horse Lords) and Henry Birdsey never let you lose sight of this singular instrument, even as they turn it inside out. Originating from a series of orchestral bell recordings by Birdsey, Bell Formations is the result of two years of trading files and sculpting sounds on a microtonal level. Showcasing both Birdsey’s precise skill at coaxing sounds through his recording and arrangements, as well as Eilbacher’s one-of-a-kind electronic processing, these sprawling pieces accentuate the natural elements of bells rather than distorting them. Embracing both subtle and extreme detunings (and retunings), the pair approach each attack and sustain as a doorway to limitless sonic possibilities. As Eilbacher explains, “Henry's bell recordings are some of the most malleable acoustic material I have worked with.” For all of Bell Formation’s dense processing, Eilbacher and Birdsey push us infinitely closer to the instrument with every strike. Our understanding of these sounds grows more intimate, even as the sources become completely transmuted. Far beyond melting, it’s as if these bells have sublimed entirely, each ring unleashing a cloud of copper and tin. For both its careful sonic unraveling of such a powerful, seemingly unchanging instrument and the inspiring musical conversation at its core, Bell Formations stand as a thrilling debut collaboration and one of the most unique experimental recordings of this year." 

Edition of 200 copies. Swedish noise agitator Dan Johannsson (Sewer Election) brand new album. Hypnotic, dreamlike and introspective tape loops, musique concrete-esque abstractions, bleached electro-acoustic structures. Skärvor Av flows with an elemental sorcery from reverberant electronic space and caustic noise swells to dense bleakness held in elemental balance with moments of astonishing beauty