The cycle of compositions collected under the title Plane/Talea reflect Alessandro Bosetti interest in vocal polyphonic music. They envision an “impossible choir” constructed through the sampling of thousands of fragments and pieces of voices, my own and those of others, and their recomposition into polyphonic garlands and textures. This cycle can be intended as the utopic sonification of an impossible community in which the voice is atomized into primary particles and later reconstituted into sonic masses and clouds. These are too dense and complex for a chorus of real human beings to sing. The music of Plane/Talea is the sonic projection of such a community. The voice is not processed or altered in any way but subjected to molecular reorganization. Theoretically, a hyper-chorus could sing material of this type but, perhaps fortunately, such a choir does not yet exist. Up until now, in the process of creation of my vocal music, I’ve kept two poles and influences in balance: that of madrigalism in its late renaissance and contemporary incarnations and that of hyper-polyphony, which is close to spectral music. Though not ever having actually written in one or the other of these two styles, I’ve always felt this unresolvable and fertile tension in my work. (A.B.) ---Recorded, composed and mixed by Alessandro Bosetti at GMEM (Centre National de Création Musicale in Marseille). Additional recordings by Attila Faravelli at Spazio O', Milano. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin.pressing info: 300 copies on black, embossed lettering

Apocope is the second C.A.N.V.A.S. compilation, following Cipher (2019) and featuring another grouping of dispersed artists responding to a call-out under a unifying theme/sky. Where Cipher approached codification, Apocope approaches the cut-off point of a pop operative. An ‘apocope’ is a word truncated—a sound omitted—moulded into a shape that rolls off of the tongue yet carries within it further significance. Together as C.A.N.V.A.S; Lugh, Olan Monk and Elvin Brandhi invited Alpha Maid, Bashar Suleiman, Billy Bultheel, Hulubalang and Nadah El Shazly to join them in excavating ‘POP’—a boundless yet always personal subject, specific to context and forms of co-existence. The resulting record created by the group is a warped hypogeum of dissonant intimacies, the texture of the post-POPped bubble strewn into unpredictable hymns of prophetic onomatopoeia. Together this collection of tracks sustains tangible reciprocity between those involved, despite the dislocation of the time during which it was made and the physical distance which separated the artists who communicated remotely. HYPE! As the commercialization of an essentially positive impulse to exert imbalance. We asked ourselves to what extent we are the subject of the conditions we fight against, which contagions inhabit our receptivity. What involuntarily haunts the creative inventory. Apocope is a compilation of tracks that approach without reaching their referent. The possible drop-off point of the pop lineage. Idols falling. Apo-Cope, understood also as apocalyptic hope. This title recovers the dynamic meaning of Cope (Kolaphos). Cope is not a capacity to contain a situation, it is a strike, a hit—a resistant attack. A de-fence mechanism as a cutting through the protective infrastructure and allowing the skin to breathe. A collective calling up, throwing off our infatuations. The joy of pop nothingness falls flat of an exuberant call-out. Instead, it’s a burnt out landscape of post-pop memories. Shells of cars with the windows blasted out and the radio playing a skipping CD on infinite loop or tuning into radio stations still echoing from last year, already forgotten. A pandemic induced surge-out, a farewell to arms. The greatest hits of an only half-remembered era of reducing attention spans and blown out pop hedonist nihilism, a NOW compilation for the elongated annulment of our prospects. Apocope is a somewhat jaded, stranded, and disoriented but defiant and hopeful gesture, striving to redefine the realm of the possible. This is neither a tabula rasa, a clean-cut break from the past, nor is it nostalgic. Apocope remodels the vernacular to create breathing-space for an era gasping for air. It reveals and reflects the trauma of a generation plagued by cultural stasis and strife, letting out some bruised blood. We sidle with the cut-off point, the Cope, the Hit that POP’s our bubble, revealing the face disguised by flawless elastic. To learn from the affectivity of ideological oppression we join the hit parade assertively walking in the opposite direction. 

Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room was written over 50 years ago, and it’s about time somebody figured out what to do with it. Sure, you could upload and re-upload the same video until it washes out into a gurgle, and people have. But the result is always just less video and not more of something else. There’s no space, no Room, inside a digital stream to come forth.Here’s why: Lucier’s piece famously provides more thrills and chills the more patience you bring to it. And it works that way because music chops up time. It’s something you have to do. It requires a listener, sitting there, realizing how a pattern has been laid out. To bring that energy to the digital realm, you have to flip Lucier sideways and inside out. And that’s what Marc Matter has done here.Matter first came around as part of Institut für Feinmotorik in the late 1990s, and he’s been politely shoving vocal recordings through various sorts of blenders ever since. He currently teaches people about sound poetry and makes radio plays in Germany.As this piece begins, you’ll notice how little audio material is really needed for your brain to start turning things into things. The merest slice of a plosive becomes a beat. The notes buried in every vowel are a bass line that nobody’s fingers can reach. And of course the lyrics are the music. Sometimes you’ll catch one of the English newscaster phrases Marc picked out, or the robot voice he chose to read stuff to you. But if you give your brain permission to not understand, then in the middle of all those fades, wipes, and scissor cuts, a flickering and drunk Jim Morrison will arise, spouting nonsense phrases like ‘back no match around the worm’. Will your ears follow Jim into his meaningless twilight, or won’t they?If you do take the ride with Marc’s GPS to the center of your mind, there’s a particular reward. Because even after the rhythm of speech is pulverized to the point of nothing, even once you can no longer tell whether the cut-and-paste is coming from the end or the beginning or the middle, there is a synthetic voice, stripped of its humanity, that will relentlessly call to your brain like a siren and beg you to make sense of what doesn’t. This piece isolates your perceptive abilities in the audio realm the way an optical illusion works on your eyes. Its melody is the amount you’ll struggle to turn sound into sense. That’s the Room that opens up after the speech is gone. On top of that, it’s delightfully fucking annoying.

Collection of recordings by the Italian sound and concrete poet Arrigo Lora-Totino (1928-2016). His place in the history and development of poetical intermedia is undisputed. This LP holds fourteen voice-based tape works made from the years 1968 to 2000. While there is some use of cut-up tape manipulation, the artistry truly lies in his performance of the sound plays. Multi-tracking is utilized and Arrigo’s nebulous voice paintings splat and click and glide. His bold expression is inspiring to me: it leads by example in encouraging the pulling of oneself further into their art. I was staying at a hotel in San Francisco when I awoke in a sunfilled room to an email from Giovanni Fontana telling me that Arrigo had passed away. I was saddened by the departure of such a creative man, yet proud to be working with and perpetuating his legacy.

Swiss electronician Tomas Korber started releasing music about fifteen years ago, right when the Swiss saxophone quartet Konus Quartett (Christian Kobi, Fabio Oehrli, Jonas Tschanz, Stefan Rolli) was formed. Korber has worked with major figures from the electroacoustic improvisation scene (Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Keith Rowe) and the onkyo improvisation scene (Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide). As a composer, his impeccable works revolve around an immersion into stripped-down, silence-pregnant, interrelation-rich sound worlds.

Recollects, Derek Baron's second solo LP following 2016's Crooked Dances, was recorded in September 2016 in the Boundary Waters between Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota and Quetico Provincial Park in southwest Ontario. Here, Derek brings together a repeatedly postponed canoe trip and a bin of old cassette tapes from the 1990s. Family histories are retold and misremembered, wildlife calls are heard and misidentified.

Blod is the solo project of Gustaf Dicksson (Enhet För Fri Musik, Oroskällan), a prolific and crucial figure in the Swedish Underground scene radiating out of Gothenburg and centered around a number of independent labels and including bands such as Enhet För Fri Musik, Monokultur, Oroskällan, Loopsel, and Neutral. Blod has released various home-recorded cassettes and a handful of LPs since 2014, all mercurial in nature, exploring various facets of Dicksson’s preoccupations. The melodies borrow from tradition and possess a lonesome quality inspired by Swedish melancholy, close relations, and white trash culture. Combined with intentionally banal artwork, the experience can be beguiling and sometimes bleak but at the same time warm and humorous. Missväxt is Dicksson’s greatest work yet, exploring the myth of ancient Swedish being and misery but with a sound that is uniquely ecstatic. Inspired by medieval folk music, it’s reminiscent of Fairport Convention’s marriage of traditional folk music and psychedelic rock. Missväxt features guest appearances by Elin Engström (Loopsel, Monokultur) on drums, Astrid Øster Mortensen on vocals and flute, Joakim Karlsson (Facit) on production and synth, and Magnus Jäverling on flute.

It Changes is a new album by Ailie Ormston and Tim Fraser. It incorporates samples of collaborative session material, automated MIDI instrumentation, and adhoc field recordings. Music from this album was first presented in 2019 as a larger audio-visual work which debuted at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow as part of Counterflows festival. The recordings were then completed in 2020 during the first lockdown using voice notes, and by running a 7.5m headphone cable between their neighbouring flats. The album’s title It Changes is taken from a Sherman Brothers song of the same name, written for the animated film Snoopy Come Home. It mirrors themes of alienation and attachment associated with Peanuts characters, and looks at modern individualist and consumerist ideas of desire and liberation. It uses the 1992 UK Clubland anthem Only Love Can Set You Free by N-Trance as a central motif, noting the last three decades of neoliberal policies and affected culture. References to the decline of the welfare state and increased surveillance are contrasted with sincere messages of love and resistance.

This record began in summer 2020, when I was staying at Andersabo, Sweden, where I run an artists' residency. I had access to a nearby church, and would set drones going on the organ while playing clarinet and piano. I started working with the combination of these long, sustained tones, combined with acoustic instruments, where the sound's duration was only as long as a breath or the pluck of a string. A lot of the last Blue Lake LP was made using a series of zithers that I built myself. I have always been interested in layering sounds, and had in the past made music by recording several guitar parts and putting them together. The zithers allowed me to explore this kind of layered playing live, as both hands can be used simultaneously to create overlapping patterns. In the summer that I started recording Stikling, I built a much larger 48-string zither that expanded a lot of these possibilities and ended up featuring in a lot of the new music. Each piece on Stikling began with some kind of drone - an organ tone or a frozen note on the cello. A particular phrase on piano or a series of clarinet chords would start to determine a structure, and the music grew over time, with parts being added, taken away, re-written, re-recorded. The word “stikling” in Danish means a cutting taken from a plant that is then set in new soil. During the past two years, I’ve been working with gardening - planting, collecting seeds, and making cuttings. These processes often involve a mix of creation and destruction – growth goes hand in hand with removing old material and cutting things down. This kind of circularity fed into the music as it was being developed for the LP. After starting on the church organ in summer 2020, I finished by recording on the little pump organ at Andersabo in summer 2021. 

Spencer Clark is back with Vol.2 of his eco-friendly extravaganza Avatar Blue. It’s life on earth as you never heard it. The story goes like this: Spencer wanted to do a soundtrack for the yet to be made “Avatar 2”. And if you know Spencer’s work, you’ll know that he engaged on this mission reading material that influenced the rich and crazy imaginary world of “Avatar”. If you think about it a little bit, something like “Avatar” could have really come out from the mind of Spencer Clark. But it didn’t. So, he dwelled around the idea of that soundtrack, working on what is now known as “Avatar Blue”. The record we now release is a selection he made from the 2CD released last year on his own Pacific City Sound Visions. Like many of Spencer’s other alias or incarnations, Star Searchers introduces the listener to a new world. Besides making sounds/soundtracks for alternative realities he cares about making a world for his music to live in. It’s never superficial or dedicated just to the act of imagination, Spencer creates sounds that sustain the reality he imagined. That’s why they’re so rich and consequential in the realisation of music as a medium. “Avatar Blue” is music but also literature. And cinema. Star Searchers’ sound creates an absorbent sound about what’s happening in aquatic life. It goes beyond the perception of what we’ve seen or what we’ve known, it’s a neo-future aquatic life, with a world building structure and sounds and narratives that go along with it. All done with a sound-aesthetics that could be described as slowed-down-trance, that fits 1980s synth nostalgia and dreams of sci-fi to come. --- Discrepant Music, 2020

Reading Group presents 'Wanda's Dream', the new work by Krakow-based sound artist and researcher Marcin Barski. Below is Barski's introduction to the record: "The 1980s were special. It was then when microphones became a natural common part of the equipment of many households. Audio recordings were no longer unusual: everyone could make them. Handheld walkmans with a dictaphone option, analogue answering machines, tape players always equipped with a red button and a tiny hole to which one should speak in order to have their voice archived – all of these were to be found pretty much everywhere and pretty much everyone knew how to use them. There was no philosophy behind it: tapes cost pennies. And many of them have survived to this day. (...)Disappointment is a recurrent theme in these tapes. The jammed Radio Free Europe broadcasts, the vulgar sexist cabarets which stopped being funny many, many years ago (if they were ever funny at all) and above all the conversations describing new taxes, the difficulties of everyday life, or even complaints about the phoning system and the need to wait hours by the phone before being able to speak to relatives abroad.It is not uncommon to find tapes with Father Popieluszko’s sermons about truth, disguised (perhaps to fool the militia?) as Modern Talking cassettes, with the tracklist handwritten on the red and white inlay card. In the illegal underground circuit of the 1980s, the visual could function just as a cover-up for the audial. The Polish soundscape back then was very much happening on the level of the imagination. On tapes, people were sharing things they had never seen, the voices of people they had never met and recordings of music they could never experience live in a concert. The audial was shaping their longing for the visual. The audial had the power of changing a reality which otherwise was too much stuck in its greyness. (...)The other day, I found a box of tapes with recordings of phone conversations from 1982-1984. The man who was recording them – Jan – documented every single talk he had over the phone throughout these years. His wife lived in Vienna at that time and was sending him Western goods that he distributed in Warsaw among friends. But he was also a romantic guy: the tape on the bottom of the box was titled (in handwriting in pencil) «Wanda’s Dream, May 1982». It’s a quiet, 8-minute long recording of someone’s snoring. Did Jan ever listen back to his wife sleeping? Did he go to sleep in a grey communist Warsaw flat with this tape on after both TV channels had finished their broadcasts? Did he ever try to imagine the sounds, the smells and the looks of Wanda’s bedroom in colorful capitalist Vienna? Again, disappointment is a recurring theme. In a way, Jan lived a polygamic life, with one wife behind many passport controls and another one on his tapes. Both invisible, but which one was more real?"Excerpt from "Sermons over Modern Talking" essay published in "Topos. Journal for philosophy and cultural studies" (No 1 2018). The whole text in pdf format available here.A1 - Wanda's DreamA2 - Jammed by the SovietsB1 - Sermons over Modern TalkinB2 - Conversation with FatherLimited edition of 250.Includes digital download card

Best Available Technology’s Kevin Palmer keeps a backpack full of cassette tapes in his car to play at random and in their entirety. The Florist’s Mum release of Inscape Routes is an amalgamation of these long coastal drives, a high moon beaming through the windshield as a reverberating guitar plucking, structured rhythms of the highway’s rumble strips, a red light, and an indicator signalling left all take place within the tonal monastery of this metal box at 60 mph. Best Available Technology reasserts himself as a ruthless pioneer within his own field, a tree-lined pavement between ambience and dub, a dreamy drive down a barren city. --- released August 27, 2021   ---Mastered by GIusseppe Ielasi Artwork by Ziad Nagy   ---   The Florists Mum, 2021

A remastered vinyl issue of the impossible-to-find album Cri-Rythmes by the French sound poet François Dufrêne (1930-1982). First published on cassette in the 1970’s, this LP holds tracks not available since then. Dufrêne swallows the microphone, gargles the capsule, then vomits up the cables. Claustrophobic, verbal seizures, revealing once more that Dufrêne is king and all the pages of poetic history now have his spit on them.

Finders Keepers Records' continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani's key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world's most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers' decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani's versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line. Within the context of Suzanne Ciani's achievements the words “maverick” and "pioneer" have regularly shared sentences amongst a list of "firsts" when documenting her expansive CV as a Grammy nominated, million-selling recording artist, and genuine revolutionary in the progression of future music in all its early capacities. But it is with this important release of uncovered recordings from early 1973 that Ciani's "exploratory" compositions from her formative years find kinship alongside the exploits of other radical and historic trailblazers, as the music for the film known only as Denali finally achieves a wider vantage point. Commissioned in the early years of Suzanne's "professional" life, in a period that bridged her activities with art installations, experimental theatre and her rising reputation as a film composer and sound designer, the Denali tape reels preceed Suzanne's film work such as Lloyd Michael Williams Rainbow's Children (1975) and Bryan Forbe's The Stepford Wives (1975) by just 18 months, and capture Suzanne at her wide-eyed best two years after scoring her first-ever paid work providing synthesiser loops for aquariums in Middle America shopping malls (Fish Music, FKSP011). It was in 1972, whilst occupying a studio space in San Francisco, as one of a small group of prophets then celebrating the interpolation of Don Buchla's electronic instruments, that Suzanne was approached by a French speaking ski enthusiast and short film producer called Patrick Derouin to create "forward-thinking" and "otherworldly" themes and sound design for some amazing unseen footage of the first-ever people to ski down the death-defying face of Mount Mckinley in Alaska. Recognised as one of the tallest mountains in the world, this footage would mark a significant historic feat previously inconceivable outside the hat stand notions of a small group of French speaking European explorers and would also coincide with cultural pressure within the Alaska state legislature to lobby for the United States Board On Geographic Names to reinstate the mountain's traditional name Denali (a decision widely supported by The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain for centuries). Given what is now widely recognised about Suzanne Ciani as a composer, it is plain to see that Derouin came to the correct place and as you will hear, for the first time, within the grooves of this record the collective aura of challenge and enlightenment is almost breathtaking in its precise narrative ability; striking similarities with Eno, Kraftwerk and Neu! at their melodic best but from a very different vantage point, with polar opposite means of execution, whilst operating on Ciani's unique and all-important feminine "wave" length. The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne's first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne's proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it's advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani's globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer _lhan Mimaro_lu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer's determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla's production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. "Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano," explains Suzanne in 2020. "It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA," she laments. "If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola," she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small's aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. "I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent," Suzanne explained. "He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself." The basic brief around Suzanne's musical journey was to be "The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain," which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions ("I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn't get street hassle on the way home"), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer. As mountaineering history denotes the first-ever skier to descend from the tip of Denali was indeed in 1972, in dates that correlate directly to Suzanne's meticulously kept tape library and studio diaries. The explorer's name was French speaking Swiss skier Sylvain Saudan, a celebrated household name amongst enthusiasts to this day. Like Suzanne, like Saudan, neither artist have diverted from their path, turned their back on a challenge, nor lost their footing in the face of adversity. 

"Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, Virtual Swimmer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. 'Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist.'Mike Cooper says 'the first half is played on my old 1920s National tri-plate lapsteel guitar and the second half on my vietnamese electric lap steel. I also sing two songs along the way. ‘’Movies is Magic’’ by Van Dyke Parks and “Dolphins” by Freid Neil. It was the first time I had ever sung the last song.'"With beautiful artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw.

The Clearing is the debut album by the late Los Angeles-based musician Barry Craig aka A Produce. As co-founder of the underground cassette imprint Trance Port Tapes, Craig managed to assemble local artists who were working within the realms of DIY electronics and rhythmic, spacious sound. Incubated over a three year period, '88 release The Clearing draws on the roster of TPT associates such as Scott Fraser (Kronos Quartet), Daniel Voznick (Afterimage) and guitarist Scott Marc Becker resulting an 'an album of conceptual space', owing equally to the guitar-based new-wave releases of the imprint prior as to the later, and deeper ambient trance sound that would follow. Coming at this intersection of styles, there are moments of deep introspection and sulking, minimal drum machines followed by pieces of more outward expression only to be plunged back into tense, oppressive atmospheres. Yet despite these shifts in style, the sense of mood and cohesion throughout is ever-present, giving a true sense of inhabiting a unique space - or 'The Clearing'. Stockport-based store All Night Flight Records is proud to present this official reissue, with the blessing of Craig's estate and artwork replicated by the original artist - renown designer Bruce Licher of Independent Project Recordings. Release by All Night Flight

This manifesto of outsider orchestrations, teenage symphonies and cultivated concrete is the debut album of experimental Irish avant garde and electro acoustic innovator Roger Doyle. A pianist, composer and improvisational jazz drummer with a penchant for experimentation that would marginalise him from traditional seats of learning in his native homeland but embrace him to the bosom of Europe’s leading forward-thinking research centres for electronic and computer music. Here he would piece together two highly sought after experimental albums before returning home to channel his multi-disciplinary work ethic into the agit pop theatrical company Operating Theatre and play a leading role in the burgeoning Irish new wave scene as an early signing to U2’s Mother Records. A collection of some of Doyle’s earliest works as an indomitable scholarship student of composition at the Royal Irish Academy Of Music in Dublin and then as founding member and drummer of experimental jazz rock outfit Jazz Therapy (who would later become Supply Demand & Curve), this patchwork 1975 debut long-player draws from what was an already bulging portfolio that included academic assignments, living room compositions and soundtrack collaborations with Irish filmmakers. Originally part-recorded and subsequently aborted when the would-be label vanished without trace overnight, Oizzo No was shelved indefinitely until a scholarship at the prestigious Institute Of Sonology at the University Of Utrecht in Holland afforded Doyle not only the opportunity to partially revise his humble opus in their state of the art studios (as well as those of the EMS Studios in Stockholm) but also the money to press a limited run of 500 copies and help further cement the foundations of his future status as one of Ireland’s leading and most versatile contemporary composers.