Vinyl


Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen came together for a gig in Berlin, organised by Pattern Dissection in February 2020, at which they shared the stage for the first time — resulting in a sweaty winter night and a cheering, overwhelmed audience. Their idiosyncratic line-up of electric bass, synthesizer and drums is foundation to spectacular group improvisation, pushing through seething soundscapes and incredibly dynamic interplay to agile free jazz attacks of astonishing intensity. They met again six months later for a day in the studio to record their debut album and the inaugural release on the Pattern Dissection record label. Dag Magnus’s down-tuned drum set builds the ground for relentless legwork and hectic wrestling, shaking the floor when confronted with Farida’s high string slaps on the bass guitar, which they occasionally swap for droning vibrations and scorching fingerpicking, neither shying away from a heavy riff nor stripped back momentum. Liz’s synth is an idiosyncratic creature of its own, birthing sounds rarely graspable but utterly fascinating, swift in taking turns and always one step ahead of any expectation. Before meeting as a band the three artists cut their teeth in numerous projects and constellations as well as finding a highly personal voice in playing their respective instrument: By challenging possibilities and limits and navigating to unknown territory, CIRCUIT will keep you on the edge of your seat. All music composed and performed by Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen, recorded in Berlin on July 28, 2020.

Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack, & Dag Magnus Narvesen – Circuit

TWO LIVE RECORDINGS + UNRELEASED TAPE + UNRELEASED CONFERENCE + INTERVIEWHenri Chopin came to perform in Besançon in 1995 at Garage Caméléon the birthplace of Erratum Musical activities and the label. People involved were Michel Giroud (who introduced Henri Chopin to us and helped to publish “Poésie Sonore Internationale”), Joachim Montessuis, Yvan Etienne and Masahiro Handa. This place used to be a 300m2 garage where we lived, worked and organised noise performances and poetry actions from 1993 to 1998. When Henri Chopin arrived, he was 72 years old, calm and slow, and was delighted to meet a younger generation interested in sound art and electronic sound poetry experiments. He brought his tapes and we rented a powerful sound system that would be perfect to fill all of the space with his mouth noises. He then asked us to project the sound and follow his gestures concerning volumes and dynamic panning, and the resulting high pitch echos and feedback intensity along with the slowly melting speakers (audible here) gave him an incredible excitation and joy that we all could witness - and it was a contagious enthousiasm. Direct energy ! Later in 2004 Henri Chopin gave us two tapes to release, the first one was for the CD “La danse des tonneaux roulants et brisés” and the second one was “Les gouffres des bronches sont des cavernes infinies”, which was aired for the first time on France Culture radio in 2013 thanks to Thomas Baumgartner. Henri Chopin was born in 1922, this LP is echoing his 100th anniversary and celebrates the passion he channeled and transmitted to many artists along his life and beyond.

HENRI CHOPIN – LES GOUFFRES DES BRONCHES SONT DES CAVERNES INFINIES

Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist Crys Cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300. 

Crys Cole – Beside Myself

Building upon a standing commitment to the work of artists who worked in international obscurity under the shadow of 1960s and '70s fascist Spain, Alga Marghen returns with "El Artilugio”, a never before issued body of work by Manuel Calvo. Bridging the contexts of installation, sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music / noise, its stunning two sides - issued in a limited edition of 200 copies on vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve with an accompanying large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo - open a visionary creative universe, too long hidden by the history's weight. Over their decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has illuminated a near countless number of historical artefacts at the juncture of visual art, experimental music and avant-garde deployments of language, helping to radically reshape our understanding of 20th Century creative practice. Embedded within their ever-growing discography lies a small window, via releases by Zaj members Walter Marchetti, José Luis Castillejo and Juan Hidalgo, into the avant-garde happening occurring in Spain during the '60s and '70s, while the country lay under the final decades of fascist rule. Now, Alga opens access to this radical world with El Artilugio, a stunning LP of previously unavailable sonic art by multidisciplinary artist, Manuel Calvo, created in 1966. Creatively thrilling and existing outside the larger historical vision of experimental practice occourring in Europe during that decade, its stunning sounds are issued on vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, accompanied by a large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo, in an edition of 200 copies. As important as world-premiere releases come.Born in 1934, during the 1950s and '60s Manuel Calvo emerged as a forerunner and a protagonist of geometric abstract painting in Spain, working against the odds attempting freely expression within the context of fascist rule in Spain that had taken hold during the early years of his life. During his early career, he was closely aligned with groups like Equipo 57 and Grupo Parpallo, artists who were active around Valencia and held strong connections to the rest of Europe, developing the principles of an analytical art in opposition to the main currents of informal art and lyrical abstraction.This restless questioning increased to more radical tendencies in his work, a period spent in Paris and then Brazil, before returning to Spain in 1966 where he fell into contact with artists like Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, who had founded the Zaj group in Madrid in 1964, and begun creating some of the most subversive means of aesthetic communication encountered during that period.Calvo’s new phase of radicalism, embarked upon between 1966 and 1967, centered around the transformation of his studio into a laboratory where he could hold a permanent exhibition of his works, opening it to the public with no temporal limits, in the hope to reverse the standing perceptions of what an exhibition was. Within this space, Calvo created El artilugio, a participatory installation where the effects of light variations were randomly activated through simple buttons by the audience, opening the potential for open structures of unlimited possibilities for random variation. In addition to this, through a process similar to that applied to the light, Calvo introduced a reel-to-reel recording machine and a pre-recorded magnetic tape as a sonic element, recording the parasitic noises of an old electric engine that were then introduced into the installation via the reel-to-reel. It is this sound component of the installation that makes up Alga Marghen’s incredible LP, El artilugio, opening long overdue access to this singular creative world.El artilugio comprise two side long tracks. The first encounters the brilliant, randomized sonic universe that accompanied the installation of the same name, appearing somewhere between sound collage - split and juxtaposed by the participant’s push-button activated manipulation - and a microscopic journey across the surface and generative possibilities of the machine whose sounds it captures, rattling, clicking, scratching, droning, and buzzing as it goes, before fading out in a glissando after nearly half an hour.As a fascinating juxtaposition, the second side of El artilugio features the performance of an Austrian soprano singer reading out phonems, alliterations of single words, tongue twisters, and texts in different languages, repeated obsessively into states of abstraction that offers a stunning counterpoint to other forms of sound poetry being created during this period across the globe.Issued in a vinyl edition of 200 copies, in a gatefold sleeve that also includes a large format 8-page booklet, with El artilugio Alga Marghen has offered yet another triumphant window into the incredible world of singular artists working against the odds within fascist Spain, expanding their long-standing commitment to illuminating under-celebrated artefacts from the 20th Century, and changing history as they go. Absolutely incredible, and a must for any fan of sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music at large.

Manuel Calvo – El Artilugio

'Studies / Studien / Etudes' is a collection of pieces on synth by Rotterdam-based artist Joost M. de Jong jr., inspired by the first wave of Krautrock, Wendy Carlos and straight-to-VHS soundtracks. His music is both abstract and melodic, playful and austere, highly experimental and endlessly replayable... TEXT ↓It turns out that ‘Joost M. de Jong, Jr.’ is just one of the incarnations, in name and character, of the man sitting in front of me. As a person, he is apologetic about being chaotic and about being a millennial. As a musician, he goes by a number of monikers, past and present. Oliver Oat makes pop music, Boze Adelaar raps, and Jose Happa does Casio Latin. Joost also lends his musical assistance to many other bands. It was in one of these bands, Bonne Aparte, that Michiel Klein, who runs the cassette label DeHef, noticed Joost’s doodling between songs on the MoPho, a one-voice synth with sub-oscillator. He encouraged him to keep playing around, to record some segments and forward them to him for a future tape compilation release. This provided a focus for the heretofore ‘unguided’ doodling and arpeggios; they now had a purpose and a goal.In much the same way, Joost’s earliest musical inclinations at the age of five were directed into piano lessons by his parents, to formalise his fiddling. This led to a sequence of musical adventures through his childhood, including participation in a church choir and playing Swedish folk music; violin- and singing lessons; and pop-music lessons. Later on he studied sublime poetry in Edinburgh, Scotland; picked up the accordion and the ukulele; messed with PCs and SCSI hard-disk recording; then went on to the guitar, melodic death metal, and radio-promo productions.Joost’s classical training can be clearly discerned in the arpeggiated tracks on this album, influenced by Béla Bartók, Bach’s fugues, eighties soundtracks, Krautrock, and electronic pioneers such as Wendy Carlos. The tracks were recorded on VCR using a combination of Roland JX-3P, Korg Mono/Poly, Roland Juno-60, an old mixer, an Echolette suitcase delay machine and more. Klein’s curatorial input was responsible for losing a drumtrack and looping some shorter pieces.So, listen closely and let the mathematical intricacy of synthesised arpeggios take you on a ride over some imaginary moviescapes. Text written by Danny Bosten, Rotterdam

Joost M. de Jong jr. ‎ – Studies / Studien / Études

The second release on the Henning Christiansen Archive is a compilation of four works from 1967-1972 including a poem set in a bath, an unknown musical work, the musical backdrop to a horse sacrifice and a soundtrack to a school play. What binds these works together alongside the period when written is their basis in ‘song’ and some traditional ‘musical’ elements. What separates it from said tradition is that they were composed by Henning Christiansen. Op.41 Badet is a simple work featuring 3 elements: Charlotte Strandgaard reading her poem Badet (The Bath), Henning playing melodica and the sound of water splashing in a bath. The result is an unusual and evocative lo-fi setting to the resigned nature of the reading. Not a lot is known about Kom Frem For Satan (Come Forward Satan). Possibly a soundtrack of sorts? It certainly carries that mood with it’ jazz inflicted interludes, melodic organ moments all interlaced with the diegetic sounds of cars, footsteps, gunshots, etc. The result comes across like a gangster tinged musique concrete radio play. Kom Frem For Satan also shares musical motifs that appear in Op.72 on side two of the lp. Min Død Hest was previously released as a single sided 10” under the name Hesteofringen, here restored under it’s correct name. Min Død Hest (My Dead Horse) was written to accompany the Bjørn Nørgaard performance Hesteofringen (The Horse Sacrifice) on the 30th of Jan 1970, one of the most notorious performances in Danish art history. Featuring a poem written by Lene Adler Pedersen, this is a recording made after the performance with Lene Adler Pedersen singing, accompanied by Christiansen on piano (as opposed to the green violin he used in the performance), Min Død Horse is a beautiful haunting fragile song laden with metaphor, a sad lullaby is as simple and unusual as anything in Christiansen’s output. Op.72 Bondeføreren Knud Lavard is a the soundtrack to a school play performed on at the Fanefjord School on the island of Møn, Denmark, where he lived, in 1972. Another surprising work in Christiansen’s oeuvre the 6 pieces that make up this work shift between the sinister and sweet, often in the same track. Falling within the same period Henning made the soundtrack to The Executioner, Bondeføreren Knud Lavard mixes the melancholic romantic mood of that soundtrack whilst deep organ chords, military drumming and an acoustic guitar solo (played by Henning’s first son Esben Christiansen) all make an appearance. This is an sublime collection from one the 20th Centuries most diverse composers at the bridge between his romantic and avant-garde phases. Limited LP in an edition of 500 copies with:  Large bespoke fold out sleeve on craft board with white reverse Printed inner sleeve A2 poster  Postcard Compiled by Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen and Mark Harwood Design and Concept by Maja Larsson Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Henning Christiansen – Op. 41 BADET / Kom Frem For Satan / Min Døde Hest / Op.72 Bondeføreren Knud Lavard

Icepick is the super-power trio of some of the busiest musicians on this planet – American, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley, Norwegian, Austin-based bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and American, Upstate New York-based drummer Chris Corsano. Hellraiser is already the third album of this trio and was recorded live in February 2018, on the occasion of a gathering supporting the Option series at Experimental Sound Studios (ESS) in Chicago. Originally, this performance was slated for another Wooley-led group, and only last-minute travel issues led to the rare occasion where all three members of Icepick happened to be free for the date in Chicago. The ESS continues to host and facilitate online Quarantine Concert Series even in this coronavirus lockdown era, reminding all of us what we used to celebrate not so long ago. The infrequent meetings of this trio do not affect the immediate flow of the music and the profound, telepathic interplay of Wooley, Håker Flaten & Corsano, all are masters of free-improvised format. The three collective, improvised pieces highlight their great experience and focus on structuring loose compositions through improvisation techniques, on account of powerful, wild eruptions but, still, with the fiery excitement of such a performance. Håker Flaten & Corsano build mighty yet quite flexible rhythmic patterns on the opening piece «El-Bound», fueling the soaring flights and deep whispers of Wooley. Wooley sketches «Chicago Deader» as a moving ballad while Håker Flaten & Corsano color his singing melody with disturbing, restless colors, slowly building a massive pulse. The last and longest piece, the 17-minutes «Blueline» cements the reserved atmosphere of this performance. The fractured rhythmic patterns of Håker Flaten & Corsano are the basis for Wooley’s intense employment of an array of extended breathing techniques, but soon enough all three musicians calibrate perfectly on their own dance. First in wild moves but later in more suggestive, poetic moves, repeating, again and again, the simple, melodic theme, all the way until the ecstatic coda, without raising hell, but still in perfect shape. --- NATE WOOLEY - Trumpet INGEBRIGT HÅKER FLATEN - Bass CHRIS CORSANO - Drums --- Released 2020; Astral Spirits

Icepick – Hellraiser

Patrick Kessler is not afraid to stare death into the eyes. Twelve times in June 2020, he challenged people to a duel, although duelling has been outlawed in Switzerland since 1937. But no fear! Patrick Kessler, founder and director of the Chuchchepati Orchestra, challenged his opponents, who arrived by train and were armed with an instrument, solely musically. When the train arrived at 12:12 noon each day, Patrick met with the challengers for freely improvised tonal battles on the gravel square in front of the bucolic Rietli station in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. The project called “Low Noon” references the famous movie “High Noon” by Fred Zinnemann. It tells the story of an imminent fight between Sheriff Will Cane and gangster Frank Miller, whose arrival at the Hadleyville train station is expected at midday. In Kessler’s adaptation, the arrival of the “gangsters” was postponed by twelve minutes for scheduling reasons. But this only heightend the suspense until the train came to a screeching halt at the Rietli station house. The rules: arrive,get off, play, get on, get out! The duels lasted twelve minutes each, then the guests hopped on the next train. The rivals that Kessler met, armed with a double bass and a drawn bow, make up the Chuchchepati Orchestra. Some of them, you will hear, make music faster (or slower) than their shadows... The twelve duels at Rietli station were recorded. You are holding one of the ­limited edition vinyl copies. Frank Heer 

Chuchchepati Orchestra – Low Noon – 12 musical showdowns at 12:12 pm

In this moment of uncertainty and environmental trauma, as we recoil in the face of an emotional overload that demands retreat or even flight, a certain use of solitude in confinement has generated the possibility of taking it all on, of being with others again while still listening in solitude. Music From A Private Hell describes an understanding of sound as a habitable substance from this degree-zero of isolation. A handful of songs written in iron and dust, that allow just enough fiction or myth as to turn technology into a weapon. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us in On The Line: “run away, but when you run, bring a weapon.” A remedy for mass fatalism, Hell begins with the first song, in which a tambourine of some sort plays an ostinato rhythm, punctuating each phrase with a long note that communes with the shadows. Of interest here are not the rhythms that recur throughout the record but their relationship to colors and timbres. The different harmonic openings and resonances evoke the different kinds of tension that occur when skin touches flame. “We’ll burn it down before you land here,” says a disembodied voice, and various noises and sound effects cut through it, indifferent to the threat, as futuristic today as they were at their inception. Al Karpenter’s voice is a weapon. His inexpressive whisper is a weapon. On this record, the human voice is an excess, a surplus of the body; it is at once outside and inside. It can be listened to peacefully, but it can also generate the anguish of a voice attempting to escape from language, setting the logos free in the wilderness, scavenging in the semiotic debris. We glimpse the wound, the fall into this private Hades, in the sounds of profane, everyday technologies, the changes and glissandos of banjos and cellos that tear up the tropes of Heavy Metal and Southern Rock — forgotten welding, archeologies of industrial symbols beyond our reach. Only towards the end of the album do we experience nausea, on the final tracks, adjacent to psychedelic states fed by sinister efforts to tear out the internal organs and destroy the calm that came before in an effort to stop time. A record of songs dependent on a million bits of exhausted cultural knowledge, orchestrated in the sounds of a punitive intimacy, always surrounded by the ghostly presences that allow it to escape urban anxiety, sketching, in a warmer light, the Desert Always Yet to Come.

Al Karpenter – Musik from a Private Hell Album

Available again for the first time since original release in 1974, Outernational Sounds proudly presents one of the deepest custom press jazz recordings of all – Jaman’s spiritualised and funky Sweet Heritage. The history of jazz is often told as though it was principally a history of releases and recordings. On those terms, it’s easy to mistake a small recorded footprint for obscurity or silence. But that is to put the cart before the horse, for the true history of the jazz is the story of the music as it was played night after night in the clubs, bars, concert halls and backrooms of cities and towns across America and the world. Only a tiny fraction of this living tradition ever makes it onto a recording. The far greater part is embodied in the musicians and their music as they play it and live it. And even though 1974’s Sweet Heritage is James Edward Manuel’s only release, the pianist and educator better known as Jaman has undoubtedly lived it. Brought up in Buffalo, New York, Jaman studied classical piano before beginning formal jazz studies under greats including Earl Bostic and Horace Parlan. Quickly becoming a respected regular on the club scene in Buffalo, Jaman held down innumerable residencies and worked with top local musicians – one of his early trios included the renowned bassist John Heard and drummer Clarence Becton, both of whom were poached one night by a visiting Jon Hendricks; sometime Sun Ra Arkestra bassist Juini Booth and regular Ahmad Jamal sideman Sabu Adeyola (also of Kamal & The Brothers) have graced his groups too. At famous night spots all over Buffalo’s East Side and on excursions to Manhattan’s storied jazz clubs, Jaman has shared the stage with some of the most illustrious names in jazz and blues: Big Joe Turner, Muddy Waters, Joe Henderson, Ruth Brown, Frank Morgan, Woody Shaw, Sonny Stitt, and too many others to mention. His eponymous group, Jaman, was formed in 1970; they toured the US and Canada steadily in the years that followed. He became, in short, one of Buffalo’s true jazz stalwarts, and so he remains. But despite a life lived deep within the music, Jaman only recorded a single LP, 1974’s Sweet Heritage. Pressed in tiny quantities by the Mark Records custom service, and issued with a stock landscape cover, Sweet Heritage featured the regular Jaman group playing a mixture of covers and originals. The whole LP showcases an ensemble in compete control, and with the flying, spiritual sound of ‘Free Will’ and the upful, Latin-tinged ‘In The Fall of The Year’ – both Jaman originals – the album has since become a legendary collector’s classic. Unavailable since its original issue, Outernational Sounds is proud to present Jaman’s Sweet Heritage – the soulful and spiritualised sounds of a master at work.

Jaman – Sweet Heritage

BJ Nilsen is a Swedish composer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. His work primarily focuses on the sounds of nature and how they affect humans. Recent work has explored the urban acoustic realm and industrial geography and mining in the Arctic region of Norway and Russia. His original scores and soundtracks have featured in theatre, dance performances and film. Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Melbourne, Australia, now based in Berlin. Her performance practice stretches across various genres encompassing elements of improvised, contemporary classical, experimental, and popular music. She has studied contemporary classical repertoire with renowned cellists including Charles Curtis and Séverine Ballon, and developed a strong practice in improvisation and sonic arts through collaborative projects both in Australia and internationally. Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is an Icelandic musician, painter, sound- and performance artist and founding member of Stilluppsteypa. He studied sound art in Hannover, Germany from 1998 to 2003, where he is currently living. His musical output has been variously described as collage, quiet drone manipulations, and calm and minimal, which offers a range of still, contemplative momants, contrasted with more discordant (though not necessarily noisy) ones. Heiligenstadt is the documentation of an encounter of the three artists in 2018. - - - Released in an edition of 300 copies --- Fragment Factory, 2021

BJ Nilsen, Judith Hamann, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson – Heiligenstadt