Vague Enough to Satisfy is Atlanta author and musician Philip Frobos's debut novel, an observation on aging millennials and their definitive label-less relationships through the eyes of a thirty-something from the South. Robert finds himself on holiday in Germany after weeks of traveling with a music group. At a cafe table for two in the hip and "dangerous" Leipzig, he and his new German friend, Geoff, analyze others actions and mediocrity while jostling insecurities and life's simple impulses around the neighborhood. Under a blazing summer sun, Robert and his friends begin to dig a man-sized hole in Geoff's garden with no end in sight. From lake trips in Saxony surrounded by naked sunbathers and bicycle rides through South Atlanta country trails turned developments, they ramble around to the wee-hours meeting various characters in their natural habitats. Geoff acts as a 21st century Virgil providing blatant advice that proves hard to come by, a rope ladder from the clutches of his own uncertainties. Robert's fiancée arrives in Berlin at the end of the week..

With more than 10 years of experience and numerous albums released, A Full Cosmic Sound (AFCS) is released on LP 12" for the first time, with a selection of its best compositions and also unpublished material. In recent years with a stable group, the band shows a much more controlled and enveloping sound than in its previous recordings, a sound exercise developed through the mixture of harmonies, frequencies, drones and repetitions generated by instruments such as keyboards, synthesizers, bass, guitars and multiple effects. This album evokes the rhythmic and deconstructive explorations of local bands like Los Jaivas, also certain ambient passages of Popol Vuh, the psychological sound explorations of Throbbing Gristle, Sonic Youth, Experimental Audio Research, and the echoes of the busy urban sound landscape research in Chile.

Black Editions present a reissue of Kazuo Imai's far and wee, originally released in 2004. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Though he began performing in the 1970s, his 2004 P.S.F. album far and wee was only the second under his name. In a series of thrilling acoustic guitar improvisations -- Imai's playing crackles with dynamic tension and physicality as well as a subtlety and nuance that reveals him as one of the instrument's true masters and innovators. In 2004, Kazuo Imai (Marginal Consort, East Bionic Symphonia) recorded a series of nylon-string classical guitar improvisations at the request of P.S.F. founder Hideo Ikeezumi. far and wee, the resulting album, vibrates with the inherent duality of nylon: the strings stretch and snap back like rubber tautened and released, and paint the softest of caresses in silky washes. Imai was a student of two of the foundational artists of the Japanese avant-garde: Masayuki Takayanagi, the pioneering free-improvising guitarist and Takehisa Kosugi, the visionary Fluxus composer also known for his work with Group Ongaku and the Taj Mahal Travelers. A sense of inquisitiveness about how far he can push himself and every part of the guitar pervades these performances as Imai makes everything from the pegs to the bridge to the strap pin explode with resonate. For over 20 years, Imai has been a driving force behind Marginal Consort a collective of Japanese avant-garde musicians devoted to collective improvisation, known for their incredibly layered and varied annual performances that last for three continuous hours. Using a blend of homemade and traditional instruments, electronics, and sculptural and natural forms, they create auditory experiences of exceptionally unique color and vibration. The same dedication to vitality and variety is found in Imai's guitar music, and it is via the guitar that his vast studies in philosophy and music come together in extreme focus, allowing him to tease and extend the history of the instrument while interrogating the limits of its edge. far and wee continues the tradition of the Soloworks concerts that Imai has been giving for several decades, and allows the listener to breathe in the unique space of Imai's thought processes. He attacks the instrument: the nylon strings explode against the guitar. And he caresses it, soothing each centimeter of string with delicate force and concentration. Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI. Heavy tip-on jackets; includes download. --- Kazuo Imai: guitar, chair --- All music by Kazuo ImaiLive recording by Takeshi Yoshida, April 24, 2004at Plan B “Kazuo Imai SOLOWORKS Vol. 41”Mixed and mastered by Takeshi YoshidaProduced by Hideo IkeezumiDesign by Kazuo Imai

Last time we checked in with Dan Melchior, he was Playing The Greys (see Ever/Never # 21). What has he been up to lately? Melchior is as aesthetically restless as he is endlessly creative, so in between recording an album with Austin TX art-punk trio Spray Paint and a myriad of tape and vinyl releases, Dan found the time to gift Ever/Never with another classic slice of Melchiorcore (please, shoot the messenger for that one). Road Not Driving is a 12” EP that covers a fair amount of ground during its runtime. “I Got A Feeling” starts out as a feel-bad ode to, well, feeling bad, and then finds itself truly sinking into the muck as the track distorts beyond all reason, until coming around full circle at the conclusion. Climate change has got us all down, but at least you can commiserate with the guitar slicks and (gulf jet)stream-of-consciousness lyrics of “Another Oil Spill.” In the icily observant “Cold Town,” Dan’s previous locale , Ohio -- and the lake-effect of the Midwest pokes its head through the (grey) clouds. The storm clouds hover over side two’s “Relics,” which finds Dan casting about for some kind of connection. Those bleak months -- half a year really -- can weigh a man down but they leave plenty of time to come up with creative ways of dealing with the isolation. Yet, when connection comes in the form of “Bus Stop Ghouls,” perhaps it’s preferable to be alone after all. Melchior closes out this potent dip into his stewing brain with the title track and all we can say is Godspeed, sir. -e/n

Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously belongs to one of the four substances as well as the whole. These four sections, of uneven durations, embody the different resonances of each « element » upon my imagination. The movements are ordered compositionally and range from the intangibility of the air to the extreme density of the earth. In Eterea, the dual nature of air, a space for the dissemination of sounds and an environment for mobile masses, shaped the work and the development of its forms. Whether it be the vast expanse of particles as organised movement or the displacement of sources in our three-dimensional perception, ethereal air fills the space and drives the immaterial motions and gestures. Aquatica locates the materiality of water in relation to its amazing extremes: from the drop to the ocean, an extensive journey unfolds through the various phases of the reinvented liquid. Still waters, deadly waters, raging waters follow one another, leading to the aerial fusion of a primordial equilibrium eventually retrieved. Then comes Focolaria and the unsteady fires, the elusive and wild will-o’-the-wisps that open and adorn the gates leading to the depths of the earth. The land of Terra is devoid of atmosphere, a land of matters before the advent of life. The sounds of the original matter merge and evolve into purer forms. The motions trigger progressions towards new equilibriums of forces, the ultimate fusion, the very last attempt, needed for the emergence of life. The sphere is now complete, the world ready for creation… Daniel Teruggi — While the theme of the four elements has been a constant source of inspiration in the arts, its setting to music using electroacoustic techniques seems highly auspicious, since the notion of matter and its transformation is consubstantial with the concrete approach. In Sphæra, Daniel Teruggi precisely addresses this question, transcending matter with the help of novel digital audio techniques so as to draw out forms, trajectories, layers, and musical objects, all of which result from the merging or sublimation of primordial sounds. Indeed, this is where Daniel Teruggi’s music and compositional approach stand out: by engaging sounds, with strength, will and inspiration, in a close encounter with energies, whether tectonic or electrical. Such collisions, such metamorphoses, are then appeased in the whole space of the composition, a fascinating landscape, the final destination of all transmutations. François Bonnet, Paris, 2021 

The origin of CRACKFINDER dates back to the concert of SONO GENERA – the trio of Anna Zaradny, Robert Piotrowicz and Jérôme Noetinger – at the Sacrum Profanum festival on October 7, 2016. That evening, the audience experienced a clear aesthetic breakthrough; something important was happening, something special. I instantly felt that the new thing that emerged could not be left unrecorded. Zaradny is a composer, instrumentalist and visual artist; Piotrowicz a composer, author of sound installations and virtuoso of analog synthesizers. They founded and curated the Musica Genera festival and label. Noetinger, an improviser, publisher and instrumentalist from Marseilles, specializes in electroacoustic collages full of permutations on his tape recorder and using all sorts of electronics. What connects these musicians are their methods of work: experiment as the basis of action, controlled accidents, repetition, processing and processuality. CRACKFINDER is intense and saturated, intriguing with fragments that are rhythmic yet distant from the repetitiveness of minimalism. They give a degree of structure to the otherwise loose amalgam of raw electroacoustics and instrumental improvisation at times evoking free jazz (when Zaradny reaches for the saxophone). At any time, however, the division of roles is clear, an impressive feat at such a high density of sound texture. CRACKFINDER the album comprises of two distinct parts. The first is extremely intense and eventful, creating a strong tension, giving the sense of an immense effort or even wrestling between the musicians; a clash of ideas and values. This dialog is not monotonous but dynamic, full of changing and new hypotheses – as if in a process of reaching the truth. We can suppose that these investigated issues are philosophical and existential, giving the impression of greatness and overwhelming significance. The second part evokes a kind of a soothing stabilization. One may think that the interlocutors have reached a consensus. However, no-one is celebrating, and the mood is somewhat melancholic. The discovery proved to be depressing and the truth is not liberating – it becomes a burden. There is a poignant feeling of failure or unfulfilment, despite concluding and solving the task. Finally, we are left with silence, and even emptiness – with a symbolic and absolute dimension of the end. The effort of the first part, motivated by the conviction of the significance and need for proving something, is confronted with the disillusion brought by the end of the road. The effort, however, was not in vain – the discovery of the truth, although painful, can be purifying. The album offers more interpretative hints than just its expressive title. The artwork on the cover is a frame from the video art piece ENJOY THE SILENCE by Anna Zaradny: symbolic flares and cracking of matter in complete silence. The intensity of the image, however, creates a strong suggestion of sound. The back of the sleeve is spread with photos of the musicians holding the #BLACKPROTEST banner, in remembrance of the wave of pro-choice protests in Poland in 2016. Cracks – both material and metaphorical – do not have to be the negative effect of an abrupt event. They can be the beginning of change, an opening for the new, an impulse for action. It is, therefore, worth continuing the search for the 'portals of change'.

After "Today, the organ has played beautifully again" and "32 bpm" from 2019, Edition Telemark presents three new LPs by Dutch sound artist William Engelen, released on the occasion of his exhibition "Klinkt goed" at Kunstmuseum Den Haag. All three LPs are released separately but may be listened to as a whole because they portray three work groups that are representative of Engelen's compositional methods: Falten, Verstrijken and Gebrauchsspuren. Gebrauchsspuren (signs of wear) is a composition from 2016. It consists of the sounds of a CD player skipping on a piano track, transcribed for piano. The idea for this piece occurred to Engelen while he was listening to a CD of piano pieces by György Kurtág, Béla Bartók et al., when the CD player suddenly started skipping back and forth randomly on a track, repeating some notes and skipping others, thereby creating rhythms and additionally making its own noises. Because he was drawing, he couldn't get up immediately to remedy the situation. Rather, he was forced to listen to what became the CD player's own music. Engelen made an audio recording of the situation, transcribed the notes and noises, and asked pianist Benoît Gagnon to perform the resulting score. This LP contains two versions of the piece, both recorded by Gagnon in 2018. Edition of 300.

Mark Vernon "An Annotated Phonography of Chance" ‘An Annotated Phonography of Chance’ expands upon the soundtrack to an uncompleted 16mm film made in collaboration with English filmmaker Martha Jurksaitis and the Portuguese artist duo Von Calhau! The film ‘Nossos Ossos’ was shot largely on location in the Alentejo region of Portugal in 2013. A1 Succulent Gros (featuring – Von Calhau!) 3:00 A2 Overflown Ellipsis 1:33 A3 The Larum of the Living 2:18 A4 The Consensus is to Delete 4:16 A5 Nossos Ossos (featuring – Von Calhau!) 4:30 A6 Revolving Rivers 4:13 B1 Aspen House (featuring – Von Calhau!) 5:28 B2 Megalithic Circuit 6:03 B3 Shrouded Yagis 5:16 B4 Simmer Dim (featuring – Von Calhau!) 3:23 Mark Vernon is a Glasgow-based artist whose work exists on the fringes of sound art, music and broadcasting. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found recordings. He incorporates these diverse elements into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media and live performances. A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he was a founding member of Glasgow’s Radio Tuesday collective and has gone on to set up several other RSL art radio projects in the UK including Hair Waves, Nowhere Island Radio and most recently, Glasgow’s Radiophrenia. He has produced programmes internationally for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, RADIA, EBU and the BBC. Since 2011 he has co-run Lights Out Listening Group – a bi-monthly listening event focused on creative uses of sound and radio that takes place in complete darkness. His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Staalplaat, Ultra Eczema, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Staubgold and Gagarin Records, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own Meagre Resource imprint. 

The Festival Experimentelle Musik is a music festival in Munich, organized by Stephan Wunderlich and Edith Rom, that has been held annually in December since 1983. One of the festival's unique characteristics is the way the performances are organized: Each is limited to 20 to 25 minutes and all take place in direct succession without pauses, on previously set-up small stages. In 2017, Seiji Morimoto and Yan Jun performed after each other. Seiji's piece was called "ring + balance", he used small speakers, microphones and amplifiers on a table to create feedback rings that were eventually distorted by alarm clocks. Yan performed "solo with background" in which he sat on a chair making vocal and body gestures and had two audience members announce the elapsed time every 3 or 5 minutes, respectively, according to their own inner clocks. As a spectator, I felt that the two performances had something in common. Their very quiet and experimental nature – in the sense that it was impossible to anticipate what would happen and when, if at all – made the audience listen not only to the sounds but also to the situation that had been evoked. When I met Seiji a few weeks later in Berlin, it turned out that he had a similar feeling. We asked Yan and the idea was born to make a split LP of both recordings. Edition of 300. The performances were recorded by Albert Dambeck and carefully mastered for vinyl by Werner Dafeldecker. Audience noises are an intended part of the recordings. Seiji Morimoto (b. 1971) is a Japanese sound artist and performer living in Berlin. He is interested in uncertain acoustic appearances between usual objects. Yan Jun (b. 1973) is a Chinese musician and poet based in Beijing. He works with field recordings, electronics, voice, body movement etc.: sometimes funny – always simple.

The Kollektiv für Kommunikative und Ästhetische Forschung was an artist commune that existed for about 2 years around 1970 in a former monastery in Mariental (Lower Saxony), West Germany, close to the then inner-German border. It was founded by members of the West Berlin free art and music scene, many of them having been part of the scene based around the short-lived Zodiak Free Arts Lab. Among the residents were drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, guitarist Norbert Eisbrenner and bassist Werner Götz who had formed the experimental trio MND (Moderne Nordeuropäische Dorfmusik, Modern North European Village Music) in West Berlin in 1968. One of the communal activities was to jointly make music, thereby including both the trained musicians as well as the inexperienced players and non-musicians. This led to the formation of a larger communal group around the MND core, named Schlangenfeuer (Snake Fire) by Eisbrenner; other names like Norddeutsche Dorfmusik Mariental appeared on concert posters, too. The concept of bringing together players from different backgrounds in order to improvise was followed elsewhere at that time, too, though many of such enterprises evolved around one or more leaders who clearly left their mark on the resulting sounds. Unlike such groups, the Mariental undertaking was distinctly egalitarian, with the experienced players giving leeway to the others to express themselves, while never overreaching with disproportionate virtuosity or soloing. For these reasons, their music sounded different from many jazz-based free improvisations, rather closer to early Faust or, more specifically, Kluster, Eruption and Human Being, similar endeavours from the West Berlin underground music scene. "New things were in the air; long arcs; building up – swelling – breaking down – dying away – a kind of continuum with a rather straightforward tonality and rhythm. Even quite lulling sometimes. The more complex and in a different way expressive free jazz which we were pursuing at the same time was somewhat put aside in favour of a joint performance of the 'commune'. The result was a new kind of monastery music, nourishing the youth in their longing for community." (Sven-Åke Johansson) Edition of 300. Double LP containing a full concert recording from the festival "Art Information 71" in Kiel in June 1971, one of three public performances of the Schlangenfeuer group. Players: Norbert Eisbrenner (el. guitar), Peter Dyck (cello), Rita Eisbrenner (vocals), Elke Lixfeld (vocals), Boris Schaak (vocals, bassdrum, bell), Werner Götz (double bass, viola), Sven-Åke Johansson (drums, oboe d'amore). Gatefold sleeve with photos and extensive liner notes by David Toop. Includes a reprint of the festival poster.

Christopher A. Williams (born 1981) is a contrabassist, composer and theorist of experimental and improvised music whose artistic research takes the form of both academic publications and practice-based projects. "On Perpetual (Musical) Peace?" (PMP) is one of his projects – an experiment in musical cohabitation with large improvising ensembles. It is inspired by Immanuel Kant's essay "Zum Ewigen Frieden: ein Philosophischer Entwurf" which speculates that nations do better for themselves by sorting out their differences through an international federation instead of through warfare, thus proposing a path to lasting peace. (It later influenced the UN Charter and EU Constitution.) Williams argues that Kant's idea of hospitality, publicity (transparency), and perpetuality (sustainability) may help players in improvising ensembles to articulate and transform their ways of playing and thinking, thus opening up new ways of interacting with each other. Composing in this way becomes less about giving the players a compositional structure to realize, and more about tweaking inherent constellations that are already present within the ensemble. This LP features the results of PMP realized in Mexico City in 2019 with Liminar, a Mexican ensemble that works at the boundaries between composed and improvised music, performance and sound installation, and regularly performs in Mexico City's main chamber music halls as well as in museums, galleries and alternative venues. An extensive PMP concert took place at Bucareli 69, an art and concert space in a late-19th-century villa near the city's historical centre. The recordings for this LP were made afterwards in the studio NAFF. Edition of 300 pressed on UN-charter-blue vinyl, with printed inner sleeve.

Horacio Vaggione (born 21 January 1943) is an Argentinian composer of electro-acoustic and instrumental music who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound and whose pieces are often scored for performers and computers (mixed music). His music is regularly played worldwide in major centers and festivals of contemporary music. La Maquina de Cantar is his first solo recorded work; originally released on the Italian Cramps Records label as the 18th volume of the Nova Musicha series dedicated to contemporary avant-garde composers, La Maquina de Cantar is now made available again on Dialogo in a faithful reproduction of the original gatefold cover artwork, including also an inner sleeve with the English translation of the liner notes. From the original liner notes of “La Maquina de Cantar”: Horacio Vaggione was born in Cordoba (Argentina) in 1943. He co-founded, in 1965, the Centro de Música Experimental de la Universidad de Cordoba, Argentina. In 1966, he was awarded a Fullbright scholarship that allowed him to travel through the USA, where he visited several electronic music studios (Columbia, Illinois, California) and met John Cage. From 1969 to 1972, while living in Madrid, he belonged to a “live” electronic music group with Eduardo Polonio and Luis de Pablo. He was also in charge of the ALEA group’s electronic music studio. In 1973, he visited the Far East. In 1974/75 he toured in the USA and Europe, more precisely with E. Wiener and the Kevan Cleary and Dance Company, while he was working in various electronic music studios (New York, Oakland, Montreal and Paris). [From 1978 he] lives in Paris, where he teaches electronic music techniques (synthesisers) and collaborates with Martin Davorin-Jagodic and Costin Miereanu on audio-visual performances. - - - La Maquina de Cantar was produced in 1971, using the IBM 7090 computer owned by the data processing centre of the University of Madrid. Sound synthesis was carried out by a team under the technical advice of Florentino Briones, director of the centre. The complete system is a “hybrid”, as it is made up of digital and analogue operations. To begin, the composer writes his “score” in musical notation and then transcribes it into decimal numerical notation. This numerical notation is then transcribed into the machine’s language, in the form of punch cards; in this way, the computer receives all the data that it has to process and translate into sound. At the same time, the POPOVA program, which supports all the operations, is also launched. The sound is produced in the central unit of the IBM 7090, via high-speed magnetisation changes. So, the sound values will be expressed in the form of the number of magnetisation changes (bits). Once the sound and its envelope have been generated through this digital process, the next step is to send this information to an analogue section, consisting of a series of filters, a VCO (voltage-controlled oscillator), and an echo chamber. Contrastingly, Ending is a work for live electronic keyboards. In this version, three Minimoog synthesisers (played by the composer) and a Yamaha organ (played by E. Wiener) were used. The work is dedicated to Robert Ashley. 

Edition of 500 LP on black vinyl. Audiophile pressing. Gatefold cover, including printed inner. Perfect replica of the original packaging (with additional translated liner notes) and newly remastered for optimal sound.** Of all the historic labels associated with experimental music, few have garnered as much affection, or as devoted a following, as the Italian imprint Cramps. Its catalog reads like a who's who of the 1970s musical avant-garde, housing seminal albums by John Cage, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Giusto Pio, Demetrio Stratos, Juan Hidalgo, Robert Ashley, Walter Marchetti, Cornelius Cardew, Raul Lovisoni / Francesco Messina, Alvin Lucier, Derek Bailey, and so many more, the vast majority of which have remained largely out of print and nearly impossible to obtain for decades. Now, at long last, the Milan based imprint, Dialogo, has begun a stunning series of vinyl reissues from Cramps' Nova Musicha series - dedicated to contemporary avant-garde composers - beginning with Costin Miereanu’s Luna Cinese, originally released in 1975. Fully remastered and housed in a sleeve that beautifully reproduces the album’s signature design, complete with brand a new English translation of the original liner notes, this is a truly historic event. For its impact, Cramps was a relatively short-lived endeavor, running for roughly seven years between 1973 and 1980. Founded in Milan by the producer, publisher, and graphic designer, Gianni Sassi - publisher of counter-cultural magazines like Bit and Frankenstein, and the designer behind numerous covers for Bla Bla, including Franco Battiato's Fetus and Pollution - Cramps was the pitch perfect emblem of revolutionary Italian temperaments of its era; creatively radical, globally minded, without profit motive, and bridging numerous musical idioms, from progressive rock and jazz, to some of the most forward thinking and singular expression of sonic experimentalism the world has ever seen. Of all the seminal figures that recorded for Cramps, the Romanian / French composer, Costin Miereanu, remains among the most distinct and under-appreciated. The reemergence of his debut LP, Luna Cinese, issued by the label in 1975, will likely change that. Over the last decade or so, Miereanu has developed something of a cult following among experimental fans because of his stunning series of albums issued during the 1980s on his own Poly-Art imprint, skirting the border of ambient music and minimalism in highly individual ways. Luna Cinese, which dives into far more explicitly experimental territory, will undoubtedly be a revelation and expose the true underpinnings of the work that would begin to emerge of the next decade and a half. During his early years, Costin Miereanu was something of a wunderkind of avant-garde and experimental music. Born in Bucharest, between 1960 to 1966 he was a student of Alfred Mendelsohn, Dan Constantinescu, and Lazar Octavian Cosma, before moving to Paris where he earned a Doctor of Letters and a Doctor of Musical Semiotics, winning numerous prizes in writing, analysis, music history, esthetics, orchestration, and composition. Between 1967 and 1969 he was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Ehrhard Karkoschka at the Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik in Darmstadt, laying the final groundwork for a stunning career as both a composer and noted academic over the years since, often combining techniques drawn from Satie with the abstraction of Romanian traditional music into a sonic fabric that is guided by systems associated with Musique concrète. Luna Cinese, issued as the composer's debut LP by Cramps in 1975, is a stunning combination of all these elements. The work - stretching across the album's two sides, consists of continuous low-density repetitions, build from what the composer describes as “the kind of 'woven' silence you find on mountains – occasionally disturbed by irregular and very dense insertions – the kind of intense noise you find in the city.” The result, combining a vast range of environmental sound, voices chattering in various languages, fragments of acoustic instrumentation, and the pulsing and ambiences of synths and electronics, is about as singular and beautiful as experimental works from the 1970s come, while never for a moment sacrificing rigour or tension. A truly stunning, interwoven sonic expanse that lays pregnant with multiple meaning and interpretations - conceived by the composer to illuminate the complex ways in which meaning and narrative are constructed across time - and imbued with surrealism and the 'schizoid', Luna Cinese stands as an entirely distinct and original gesture within the canon of experimental music, displaying a remarkable density, while open, airy, and encouraging the subjectivity of the listener to play an active part. Easily among the best and important works from the original Cramps catalog, but sinfully overlook over the years since its release, Luna Cinese is as good as they come and an absolutely riveting and immersive listen. Issued by Dialogo in this newly remastered vinyl edition - the first since 1975 - with its original liner notes by Miereanu in a brand-new English translation, this one is impossible to recommend enough and will leave the composer ringing in your mind for a long time to come. 

"Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT offers a sequence of works for player piano, a device which captured Rick Myers’ imagination in 2017. Divining a method from mathematical measurements and intuitive drawing systems, Myers obstructed piano rolls using adhesive tape. Performed in this altered state on a player piano in the hallway of Easthampton Machine and Tool in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the music embedded in the rolls was extricated from its history and given fresh life. Restriction forged a pathway to expanse. Here are the enchanting results.The workings of the machine are evident throughout, wistfully recalling music box fantasias, even as the tumbling notes confound expectations. The meticulously constructed scenarios invariably run amok, and in between chaos and melody, frustration and freedom, an impossible helix fashions its own celestial music. The sounds grumble against one another, summoning subterranean promises and unearthing unexpected delights.As the tracks run into one another, Myers interposes spoken dispatches, detailing aspects of the story behind the record. Like the sounds of the piano, they transcend mere reportage. Increasingly obscured over the course of the two sides, these ghostly interjections are part of the sonic fabric, enhancing both the narrative and acousmatic aspects of the project.Rick Myers is an artist whose decades-long career has studiously disregarded the confines of medium – there are books, drawings, sculptures, installations, exhibitions, videos, performances, design projects, texts, and combinations thereof. Sound, as evidenced by his recent focus on recorded material, is but another potent arrow in his quiver. Plus, it’s nothing new – he cut his teeth as a DJ.This record is an interior travelogue shot through with ecstatic truth. In furthering the process of obstruction by which the player piano makes its music possible, Myers is, in his own words, looking to “cast and dislodge time.” Like God or Loss or Love, Time is one of the bedeviling bottomless wells from which the most affecting art springs. This is the real thing.Rick Myers is not in search of lost time, he is attempting to lose it, and in so doing to chart the inevitable trajectory of that loss, of its apparent disappearance, its peculiar habit of hiding in plain sight." - Matt Krefting --- Released on Vinyl LP in an edition of 250Jackets screenprinted by Alan Sherry

After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk. Up in Air is sewn from threads of everyday life: trails of thought, small stories and conversations with his daughter. Collecting, layering and condensing the world around him, his musings spill out in a palimpsest that renders both the material and metaphysical world. From describing a time where he inadvertently found himself on a hunting trip, recalling stories from doing role play and drawing together with his daughter, or scribing observations on the strange dedications people make in their lives, he explores the banal and the fantastical; the whimsical and the serious; the light and dark. Each line, aphorism or vignette carries with it weight that is looking to free itself, to embrace the impossibility of life distilled into simpler parameters. Ben's music acts as a motor for his words, weaving wistful melodic mantras and creaking guitar lines in and out as each song finds its feet. Although the album finds a rich array of influences dancing in an awkward balance, the emotive register of the music drinks from the fountain of the US rock continuum, with Supreme Dicks' uneasy indie, Low's slow unfurling grace and Neil Youngs' heart-worn drawl lifting each song to new heights. Expanding on this soundworld are collaborators Sholto Dobie (self-built organs) and bassist Otto Willberg, who provide drones, dissonant jolts and detuned paths for the music to open itself, but also curl into its own. Sounds are folded into one another, birthing new shapes, layers and sonic possibilities. Ben describes the album as "permeated by the sense that came from being around this sort of connection to the world where everything is immediate and fundamental." The album is representative of this shift inwards: on his own, socially, as a parent. But with that it also represents a confidence to deal with everything. The album is an excavation, both finding strange joy in simple findings and an unburdening himself of everything else, letting every thought and feeling whisks itself away up in the air. -- Fielding Hope (curator Cafe Oto, London) 

On Chorus is a national public sound artwork by Christopher Steenson that broadcast field recordings of Dublin's inner-city spring dawn chorus across Ireland, using Ianród Eireann's network of train station PA systems. These sounds were played every morning between 8am and 9am, from 16 November to 29 November 2020. By transmitting the sounds of lockdown, the artwork sought to highlight the use of listening as a connecting act during times of social distancing, as well as using sound as a way of ‘listening to the future’ and imagining new architectures for cohabitation between human and non-human species. This artist LP collects two field recordings made by Steenson, which document the birdsong being transmitted in two Irish train stations. Side A features a recording from Friday 20 November 2020 at Dublin Connolly Station. Side B features a recording of Dún Laoghaire Station on Sunday 29 November 2020. The LP is pressed on 180g black recycled vinyl, and is housed in a gatefold package designed by the artist. An 8-page booklet features 35mm photographs taken by Steenson during the artwork's creation, as well as a specially commissioned text by visual artist Ann Maria Healy, which uses the format of an LP lyric sheet to expound on ideas related to potential futures, hyper-reality and communal listening.

Second LP release by The Oval Language on Edition Telemark after Hibernation in 2017, this time showcaseing Klaus-Peter John's Waldkonzerte (woodland concerts), recorded in 2016.The Oval Language is an autonomous art project founded in 1987 in Leipzig, East Germany, by Klaus-Peter John and Frank Berendt. Since Berendt left in 1995, it has been continued by John, sometimes with collaborators, but recently mostly for solo activities. Its fields of activity have included sound-noise performances, conceptual works in open spaces, installations, land art projects, photography, and more.From the beginning, the space or location itself has been a central aspect within many of their site-specific sound-noise performances. When working at a certain location, the performers tried to not bring in anything from outside, but exclusively use material already available at the space. This way, it becomes possible to thoroughly feel out and explore the site, allowing a distinct site-specific sound to emerge that is integrated into the performance. Throughout the 1990s, the sites used often were abandoned buildings in Leipzig, available in nearly unlimited quantity, from vacant factories to unused former public bathing facilities.   During the recent years, Klaus-Peter John has focused on a minimisation of means and developed a unique vocal technique without amplification that he has used in a number of performances. In 2016, he attempted to integrate his voice into pure nature, in his own words the biggest challenge to date. His goal was not to perform any kind of singing or the like, but to use voice as a means similar to the site-specific tools used in previous performances by The Oval Language.He performed five concerts without audiences in a forest ravine in Döben, near Grimma, between June and November. The concerts parallel the course of the seasons and their related acoustic changes and conditions.This double LP is presented in a die-cut single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. The inner sleeves contain one photo made during a Waldkonzert on each side. By switching the order of the inner sleeves, four different front sleeves can be generated.

Liam O'Gallagher's audio work, People's Opera aka Aerosol/or the Computer That Couldn’t Hear: An Inter-Media Opera, features nine transistor radios (four tuned to FM stations and five to AM stations), a telephone system, and soloists on tambourine, flute, oboe, and French horn. Here are the notes on the presentation, by O'Gallagher's himself: “The ‘conductor’ signals the operators of the radios to approach the microphones or recede from them. Soloists play according to any predetermined plan. Two soloists play in the studios and two phone into the studios and play their parts through the phone system. The ‘scorer’ works from the main broadcast control room of the radio station and controls the mix and effects of the various inputs. He determines the final signal or output. The ‘orchestra’ selects their stations and maintains them throughout the performance. If possible, stations should represent various genres or segments of the community, such as Chinese language, soul, Spanish language, rock, popular tunes, spiritual- and Bible-toned stations. The time limit is agreed upon in advance by the participants. Drop out, turn around, tune in.”