30 сент. 2012 г.

Kali-Yuga Karma



'Kali-Yuga Karma' gathers together various 10″ vinyl releases by The New Blockaders, Merzbow and aNoMaLi in one handy package, and given that they have been out of circulation since 2003 and 2004 this reissue is most welcome. Falten and Oumagatoki were noted in TSP magazine on their release, the former being a dazzling piece of shattering noise in two parts, and a strong example of exactly what aNoMaLi can do when he gets the chance to apply his compositional skills to some TNB tape materials. Oumagatoki was the famed collaboration between Merzbow and TNB; it still resembles an unholy ice storm settling over darkened lands and pouring sleet down on the heads of unwilling inhabitants. aNoMaLi’s 'Nitya-Baddha' has long been a personal favourite of this listener, and while it does recycle some 1989 fragments of TNB assaultage, it’s not simply brutal noise. For the most part I hear a very imaginative and varied piece of tape collage, containing plenty of surreal narrative content, quite disturbing to boot. The set is completed with a new (2010) tape collage which sees the combined forces of all the above flattened and folded together into an intense wodge of merciless cubic roar.




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29 сент. 2012 г.

Svartsinn



Svartsinn is the dark ambient project of Jan Roger Pettersen from Trondheim, Norway. Svartsinn makes dark, droning ambient music, with a cold, claustrophobic and minimalistic feel. The first and third albums are a bit more melodic and less empty than the second.



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Lustmørd



Brian "Lustmord" Williams is a musician in the subgenre of dark ambient. He started recording with the industrial ensemble SPK in the early 1980s. He utilizes ultra-low frequencies (infrasound -- frequencies below 20 Hz, which have been known to cause feelings of awe or fear). Lustmord has extracted field recordings made in crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses, and combined it with occasional ritualistic incantations and Tibetan horns. His treatments of acoustic phenomena encased in digitally expanded bass rumbles have a dark ambient quality. Some of Lustmord's most notable collaborations include Robert Rich on the critically acclaimed "Stalker" and experimental sludge group The Melvins on "Pigs Of The Roman Empire".

An early side project of his, Terror Against Terror (with Andrew Lagowski), was a hard techno group that incorporated many samples from films of gunfire or other military activity. The record was originally intended to be the first part of a trilogy, the ultimate idea of which was to make each successive installment noisier; the third and final record was to have been pure noise. Unfortunately, the first record languished for two years without release and had lost some of its innovative sting by the time it appeared in print, courtesy of Dark Vinyl. The succeeding records were never made.

Williams consults regularly with other musicians to build custom studio equipment, and works with many Hollywood film soundtrack creators as well.

Lustmord has been working on Tool's DVD singles and has remixed versions of "Schism" and "Parabola" which were released December 20, 2005. Lustmord also contributed to Tool's 2006 album "10,000 Days".



* - See "Zoetrope", an experimental psychological horror and short film by music-video director Charlie S. Deaux on YouTube


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27 сент. 2012 г.

Alvarius B.



Born in Michigan, Alan Bishop co-founded the Sun City Girls with brother Richard Bishop and drummer Charles Gocher in Arizona 1981. Some 13 years into that band's career, Bishop began to issue music under the name Alvarius B., starting with 1994's self-titled effort and followed four years later with another self-titled release, that one a double. The music was an extension of the Sun City Girls' free-thinking experiments that wound together post-punk noise, improvisation, absurdity, and musical traditions from around the world into a prolific and adventurous catalog. In the early '80s, Bishop traveled to Morocco to make field recordings, both of live musicians and radio broadcasts, beginning a side career as a D.I.Y. ethnomusicologist that would eventually spawn the Sublime Frequencies label he founded with Hisham Mayet that documented popular and otherwise interesting music, often from third world countries.

In the early 2000s, as Sublime Frequencies got off the ground, Bishop grew more productive as Alvarius B., issuing albums throughout the decade. While the first Alvarius B. disc collected some 32 short and noisy acoustic guitar sketches Bishop recorded on cassette between 1981 and 1989, later discs found him working as a lo-fi-style home-recording songwriter. Like Uncle Jim, the character Bishop sometimes played to deliver monologues on Sun City Girls albums and at performances, Bishop's songs were provocative, surreal, and often hilarious. the Sun City Girls slowed down, disbanding following Charles Gocher's death from cancer in 2007, and Bishop spent time on more Alvarius B. albums, recorded a disc as Uncle Jim, staged a tour as the Brothers Unconnected with his brother (who launched his own solo career as Sir Richard Bishop in parallel with Alan), and helped maintain the Sublime Frequencies label.

By 2005's Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset, the scope of Alvarius B. grew broader, leaving his sense of absurdity intact but pulling in more of the Sun City Girls' eclecticism and employing more fleshed-out production that could sometimes find Bishop sounding consonant and even gentle. Released in 2011, Baroque Primitiva continued the trend, including covers of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" and John Barry's "You Only Live Twice." Throughout, Bishop continued traveling, researching, and recording for Sublime Frequencies, which forged relationships with a generation of contemporary African guitar bands, including Group Inerane, Group Agadez, Group Bombino, and others.




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26 сент. 2012 г.

Celer


In Loving Memory of Dani, for always.


Celer is the sound, visual, literary, and artistic endeavor of the husband and wife duo of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. Danielle was a teacher of special education and music therapy, a seasoned and published writer of poetry and prose, a painter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist, also recording as Chubby Wolf. She had an extensive background in Gender Studies, Education, Basque History, Photography, and Tibetan Studies, as well as having lived in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the United States. She passed away on July 8, 2009 of heart failure.

Will is a published writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, having studied English, History, Creative Writing, Philosophy, and Literature, with a basic background in music. Will and Dani met each other in 2001, and remained close friends until 2006, when they became a couple. At this time they also began Celer, which had been up until this time a constant exchange of letters, music, and love. They were married in March of 2007.

In Will and Dani’s time together, they produced numerous custom, handmade self-releases, sound for installations and art exhibitions, as well as creating works for independent labels in North America, Japan, and Europe. Their intent was producing works that reflect the sincere nature and importance of love, the fragility of life, and the importance of togetherness, through a relative and absolute symposium of expression.





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24 сент. 2012 г.

Keiichiro Shibuya



Keiichiro Shibuya (渋谷慶一郎) is a musician. Born in Tokyo, 1973. He graduated with a degree in composition from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 2002, he established ATAK, which functions not only as a music label, releasing CDs of domestic and overseas cutting-edge electro-acoustic works, but also embraces creators in various fields such as design, network technology and so on, as well as being a kind of "platform" to develop dynamic new work. Later, in 2002, Keiichiro Shibuya was involved in the commemoration CD of founding Mori Art Museum.

In 2003, he released a CD ATAK002 keiichiro shibuya + yuji takahashi in collaboration with Yuji Takahashi, a Japanese composer/pianist. Later in 2003 ATAK made a domestic concert tour with Icelandic stilluppsteypa. In 2004, he released his first solo album ATAK000 keiichiro shibuya. His dense composition in that he drastically focused in sound material (color) and rhythm, was described as "a perfect work that rules over the history of electronic music" (Atsushi Sasaki).

Shibuya has been continuing collaboration with Yuji Takahashi(composer/pianist, Takashi Ikegami (complex system researcher/ associate professor at Tokyo University) . In 2005 Shibuya and Ikegami started their collaboration as they exhibited a sound installation work at ICC (Inter Communication Center of Tokyo Opera City) and made a concert-style presentation to unveil the The Third Term Music, a music theory of sound variation and the motion dynamics based on nonlinear sciences.

His album ATAK010 filmachine phonics (2007) and the 3-dimensional installation filmachine (2006), made together with Takashi Ikegami, were awarded honorary mention in the digital music division at Ars Electronica in 2007. In 2008, the installation was shown at the transmediale, the annual festival of art and digital culture in Berlin, and there was a partner event at Tesla/Podewil'sches Palais. He also worked for a pedestrian crossing signal music project as an electro-acoustic specialist as well as working as a musician for International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences; for the project he composed music from the viewpoint of urban design in place of the previously-used melody "Toryanse".

In 2009, he organized and took part in an ATAK NIGHT4 tour throughout Europe, Asia and Japan, which also featured Yasunao Tone, Ryoji Ikeda and Pansonic. In September of the same year, he released his first piano solo album “ATAK 015 for maria”.

In 2010, he released a collaboration album, “Our Music The Principle Of Relativity + Keiichiro Shibuya,” and it topped the iTunes music store chart. He continuously intensifies his creativity, composing for a documentary film by Shusaku Arakawa, giving a concert with mum’s cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir at the technology art festival ISEA2010 in Germany, taking on the musical direction for the TV drama "Spec" (scheduled to air in coming October), and more.

Alongside his musical profession he worked as an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of the Arts.




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Loscil



Loscil is the electronic/ambient music project of Scott Morgan, from Vancouver, BC. The name Loscil is taken from the "looping oscillator" function (loscil) in Csound. Scott Morgan was also the drummer for the Vancouver indie band Destroyer.

A self-released album titled A New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies caught the attention of experimental music label Kranky, who signed Morgan on to release his debut album Triple Point in 2001. The album features six tracks off his first independent release as well as four new tracks.

Loscil followed up the release with Submers, an aquatic-themed album. Each track on the album is named after a submarine. The last track on the album was produced in honour of the people who died on the Russian submarine K-141 Kursk.

His 2004 album First Narrows (a reference to the official name of the Vancouver bridge, also known as Lions' Gate Bridge) marked the incorporation of improvised performances by a number of guest musicians: Nyla Raney, cello; Tim Loewen, guitar; and Jason Zumpano, Rhodes piano. Consequently, the songs on First Narrows are more organic and looser in nature than Morgan's previous work.

Eight of his songs were featured on the film score of the 2004 documentary ScaredSacred by award-winning documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper.

In 2005, Morgan released Stases, a collection of drones based upon the backgrounds of his work for Kranky Records. The album was made available as a free download-only release from One Records.

The theme of his fourth major album, released in 2006, continues the conceptual ascent each album has taken, from the sub-atomic level (Triple Point) and watery depths (Submers) to the surface (First Narrows) and the sky (Plume).

Plume continues Morgan's musical integration of other musicians' work into his ambient compositions, including Josh August Lindstrom on vibes and xylophone and Krista Michelle Marshall and Stephen Michael Wood on ebow guitar (as well as Zumpano again on piano).





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Label: Classwar Karaoke



Founded in 2008, Classwar Karaoke is a label dedicated to the release of experimental music and short-films; principally, by means of a series of ongoing quarterly surveys, made available via sites such as internet archive, myspace, discogs, youtube, lastfm, facebook, sonic squirrel, reverbnation, soundcloud etc., under Creative Commons license 3.0. All material remains the property of the respective artists and is offered for free download in line with this license. The Surveys published so far feature artists from all over the world; and the material in toto represents significant documentation of the experimental scene itself. Involvement in the project has helped spawn many fruitful collaborations, live-shows and a vibrant exchange of ideas; so much so that, for several repeat-participants, Classwar Karaoke is as much a collective as it is a community and also a mechanism for the release of new material.

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Label: Crónica



Crónica is a media-label based in Porto, Portugal, Europe. The Crónica media-label project was founded by Pedro Almeida, Miguel Carvalhais, João Cruz, Lia, Pedro Tudela & Paulo Vinhas, and has its roots in an online operation whose URL constitutes Crónica's avatar.

In the first day of January of the year 2003, cronicaelectronica.org, till then a bit-based project, morphed to a media-label configuration and expanded its activities to the field of residual arts and physical cultural artifacts, meaning: atoms, objects, commodities, value, etc.

With a strong emphasis towards electronic and experimental music and its intertwining with all forms of time-based audiovisual media, Crónica embraces the digital domain and its explorers, as the perfect context for the flowing of data and for processes that enable the maximization of a full intermedia experience.

Crónica's publishing strategy and its range of activities, encompass a variety of actions and events that seriously aim at the dissemination of electronic culture. The establishment of high quality standards in the endorsement of specific artists' work, points to the caring creation of a meaningful catalogue with international resonance.

Crónica's criteria is obviously beyond a strictly commercial approach to the publishing business, most of the time Crónica's products are complex and with narrow markets or simply unpopular. Still, coherence, professionalism and systematic work can lead to the construction of a significant body of work that, we hope, is relevant to the public interest and more importantly, to YOU, our dearest customer/supporter/friend.

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23 сент. 2012 г.

OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music 1948 - 1980



Every 'history' is biased and has some kind of ax to grind.  The one that Thomas Ziegler and I set out to do was no different.  In the summer of 1999, he asked me if I wanted to help him put together a multi-CD set to cover the history of electronic music.  I jumped at the chance, having no idea what I was getting into and with zero experience as a producer.  After settling down on a year span (the '80's seemed like a time when things really splintered), we then had the pain-staking task of deciding which artists and which pieces should be on it.  As detailed in our liners for the release, some legal problems prevented us from including everything that we would have wanted to but in the end, we had 3 CD's with about forty artists, covering some of the most extraordinary composers and visionaries of the last century.  A number of other collections had covered one particular time period or region but there wasn't one release that had all of them together in one place.  Along with inescapible names like Cage, Eno, Stockhausen, Riley, Reich and Xenakis, I thought it would also be important to include other composers who have made important contribution but might not be as well known, such as Eimert, Lansky, Chowning, Dodge, Le Caine, Maxfield, Parmegiani, Risset and Ussachevsky.

The end result is OHM- The Early Gurus of Electronic Music on Ellipsis Arts (available April 24th).  Along with Thomas and the Ellipsis crew, we worked long and hard to contact all of the living composers to get quotes about their pieces as well as find archival essays and photos to go along with comments from artists influenced by these composers.  Gruelling as it was, I hope that the end result will be worthwhile to anyone with an interest in electronic music.

I myself learned a lot from the experience and found myself with a treasure trove of material that we were not able to include in the accompanying booklet.  Rather than let this historic material gather dust in my drawers, I thought I'd like to share this important material with the online world.  As with OHM, I hope that this will become an invitation to you to explore more of this rich and astounding field.
 

TRACK LISTING: see exactly what's on OHM
INTRODUCTION:The original essay for the release
 
HISTORY: Interviews and essays
GENERAL COMMENTS FROM OTHERS:
For the notes for OHM, I did a number of interviews with artists to get their thoughts on the evolution of electronic music

© Intervews and essays by Jason Gross (April 2000)



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Luc Ferrari



Luc Ferrari (February 5, 1929 - August 22, 2005) was a French composer, particularly noted for his tape music.

Ferrari was born in Paris and studied the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first works were freely atonal.

In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet Edgard Varèse, whose Déserts he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in Déserts serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use magnetic tape in his own music.

In 1958 he co-founded the Groupe des Recherche Musicales with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio.

By the early 1960s, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds in "an organized and poetic, though non-plot oriented manner." The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language. (Tyranny)

Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach and, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of John Cage's idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this.

Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Ferrari composed works that have moved away, more or less, from purely musical preoccupations, some of which could be branches of the same tree - the problem being trying to express passing ideas, sensations and intuitions through different means, observing daily life in all its reality - social, psychological or sentimental - in the form of texts, instrumental scores, electroacoustical compositions, reports, stage works, etc.
Ferrari studied piano at "Conservatoire de Versailles" 1946-1948), then composition at "École normale de musique" with Arthur Honegger & Alfred Cortot (1948-1950), followed the courses of Oliver Messiaen (1953-1954). He joined "Groupe de Musique concrète" in 1958, remaining until 1966, and collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in setting up "Groupe de recherches musicales" (1958). In 1965 and 1966 he produced with Gérard Patris for ORTF "Les grandes répétitions", a series of television documentaries on contemporary music. He won several prizes as the Karl Sczuka Prize (1972) for "Portrait-Spiel" and for "Je me suis perdu" (1988 ). Ferrari also won Prix Italia 1987 for "Et si tout entière maintenant" and Prix Italia 1991 for "L'Escalier des aveugles". In 1990 he received the Koussevitzky Foundation Prize for "Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation". In 1972, Ferrari established his own studio ("atelier") named "Bilig". Ferrari also founded the studio/label La Muse En Circuit in 1982, eventually resigning in 1994. In 1996 he relocated his home studio, "Atelier post-billig".




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William S. Burroughs



Born: 5th February 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
Died: 2nd August 1997, Lawrence, Kansas, USA.

Burroughs initially drew acclaim as a one of the leaders of the 50s Beat movement, alongside friends and peers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His acclaimed publications, notably 'The Naked Lunch', 'The Soft Machine', 'The Ticket That Exploded' and 'Nova Express', exhibited the "cut-up" technique first espoused by fellow-writer Bryon Gysin, in which passages and texts were cut and reassembled to create unconscious writing. The pair subsequently brought the same method to recording during their stay at the "Beat Hotel' in Paris. Burroughs' experimental nature and his espousal of drug use made him an attractive figure of the 60's counter-culture.
His phrase "heavy metal' became the term for a musical genre, while several acts - notably "Soft Machine" and "Steely Dan" - took their names from his trilogy of works. His first album, "Call Me Burroughs", was comprised of readings from 'The Naked Lunch' and 'Nova Express'. It was initially issued in France prior to appearing on the US avant garde label, ESP. "Ali's Smile", a one-side 12-inch released via Brighton's Unicorn Bookshop, was Burroughs' only other 60s release, although it can be heard on the film soundtrack Chappaqua, and his distinctive voice was sampled in 1971 for Dashiell Hedayat's Obselete.

Burroughs was lauded at the Entermedia Theater in 1978 with "The Nova Convention", a collective of publishers, writers, academics, artists, punk personalities and counterculture followers. The event was released as an eponymously titled album and included pieces by Sanders ['Fuck You' magazine & The Fugs], Patti Smith, Anderson, Glass, Cage, Ginsberg, Gysin, Leary and others. Zappa was called in to replace the drug-busted Keith Richards and, after discussion with the writer, did "The Talking Asshole", which Burroughs had derived from the ventriloquist scene in "The Dead Of Night".

In 1982 "Throbbing Gristle"'s Genesis P. Orridge issued "Nothing Here But The Recordings", a fascinating cross-section of 50s and 60s archive recordings. Ten Years later Sub-Rosa issued a similarly structured set, "Break Through In Grey Room". The avant garde maintained its links with Burroughs during the 80s; he surfaced on several releases by poet John Giorno, notably "You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With" (1981), "Old Man Bickford" (You're A Hook 1986) and "Like A Girl I Want To Keep Coming" (1989) and he enjoyed a cameo appearance on Laurie Anderson's "Mr. Heartbreak" (1984).

"Dead City Radio", Burroughs' first full-length album in over two decades, paired the writer with producer Hal Willner. John Cale, Donald Fagen and Sonic Youth were among the cast assembled on what was arguably his most accessible release. "Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales", a collaboration with the "Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy", was much less satisfying, compromising the contributors' individual strengths. Despite advancing years, Burroughs contributed to Tom Waits' "The Black Rider" and appeared on singles by Gus Van Sant ("The Elvis Of Letters") and Ministry ("Just One Fix"). In 1993 he recorded a version of "The 'Priest' They Called Him" with Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.

Like Ginsberg, Burroughs was openly bisexual. He was also an opiate addict, almost acting out a characterization of his first novel "Junky" and his second "Queer", whilst being a 'loose cannon' in both his writing and social confrontations. He managed to avoid a jail sentence when he killed his second wife after shooting her in a drunken stupor. When Burroughs died of a heart-attack in 1997 his passing was mourned with the Internet message: "William Burroughs has finally figured out how to leave the flesh behind and assimilate with it all".




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