‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is the imagined soundtrack of a film yet to exist and of lives dealing with existence itself. Inspired by the Karnofsky Performance Scale, a scoring system widely used in medical oncology where 100 equals ‘normal’ and 0 equals ‘dead’, artist Teresa Cos undertakes a journey where numbers are shuffled and time is stretched. Part of a body of work that includes visual scores and a forthcoming film sharing the album’s narration, ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ may indeed be guided by the ghost of David A. Karnofsky himself, the pioneer oncologist of the 1950s and 60s who had earlier conducted experiments with the US Army Chemical Warfare Service. He died of cancer aged 55, becoming subject to the system he created.Recorded and mixed while on artist residencies across Europe, the album is built from a composition of guitar improvisations running through a four-track looping recorder, delay, and pitch-shifting pedals, with additional harmonica on the last twin tracks. The left/right monitoring that persists throughout the composition echoes a wavering between the extreme poles of the 0/100 scale, but is contradicted by a whole palette of emotions, at times scattered, at times doomed, at times joyfully playful. Minimal and lyrical, the atmosphere is haunting, occasionally eerie.Nothing lasts too long. The play of ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is in the interval between two octaves in music, the extremes of a scale which in the abstraction of western notation run upwards and downwards to infinity, in reality until the limits of embodied perception are met.

Second outing from killer trio of John Tilbury / Keith Rowe / Kjell Bjørgeengen, recorded live at Cafe Oto in 2018

Sealed original copy of the Great Wall/Chanta Khat CD privately released by Michael Ranta on his Asian Sound label back in 1991. 1- The Great Wall : Recorded at Asian Sound Studio and Conny Plank’s studio – (45’46”) 2- Chanta Khat : Realised in 1973 at the NHK Electronic Music Studio, Japan – (29’02”)

Flower Travellin' Band, 50 motorcycles and others - Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles =Regular Edition= 10-inch LP & CD Expo 70, held in Osaka, was a pivotal event for the Japanese people and their relationship with the rest of the world, demonstrating both the nation’s ongoing economic recovery from World War Two and the creative spirit of Japanese society and its artists. The event gained international acclaim for its adventurous architectural design, visual art and electronic music. Some of Japan’s most renowned composers were involved, but also present were the now-legendary rockers, the Flower Travellin' Band. A series of performances, billed as “Night Events” were held at the Expo; the most radical of these was "Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles”, but its anti-establishment feel and general madness took the Expo organizers by surprise and it was cancelled after only one night, despite being scheduled for a longer run. An air of myth developed around the event, but a recording of the event has been discovered and this release is the result. And what an event it was: a night-time sound-bomb with a fabled band, electronic sound and 50 motorcycles with horns blaring, spotlights, electronic billboards and a robot ― all flashing, roaring and howling at the night sky. This release comprises a CD, a 10-inch record with fold-out sleeve and large obi, plus fascinating notes in Japanese and English by Kenichi Yasuda, an expert on Japanese rock music, and Koji Kawasaki, a renowned researcher of Japanese electronic music, as well as rare photos. No download code/ticket available. TRACKS: CD “Beam Penetration” (full-length) [45:49] 10-inch (excerpts) Side A “Beam Penetration” [14:52] Side B “Beam Penetration”

Originally released in 1978, Music By William Eaton is a private-press album from the accomplished experimental stringed instrument builder. The atmospheric recording techniques, mixed with a hint of Fahey/Takoma-lineage make for a listening experience akin to the mountainscape drawing represented on the album cover. The experience may seem simple at first, but like any great trip in nature, new details consistently reveal themselves upon each listen. “When I started building instruments, playing guitar took on a whole new dimension. From the conception to the birth of each instrument, new layers of meaning unfolded. Cycles, connections and interdependencies became apparent as I contemplated the growth of trees from seed to old age, and the transformation from raw wood to the building of a musical instrument. I sought out quiet natural environments to play and listen to the “voice” of my 6 string, 12 string, 26 string (Elesion Harmonium) and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar. Deep canyons contained a beautiful resonant quality and echo. A starlit night with a full moon provided all the reflection and endless space by which to project music into the cosmos. The sound of a bubbling stream and singing birds added a natural symphonic tapestry to a melody or chord pattern. As I perceived it, everything was participating in a serendipitous dance. Everything was part of the music. During this time, I decided to record an instrumental album of music. The idea was simple; it would be a series of tone poems with no titles or any information attached, only the words ‘Music by William Eaton.’ While some of the songs evolved out of composed chord progressions, most of the songs were played spontaneously, only on the occasion of the recording. These improvised songs haven’t been played since.” -- William Eaton

Full colour sleeve includes track insert in Japanese

Junk Box Natsuki Tamura --Trumpet Satoko Fujii --Piano John Hollenbeck--Percussion

Banksia Trio's third album is a studio recording of the culmination of a live tour held during the pandemic. In addition to the members' five original songs, songs by Masaaki Kikuchi, Nick Drake, and Paul Motian were recorded on analog master tape. In addition to the richness of overtones produced by analog recording, the hybrid use of high-resolution digital recording technology allows for extremely natural and nuanced sonic expression. “Piano, bass, drums. From the moment each note of each instrument rises, it slowly decays into silence. We focus on the acoustic phenomenon of this single note, and as the sound disappears. Dive into the ocean of decay. Listening immersively and weaving the next sound is a very introspective, prayer-like process for each of Takashi Sugawa, Masaki Hayashi, and Shun Ishiwaka. I would be happy if you could enjoy this band ensemble, which exquisitely coexists with its own spiritual and personal sound world, while the music itself steadily moves forward.'' (Sugawa)  . Drizzling Rain (Masabumi Kikuchi) 2. MASKS (Takashi Sugawa) 3. Abacus (Paul Motian) 4. Bird Flew By (Nick Drake) 5. Doppio Movimento (Masaki Hayashi) 6. Stefano (Takashi Sugawa) 7. Siciliano (Shun Ishiwaka) 8. Messe 1 (Shun Ishiwaka) 9. I Should Care (Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston) 10. Wonderful One (Paul Motian) 須川崇志　Takashi Sugawa (bass, cello) 林正樹　Masaki Hayashi (piano) 石若駿　Shun Ishiwaka (drums)

MacLise's brief-but-legendary life was an incessant pursuit of the dharma, and the tapes he left behind in his archive testify vividly to the distances he was inspired to go. Astral Collapse is one of several culls from the archival recordings eventually made into posthumous releases, featuring his DIY tape collage assembly of field recordings, chants, ARP synth, bells, bongos and organ drones, making a kaleidoscopic sequence of sonic encounters and a backdrop for intermittent recitations of Buddhist prose and poetry. Purely mind-altering transmissions from a past where such experiences were prized and pursued like rare magic.

2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by its incantatory repetitiveness, its flamboyance, and its mysticism, but also by its violence. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad, Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work, which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video, and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols, as well as Tintin creator Hergé. Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles, and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Sacred Bordello is a flexi-cover sewn, full color, 192-page, 11" x 9" book that includes essays, scores, and original photos of performances and installations, providing the most complete documentation of Charlemagne Palestine's art. The included CD features an hour-long recording of a lecture that Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at the ArtNow Centre in Canada. Following the performance of a strumming music concert, Palestine freely speaks about his music and philosophy, involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question-and-answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The CD also includes a previously unreleased multi-layer voice study from the early 1960s.

On December 11, 1980 Eliane Radigue performed live on KPFA. Her full performance is included here, remastered, on two compact discs. Upon hearing these performances for the first time in many years Radigue declared them to be the best versions she'd ever heard. Included are full in-studio performances of Chry-ptus and the world premiere of parts one and three of Tryptych.

Beginning in 1974, based in New Zealand, the sound-performance group From Scratch used an evolving array of percussion instruments to create a distinctive rhythmic music, texturally rich and tonally sumptuous, making use of found and repurposed objects as well as custom-made percussion instruments. And while the music has a sophisticated, fluid and intelligent polyrhythmic drive, pitched percussion features prominently, using microtunings and just intonation in tightly structured pieces which evolve and mutate, making use of intricate interlocking of melodic and rhythmic elements. Given their Pacific identity, one can find similarities with a number of Asian Pacific musics; their music will appeal to open-eared listeners interested in such musics, and it will also intrigue admirers of the early work of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Formed by Phil Dadson on his return to New Zealand following his late-60s involvement in the U.K. with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, Auckland's From Scratch embraced an egalitarian ethic, focusing on co-operation, integration, and the union of opposites. These principles are clearly heard in the music here, with all the players interlocking, with the music exploring and exploding the polarities of melody/rhythm, local/global, group/individual, minimal/maximal. These four tracks, ranging from 1974 to 1982 are propulsive and yet serene, percussive and yet sweetly tonal, and toe-tappingly alert, an immersive and distinctive soundworld. All tracks here are newly remastered from the original master tapes; "Passage" was their first recording and is previously unissued.

Anne Gillis (Paris) is a composer and performer since the eighties, Paul Abbott (Antwerp ) is a musician, drummer, writer, and Seymour Wright (London) is a saxophonist and writer. In 2021, during Covid restrictions, the trio of Anne Gillis and XT (Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright) developed a piece remotely together for Café Oto online radio broadcast program. A one-hour piece titled “Our/s Bouture(s)” was ‘broadcast’ on 1 June 2021 to online audinece, and we present a complete program with careful CD mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi. The trio’s concept for “Our/s Bouture(s)” is to ‘plant’ sounds and movements, which will grow and evolve through broadcasting, and what you will hear is not a 'performance' but a one-hour journey of organic sonic sound structure.

Tracklisting: 1. Tapper (solo violin) 52:22 2. Love Song (two violins) 19:53 3. Halo (one or more violins) 34:12Continuing Black Truffle’s series of releases documenting the recent work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, String Noise presents three major works for violin solo and duo composed between 2004 and 2019. Lucier has developed his compositions in close collaboration with many instrumentalists over the years; the three works presented here are performed by the violinists for whom they were originally written, Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who together make up the innovative violin duo String Noise, and have premiered works by a plethora of major figures in contemporary music. The long-form compositions presented here continue Lucier’s life-long exploration of acoustic phenomena, drawing on aspects of some of his most well-known compositions and extending them into new instrumentation. Tapper (2004) extends the experiments with echolocation – gathering information about an environment by listening to the echoes of sounds produced within it – that Lucier began with his classic 1969 work Vespers, where performers explore a space equipped with hand-held pulse oscillators. Here, the same principle is put into practice for solo violin, the body of which the performer taps repeatedly with the butt end of the bow while moving around the performance space. The result is a subtly shifting web of echoes and resonances produced by the reflection of the sharp tap off the surfaces of the room (in this case, the Drawing Center in New York). In Love Song (2016), two violinists are connected by a long wire stretched between the bridges of their instruments, causing the sounds played on one violin to also be heard through the other. As the two violinists play long tones using only the open E string, they move in a circular motion around the performance space, thus changing the tension of the wire, which creates a remarkable array of variations in pitch and timbre ranging from ghostly wavering pitches reminiscent of a singing saw to near-electronic tones. In Halo (2019), one or more violinists walk slowly through the performance space in a zig-zag pattern while sustaining long tones. As in Tapper, the consistent sound production reveals the sonic properties of the environment. As the title of the piece suggests, the outcome is a shimmering halo of sound produced by the reflection of the violin’s extended tones off the walls and ceiling of the performance space (in this case, Alvin's home).

Joe McPhee and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten at the Sugar Maple/Okka Fest on Saturday, June 6th, 2015. Joe McPhee - tenor and soprano saxophone. Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - double bass. Recorded live by Dave Zuchowski. Mastered by Martin Siewert in July/August 2016.

Duo (London) 1993 is a live album featuring performances by saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker which was recorded at the Bloomsbury Theatre as part of the 1993 London Jazz Festival and released on the Leo label