Acclaimed NYC experimental musician Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion on "Of Shadow and Substance". “More so than any of my other music, I don’t feel that these works belong to me,” Bertucci writes. “There is something about them that is beyond myself as an individual and provides, if anything, a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene.” Working with instrumentation in the ancient “just intonation” tuning structure (in which notes are spaced exclusively at whole-number ratios of frequencies) and a textural approach to composition, even commonly-heard timbres such as cello, harp and double bass in Of Shadow and Substance are afforded a sense of deep, ancestral knowing. The record opens with “Vapours”, whose contemplative, semi-improvisational, interflowing lines of acoustic instrumentation swell and expand like the passage of time, as if revealing an ancient, eternal memory, old as humanity itself. Its spacious, mutable open strings and droning harmonies do not favour a soloist or even any single melody, but instead blur and coalesce into one entity, drifting from consonance to discordance in harmonic clusters. A dizzying middle section gives rise to a sense of panic, pulling the strands of languid, drifting vapours into a volatile tumult before resettling into a misty, atmospheric trance-state. Bertucci writes: “A “vapor” is a molecule that exists on the verge between a liquid, gaseous or solid state, and the archaic term “vapours” was a pseudo-scientific term to diagnose types of hysteria in women.” The piece was commissioned and performed by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice, who were prompted to visualize vapours in air and to meditate on hysteric fits as they play, while Bertucci controls the sonic space with subtle processing and spatial mixing. The latter half of the album - just as moving and evocative - comprises the composition “Of Shadow and Substance” for double bass, cello, harp, percussion and electronics commissioned by the Philadelphia creative foundation ARS Nova Workshop and performed by Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Stravros and Matt Evans. “This piece measures the accumulation of events over glacial periods of time as a metaphor for social and environmental shifts,” Bertucci tells us. “It is a meditation on time travel, asking the listener to consider the way events from the past propel themselves into the future.” Its construction reflects the strange concertina of time we find in recorded history, suspended densely in the moveable center of an empty space. Using experimental mixing techniques, Bertucci loops and layers fragments of the performance in real-time, resulting in a diffuse, swirling, self-referential mass of experience, both familiar and metamorphic. Lea Bertucci is a New York-based artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques. Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2021 she founded her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, to focus on releasing her own music. The title "Of Shadow and Substance" is a reference to an episode of cult TV favourite The Twilight Zone. Available in limited edition of 500 vinyl, CD and digital download. A special edition of 25 will include hand bound prints of graphic scores to both pieces.

Dewa Alit, Bali’s master of contemporary Gamelan composition, returns to Black Truffle with Chasing the Phantom, presenting two recent works played by the composer’s Gamelan Salukat, a large ensemble that performs on instruments specially built to his designs, using a unique tuning system that combines notes from two traditional Balinese Gamelan scales. Alit explains that the ensemble’s name suggests “a place to fuse creative ideas to generate new, innovative works” and both compositions demonstrate the composer’s ability to wring stunning new possibilities from variations on the traditional Gamelan ensemble. While using familiar elements of Balinese Gamelan music, such as unison scalar melodies and stop-start dynamics, Alit’s music is overflowing with harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions, the latter often facilitated by unorthodox playing techniques.“Ngejuk Memedi”, an English translation of which gives the LP its title, results from Alit’s reflection on the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Balinese culture, particularly in the way that belief in the phantoms or spirits known as ‘memedi’ are shared through social media using digital technologies. Embodying this uncanny co-existence, the opening passages of the piece are at once immediately recognisable in their use of the metallophones of the Gamelan ensemble and strikingly reminiscent of electronics in their timbre and movement. At points, what we hear seems to have been fragmented with digital tools, or even to originate in some incessantly glitching DX7. Short melodic figures loop irregularly, with the ensemble splintering into polyrhythmic shards before unexpectedly recombining for intricate unison passages. After several minutes of this manically tinkling metallic sound world, the metallophones are joined by drums for a meditative passage of lower dynamics, as the uniformly high pitch range explored in the opening sections gradually opens up to include resonant low gong hits. Recovering some of the manic energy of the opening, but now enhanced with the full range of percussion, the piece weaves through a series of tempo changes to a stunning passage of rapid-fire melodies and ringing chords that sweep across the metallophones, their unorthodox tuning creating complex clouds of wavering harmonies.“Likad”, written during Covid-19 lockdowns, channels anxiety and uncertainty into musical form, resulting in a piece that, even by Alit’s standards, is stunning in its complexity and the virtuosity it demands of Gamelan Salukat. Its opening section is perhaps most remarkable for its mastery of texture, with rapid transitions between dry, muted strikes and metallic shimmers calling to mind the use of filters in electronic music. At points, the complex irregular repetitions of short melodic patterns, where the music seems to get stuck or be suddenly interrupted by a skip, recall the mad sampler works of Alvin Curran or the skittering surface of prime period Oval more than anything familiar from acoustic percussion music. Moving through a dizzying series of twists and turns, the piece ends with a majestic sequence of chords possessing an almost hieratic power. A major statement from a radical contemporary composer, one cannot help but agree with Alit when he sees Chasing the Phantom as an answer to the “question of the future of Gamelan music”.

Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational collaboration series. Revisited and expanded for a radiant, radical 2023 edition, the Pacific Coast’s panorama provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of the ocean’s life-giving form, vast and volatile with change.

Astonishing collaboration from two bold and adventuring voices within contemporary Irish music. Recorded in depths of winter in St Georges Church, Leitrim using what is reputedly Ireland's second oldest organ, together Natalia Beylis and Eimear Reidy plug into something elemental and almost classic sounding.

Long awaited repress of Tetuzi Akiyama's legendary 2003 LP, Don’t Forget To Boogie! Crazy essential for anyone that missed it the first time around. 20th anniversary Edition, made in japan, super deluxe. "If you know guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, it's probably as one of the forefront players in modern Japanese improvisation. Along with Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide, Akiyama has helped shaped the sound of Onkyo with his guitar-- in a scene largely heralded for its use of electronics, these musicians' use of a much more traditionally "rock" instrument shouldn't go unnoticed. Furthermore, along with Nakamura, Akiyama organizes a monthly "meeting" at the Off Site venue in Tokyo wherein many of the world's most interesting improvisers collaborate in a series of electro-acoustic performances. The third CD compilation of these performances was recently released, and will be of interest to anyone into modern improv and experimental electronic music. Now, all of that said, don't forget to boogie!!! Sorry, I just had to spit that out. Despite a CV that might lead you to believe Akiyama wouldn't be caught dead listening to a classic rock station, he sees fit to issue his third solo album as something of a tribute to the electric blooze of acts like Canned Heat, Led Zeppelin and John Lee Hooker. Don't Forget to Boogie! is a straight solo performance of riffs, licks and grease that would make Billy Gibbons jealous and European festival organizers scratch their heads in bewilderment. Where other infamous Japanese guitarists like Keiji Haino or Makoto Kawabata use their infatuation with hard rock to inform apocalyptic freakouts, Akiyama is content to play the kind of music that you might hear in a Louisiana dive late at night, after all the drunk cowboys have gone home and only the drunker barflies are left to give their respects to the blues. In some way, Akiyama's record (vinyl only, of course) is a very clichéd notion of preserving an outdated model of authentic rock expression. In another way, it's a stone, hypnotic jam. Opener "It's a Boogie Thing" will have the hardline improv-geeks running for the hills, but all you closet ZZ Top fans need to go ahead and surrender now. Akiyama's devil-come-runnin' blues shuffle is practically an archetypical soundtrack to cruising Texas two-lane highways in an old pick-up as the sun burns your arm and bugs splatter against the windshield. The minimal, repetitive groove carries on without a care in the world, as if simply sitting back and reveling in the glory of a groove and a $35 amp is the height of sophistication. Tunes like "Doll House Shakin'" and "Dead Or..." proceed similarly, emphasizing an almost intimidating willingness to do absolutely nothing for minutes at a time other than worship a riff. Not everything is so straightforward. "She's a B-Girl" is a pretty rumination on the power of shimmering light as translated by a tremolo'd guitar. Here, Akiyama uses his instrument not so much as a conduit to his rock and blues heroes, but as a paintbrush, crossing stroke after stroke of an impressionist still life. Just as he does on his improvised releases, Akiyama finds a way to make sparse figures add up to much more than the sum of their parts. This is especially the case in the ultra-trance of "Fast Machine"; you'd be surprised how engaging a single, quickly repeated guitar chord emulating the monolithic pulse of passing highway lane-dividers can be. Akiyama describes Don't Forget to Boogie as his "ego trip," and it's certainly an album that requires some compromise from listeners. For most people, perhaps an album consisting of only solo electric guitar blues-rock wouldn't sound like a must-have, and I'll own up to having been fairly skeptical before hearing it. However, I shouldn't have been surprised to know that good musicians tend to make interesting whatever they try, even when they might trip over their own enthusiasm along the way. Akiyama's ego trip is, at worst, a guilty pleasure, and at best, a carefree cruise into the rock and roll sunset. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, boys." - Pitchfork

Freeform, pigeon-hole dodging, stylistic merry-go-round, restless, weird and addictive - the long anticipated return of Nina Harker! Three years in the works since their self-titled 2020 debut, we’re just about ready. Similar in vein to its polyglot predecessor, we’re deep into an extremely skewed trip to the unknown. The duo’s chameleon-like musical world never misses an opportunity to shred it’s skin and reappear as something totally unexpected. Apolline’s beautifully exposed, day-dreaming vocals on opener ‘Le Pont à Voiles’ cut deep, setting up a false sense of security before things take a dive into the underneath - stuttering synths and garbled vocals brace an eerie up-right piano solo and agitated spoken / electronics piece. The sheer lack of cohesion and total disregard for an attempt at *flow* adds a tangible sense of surrealism. But it’s no amateurish prank or way of disguising technical flaws - it’s clear these musicians can play, and there’s a strong feeling of intent. The folkier moments, when they do decide to glisten through the gunk, are captivating and otherworldly, whereas the indifferent vocals and brittle drum machine tilt of ‘Hin Und Her’ or quivering electronics of ‘ë’ could easily be misplaced for an 80’s tape piece from Vox Populi!. Add in a drop of the unhinged weirdness of early Beate Bartel / CHBB, or scratchy Siltbreeze almost-songs and the collage-aesthetic of Enhet För Fri Musik and it’s clear we have something special in our hands. In an age of unashamed pastiche, it’s so nice, almost REFRESHING, to be properly tangled up in something so genuinely other and intoxicating.

Ilta Hämärä: Origo – LP Bergpolder 09, Netherlands 2023 + insert Regular edition of 250 copies A1: Ilma A2: Vesi B1: Tuli B2: Eetteri Recorded and mixed at Kulta Saha by Timo van Luijk and Bart De Paepe, 2015-2016 Originally released on cassette in 2016 The track ‘Maa’ has been replaced by ‘Eetteri’ (previously unreleased).

Nicole Lachartre: “Mundus” 3LP box – Metaphon 012 - 2023 First ever release of French composer, musicologist and writer Nicole Lachartre (1934-1991). This 3LP set comprises most of her electronic music and musique concrète compositions recorded in the 60’s and 70’s, all previously unreleased. Lachartre had a classical formation, studied with a.o. Darius Milhaud, Iannis Xenakis and Michel Philippot. Her broad formation and interest as well as her profound commitment and singular vision created a solitary voice even within the field of electronic music and musique concrète, strangely enough unheard till this day. Her first tape composition from 1968 was recorded in Pierre Henry’s Apsome studio and most of her other electronic and electro-acoustic compositions included in this box set were recorded at the IPEM in Ghent.

"Applying elements of minimalism or electronic music to their compositions, Carcascara's second studio album is deeply rooted in folk, blues or jazz. Borrowing from American primitivism, this acoustic guitar trio based half way between London and Zarautz, stretch the boundaries of tradition with a fluid and developed command of the string instrument. Coming out 14 years after their self-titled debut, highly recommended for fans of Robbie Basho, Steve Reich or John Fahey." Composed, performed and produced by Carcáscara: Fernando Aguirre, Xabier Iriondo and Iñigo Ugarteburu. Classical guitars, vocals, harmonium, bells, marimba, ukeleles, flutes, synths and field recordings. Engineered and recorded by Fiona Cruickshank at Snap Recording Studios (London, England) in August 2014. Harmonium, Synths, Bells, Flutes, Vocals (except "En ese muro de piedra") recorded at home in Zarautz (Basque Country, Spain) by Carcáscara. Outdoor take of Sano Bueltatu Maitia recorded by Fiona Cruickshank and Shelley Uprichard in Getaria (Basque Country, Spain) in July 2014.

The legendary Palm Wine guitarist S.E. Rogie’s early work. Truly beautiful songs from the 1960’s ranging from sweet acoustic solo numbers to blazing full band electric music. S.E. Rogie had a very long & pioneering career in Sierra Leone. His songs are some of the most beautiful ever – gentle & lilting timeless melodies. One of the greats.

First in the series of reissues focusing on the legendary Black Fire catalogue via Now-Again! This previously unreleased live session performed by Juju and recorded at the legendary Brooklyn venue The East in 1973. Magical, mystical, Afrocentric and progressive music!

Drummer, composer and poet William Hooker has been a tireless force in free improvised music for over 40 years. He emerged from New York's loft jazz scene in the mid-'70s, part of a generation of artists fueled by the social, political and cultural frustrations of their era. This second wave of American free jazz would push relentlessly into new territories – collaborating in a variety of non-traditional settings, establishing their own labels, venues, etc. – all in an effort at creative self-determination. While William Hooker's output extends past 70 albums as leader, it all began with the double LP ... Is Eternal Life. Recorded in 1975-1976 and released privately on the artist's own Reality Unit Concepts imprint, ... Is Eternal Life is nothing short of visionary. Filled with tension, intricacy and raw fury, these extended compositions feature the playing of David Murray, Mark Miller, David S. Ware, Hasaan Dawkins and Les Goodson.

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey.

Trans-Millenia Consort is the near mythical debut album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1982, the album is a bold and beautiful evocation of a life that exists between and beyond time. Evoking ancient rituals and primordial futures, the music of Trans-Millenia Consort glows with a strange iridescence; its pulsing embryonic waveforms flutter and drift, tones fall like raindrops of the long-ago, and melodies shimmer and dance across the ages like fireflies of a lost world. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement. releases November 10, 2023 All music composed, arranged, and performed by Pauline Anna Strom

Κλίμα (Klima) is the third album by CV & JAB, the duo of Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. An assertive step forward in the two artists' investigations into melodic interplay, acoustic processing and field recordings, the full-length conjures the modus operandi of archaeologists searching for unheard soundscapes. Structured as an itinerant mise-en-abyme, Κλίμα (Klima) summons worldwide submarine circuits and tropospheres populated by sudden findings and progressive re-encounters - hazy dreams amalgamate with mosaics of reality. Catalyzed by a 2021 invitation to perform at the UNESCO world heritage site Santuário Bom do Jesus do Monte in Braga, Portugal, the music of Κλίμα (Klima) then fermented across a period of two years, during which live experiments, cyclical studio sessions, and travels across the Island of Tenerife’s effervescent ambiences gradually contributed to its completion. It is on the volcanic island that the narrative core of the album materialized, prompted by a month of recordings across the radically different microclimates populating the landscape. CV & JAB’s flashing transpositions from desert to rainforest are evoked over ten tracks operating as an abstract audio-guide of the outer and inner realms permeating the pieces. Κλίμα (Klima) is conceived as a rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential excursus; percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface sometimes in solo, sometimes synchronically to eventually dissipate again. The remote and enigmatic atmospheres that characterized previous CV & JAB albums acquire an intimate intensity in the solo piano excursions - “Klima” and “Lands of Permanent Mist” - and a penetrating emotional resonance with the instrument’s flirtatious entanglements with JAB’s bass flute on “Dwelling” and “Pottery Fragments” or with CV’s flickering plasma voice in “Jetstream”. Suggesting timeless wanderings in ambient études and classical minimalism, the album deploys as a mirage, inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections. The palpable depth of the recordings bestows each track with a distinctive density and presence: sounds and chords materialize and dematerialise as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey. Ten sips of a familiar rapture which ooze a renewed sense of expansion in sound, informed by more than five years of CV & JAB’s continuous sonic wanderings and wonderings together. The labyrinthine and meteorological odyssey becomes tangible in the artwork, realized by the duo’s long-time collaborator Zin Taylor, mind and hand behind their two previous albums’ covers. Κλίμα (Klima)’s simulacra evokes a map in which curves transform into a score with “small systems of differences emerging side by side”.

“Mediterranean Music Water (Mare nostrum in moedium terrae) op. 203”, a never before issued tape composition, belongs to a body of work embarked upon during the 1980s and 90s connected to Sicily, the other most notable and available being “Op. 201 L’Essere Umano Errabando, La Voca Errabando”, issued by The Henning Christiansen Archive in 2020. These works were an extension of Ursula and Henning Christiansen’s meeting and befriending the Sicily based couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, with whom they regularly visited and collaborated. Like its predecessor, the aforementioned Op. 201, “Mediterranean Music Water op. 203” is a conceptualization of abstract theatricality at the connection of place and its relationship to the sea. Performed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen and recorded at a small performing arts theatre in Erice, Sicily – Teatro Gebel Hamed – during December of 1991, the abstract for this work reads: “In the morning (after the storm), on the beach. The sea has thrown some things on the beach. Blue light – some mist? On the ground. Ursula’s slides on the wall. Henning is rolling from the background of the stage slowly, very slowly, towards, in a fish net. I come in looking for the things the sea has left and discover him. I roll him out of the net, he’s nearly dead, and try to get life in him. Light in the background in rainbow colours. Ursula wears a partlett dress, as a siren.” These images lay a foundation and context for the sounds that emerge over the album’s two sides, a fascinating conjunction between the power of water and the human spirit. Through the processing of heavy delay and reverb, we encounter the howling utterances of violin tones, vocalizations, and countless unplayable instrumental and non-instrumental sound sources, gathering in a vast and sprawling serious of sonorous expanses that seem to echo the power, movements, and myths tied to the Mediterranean.

Tracklisting: A1 Il Pavone 6:20A2 Dove 2:36A3 No No No No 2:25A4 Il Serpente Innamorato 2:26A5 Lo Zoo 2:36A6 L' Uomo 2:40A7 I Camaleonti 2:40B1 La Pecora Crede Di Essere Un Cavallo 4:20B2 Il Letargo 8:20B3 Aria Terra, Acqua E Fuoco 8:50 "Known for her renderings of Italian popular songs, Maria Monti is an Italian singer and actress with a noteworthy career: cabaret singer in the '60s, ambitious avant-garde folk artist in the '70s, and starring in films by directors as such as Sergio Leone's Fistful Of Dynamite (1971) and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976). Il Bestiario is a near perfect emblem of the fascinating territory gained through collaboration. It enlisted the radical poet Aldo Braibanti as its lyricist, features arrangements and synthesizer from Alvin Curran (Musica Elettronica Viva), the baritone saxophone of Roberto Laneri (Prima Materia), as well as the soprano saxophone of jazz legend Steve Lacy. The result is absolutely stunning, musically unique within the respective outputs of its participants' long and noted careers. Unquestionably one of the most beautiful and neglected albums of its decade."

Truly amazing solo piano work from Giovanni Di Domenico! Giovanni Di Domenico has now achieved a personal and unmistakable style within contemporary minimalism. His music always expresses a state of concentration, of recollection and contemplation toward a focal node. Repetition is experienced as alchemical state, as truth contained in the small nuances of change, in a crescendo that never reaches a climax. The atmosphere is intuition and is made up of a few compositional touches. To compose is to make synthesis, to unearth purity, simplicity and exactness. This new work for solo piano is almost an imaginary novel...the notes seem to tell of deserted streets, lonely walks in the night or runs down stairs. In this sense the musician is the writer of silence and the fleeting moment. And so, amid slow chords like Chopin or Satie, moods oscillate between brio and allegro, evoking the lightness of love, greater sadness and melancholy, as well as more restless and agitated ostinatos, the product of a more cathartic worldview.