Homespun cassette label Regional Bears moves away from its preferred format with a debut vinyl release from Philadelphia-based sound artist Christian Mirande.  Previously releasing works on labels such as Hanson Records, Recital and Vatrine, his work is often characterised as textural or atmospheric and deals with themes such as memory, loss, and faith. Beautiful One Day, Perfect The Next is a tale of two halves and employs Mirande’s trusted instrumental and compositional repertoire of magnetic tape, fretless bass, iPhone voice memo and a range of FM synthesis.  The A-side consists of a number of queasy, iridescent synthesis pieces broken up by haphazard interludes and bookended by two vocal pieces.  The nauseous pitch-bent sonics and vocal musings have us wondering if there could have been a Werkbund record on Lovely Music, or recalls Paul De Marinis’ seminal Music As a Second Language, whilst ‘Can’t Close My Hand In This Dream’ breaks up the inorganic sound with nostalgic vinyl crackle and out of tune piano.   The B-side is occupied entirely by the title piece, opening with cool, menthol electronics before developing into rolling hi-hats, a driving fretless bassline and flurries of collaged spoken word samples.  We’ve spent the last 18 months with this piece of music in one form or another and are still yet to tire of it - something like modern take on Robert Ashley’s The Park with a double decker sized low end, it’s become a faithful companion to the store.

Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco is the first major solo release from Australian performer-composer Sam Dunscombe, now based in Berlin after residing for the past decade in San Diego and Tokyo. A virtuoso clarinettist who has performed in composed and improvised settings with artists such as Klaus Lang and Taku Sugimoto, their practice also embraces computer music, lo-fi electronics and field recordings, in addition to their long-term commitment to archiving, studying and performing the work of Romanian spectralist composer Horatiu Radulescu. The two side-long pieces presented on this LP began from a chance encounter in a specific geographic location (documented in the photographs that grace the record’s sleeve). Exploring California’s Mojave desert with a friend, Dunscombe made the unlikely discovery of a tangle of quarter-inch tape snared on a cactus. The digitised version of this tape, variously edited and processed, as well as Dunscombe’s own transcription and embellished performance of some of its material on Hammond organ, makes up one of the main ingredients of the LP’s first side. The other is a field recording of the area outside the ghost town of Ludlow, where the tape was found, where haunted silence is punctuated by freight trains and clusters of explosions from gold mines and the local marine corps. Far from any kind of documentary approach, the resulting composition reaches back to the smeared atmospherics and overdriven tape crunch of Hands To, Small Cruel Party or Joe Colley, before the Hammond organ rises up to cast a spectral shimmer reminiscent of 1960s tape music classics like Arne Nordheim’s ‘Warszawa’. On ‘Desert Disco’ (its title perhaps a clue to the content of the mysterious tape), Dunscombe zeroes in on a single fragment of the tape, accompanying it with analogue synthesis to craft an immersive work based on a single chord. Throughout the course of this work, the monolithic opening sonority gradually splits apart, revealing an infinity of rhythmically phasing lines that swarm like a cloud of insects and patter like falling rain, placing Dunscombe’s piece in a lineage of patient electronic exploration that includes landmarks like Costin Miereanu’s Derives and the contemporary work of Jim O’Rourke. --- Black Truffle, 2021

At the top of a carpeted staircase in a Georgian country home a blue wooden rocking horse stands completely still in front of a closed window with a view out onto the green hills and trees and fields beyond. A child rides a stationary wooden horse and travels to faraway places without ever leaving the security of his room. The movement of a rocking horse is similar to that of a cradle, or a swing, or a lullaby. Its about being quiet, its about balance, its about being at home and thinking of elsewhere The Horse Stories is the soundtrack to Going places sitting down, a film by Hiraki Sawa, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Bloomberg London, for Waterloo Sunset, the Dan Graham Pavilion at the Hayward in November 2004. It is a piece about make-believe journeys to far-away places (at the tips of your fingers, between the cracks in the floor at your feet, on the edge and behind the door, right here where you are, close-by...) For the soundtrack I used sounds belonging to the country house and garden in which Sawa filmed - water running in the upstairs bathroom; rain water dripping on the stones outside the kitchen door, sparkling water in a glass on the table, the wind-chime and the clock and the record player... And then the sounds of music boxes being played - one elaborate antique music-box with bells the shape of bees and a miniature hollow drum, and other simple music boxes, playing only one tune each, tiny naked metallic combs and drums and handles. At the core of all my sound work lies a deep interest in ideas of aliveness, of space and the awareness of time passing, of breathing and being still and of listening. And of the possibility of grace.

LP hand numbered ltd 350 copies Talibam! with Alan Wilkinson Determined to continue collaborating with revolutionary blitzkrieg musicians in perpetuity, Talibam! Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea were set up on a blind date with Alan Wilkinson by Bo' Weavil Recordings for a London basement show in May '08. Like a late '60's Sadean love-in ripe with Joycean epiphanies, Talibam! heard in Wilkinson's tone the strength and grit of a fine british pint served cool and fresh…a perfect energy to swing-bounce their rolly polly hieroglyphic dance mayhem. A second gig happened in fall '08, followed by this recording in winter '09. If Talibam! and Wilkinson were a rugby team they'd be in first place, trouncing competitors with more riff hard tenacity and more powerful/declarative end zone dances. Balancing contradictory cultural fragments into a psychadelic yin and yang power drive of glitch emission sprezzatura horns, Zarathrusta organ drone launch, and sayanora-rama drum spills, alan wilkinson, matt mottel, and kevin shea turn anamitronic nihilists into veritable musicological sexphorisms -- they cut the tension on the dance floor like that abrupt liminal point between peace and footsie, between donuts and bagels, between lizards and turtles. Our three dangerously handsome myriad-men from the future have materialized mixed signals into sharp-fanged foreign accents on this red-eye voyage to vinyl metropoly, a 2-sided ecosystem of Gatsby-killer morph-prov entitled "dem old apple pie melodies".

Blank Forms · Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit - Fragment - VI (Mass Projection)Axis/Another Revolvable Thing is the second installment of Blank Forms’ archival reissues of the music of Japan’s eternal revolutionary Masayuki Takayanagi, following April is the cruellest month, a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit. Comprised of recordings of a September 5, 1975 concert by the New Direction Unit at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, the two-part set showcases Takayanagi in deep pursuit of what he began calling “non-section music” after leaping beyond the confines of his prior descriptor “real jazz.” The quartet of Takayanagi (guitar), Kenji Mori (reeds), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) deftly explores the twin poles of Takayanagi’s spacious “gradually projection” and explosively virulent “mass projection” concepts across six pieces, titled Fragments I - VI. Originally issued in two individual LP volumes in rearranged order, this CD edition presents the Another Revolvable Thing concert in chronological sequence for the first time, with “gradually projection” pieces on the first disc and “mass projection” eruptions on the second.As part of his liner notes for the original records (newly translated for this edition), noted Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima wrote:"New Direction Unit performances always emit the smell of blood. Fresh blood, never blood that is old or crusted. This is not the desiccated shell of music, it's sound through which pumps the blood of living human beings. Blood that seethes, that flows and counterflows, that blazes, runs, rises and congeals, blood that vomits and spurts. Vivid, scarlet blood. The ultimate beauty that Takayanagi aims at, is it not the color of this blood?Blood calls out to blood. For these four musicians, playing together means feasting on each other’s blood. It is also a summoning to a secret blood oath, to the creation of solidarity with the audience. In the moment, truly, the situation and beauty are instantaneously unified. To borrow the title of a movie by Kōji Wakamatsu: blood is redder than the sun."   --- Masayuki “Jojo” Takayanagi (1932 - 1991) was a maverick Japanese guitarist, a revolutionary spirit whose oeuvre embodied the radical political movements of late ‘60s Japan. Having cut his teeth as an accomplished Lennie Tristano disciple playing cool jazz in the late ‘50s, Takayanagi had his mind blown by the Chicago Transit Authority’s “Free Form Guitar” in 1969 and promptly turned his back on the jazz scene by which he was beloved, going as far as to call his former peers and admirers “a bunch of losers” in the press. Takayanagi had found a new direction, an annihilation of jazz and its associated idolatry of hegemonic American culture. Aiming his virtuoso chops towards the stratosphere, Takayanagi dedicated himself to the art of the freakout, laying waste to tradition left and right, most notably via the all-out assault of his aptly-named New Direction for the Arts (later New Direction Unit) and collaborations with like-minded outsider saxophonist Kaoru Abe. His innovations on the instrument parallel those of Sonny Sharrock and Derek Bailey and paved the way for the Japanese necromancy of Keiji Haino and Otomo Yoshihide, but even at its most limitless hurdling Takayanagi’s playing is propelled by the dexterous grasp of his foundations, to which he paid tribute with elegant takes on flamenco and Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” In the autumn of his life, Takayanagi’s solo Action Direct performances made him one of the first guitarists, alongside but independent of Keith Rowe, to use tabletop guitar for pure noise improvisation.

Blank Forms · Exotic Sin: Customer's Copy (excerpts)Debut LP of contorted cosmic jazz and eccentric minimal electronics by Exotic Sin. The duo of Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa first came together for a performance celebrating the art and music of Karlsson’s grandparents, Moki and Don Cherry, before continuing as an independent unit that still incorporates some of the Cherrys’ instruments as well as their synergetic integration of music with artistic practice.Preferring the stark contrast of analog/digital, acoustic/electric, and natural/unnatural sounds, Karlsson contributes synthesizers in addition to piano, celesta, and bells, while Iwasa collides anachronistic 90s Yamaha keyboard and guitaret with contrabass recorder, drums, kalimba, and three of Don Cherry’s instruments: one of his trumpets as well as two of his “zen saxophones,” handmade woodwinds appending reed mouthpieces to plastic plumbing parts, also called Don’s kettles after their high-pitched sound. With such timbral juxtapositions, the spirit of Exotic Sin is reminiscent of a number of leftfield jazz-meets-electronics ‘70s duos from Don Cherry’s maverick collaborations with Jon Appleton and Terry Riley to Anthony Braxton’s work with Richard Teitelbaum, İlhan Mimaroğlu and Freddie Hubbard’s Sing Me a Song of Songmy, and Muhal Richard Abrams’ electronic works. On album opener “Dot 2 Dot,” Karlsson’s measured, monastic piano sets an elegiac stage for kettle bends and absurdist electro-percussive filtering courtesy of Iwasa before a flourish of cascading ebonies and ivories together with restorative circular trumpet motifs bring the sidelong piece to a majestic resolution. Named after the character from Ridley Scott’s 1989 film Black Rain, the schizosphere of “Charlie Vincent” interfaces ominous, dystopian synthesizer with permuted organ swells before album closer “Canis Minor” sets gentle sail for a distant bed of lonesome stars.A visual artist as well as an archivist and coordinator for the Cherry estate, Karlsson continues to learn and study Don’s compositions and approach to piano with her uncles Eagle-Eye and David, who were taught by Don himself, and his use of short piano compositions as loose scaffoldings for improvisation is prevalent across the record’s three otherworldly unfurlings. Improvisor and multidisciplinary artist Kenichi Iwasa is also known for his legendary Krautrock Karaoke night, his contribution to Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 album Workaround, and collaborations with visual artists and musicians from Linder Sterling to members of Can, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, and Wire. Recorded and mixed, with additional alto flute, woodwinds, and contrabass recorder by Robbie Lee.

Shūko No Omit is a trio of Yonju Miyaoka on guitars and vocals, Yuya Oishi on drums, and Taiju Sugimori on bass: a classic framework for a rock band, and yet… Led by Yonju Miyaoka, a young prolific musician from Osaka who lives with schizophrenia, Shūko No Omit could have found a home in the P.S.F. records catalogue curated by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, sitting alongside Go Hirano, Tori Kudo, Chie Mukai / Ché Shizu, and Kousokuya. Yonju Miyaoka’s music seems haunted by the psychedelic rock of the late seventies, by its electric, solitary ghost minstrels, perhaps also inhabited by the impulsive riffs of no-wave. His voice can sound slightly out of tune to the western ear, on the edge, and maybe this is what makes it so terribly moving. His guitar seems to be soaked in the same acid as poured out by the amplifiers of Keiji Haino or Takashi Mizutani, a mercurial grain, a wild and inhabited psychedelia. The compositions crawl towards their ends in a reptilian, winding way, in a mud of saturation and distortion, almost overlaying like tracing paper sheets, in a disordered manner. These six tracks evoke inner collapse, loss, expectations and oblivion. Like his elders, Miyaoka shows a nonchalant, almost dilettantish way of building songs, preferring a chipped body, the trace of a conundrum disorder, to schoolboy academic perfection. This album is a long improvisation with a punctured, dismembered body, thrown in here like a bucket full of viscera, and reassembled in an alternate fashion. Miyaoka lies there, naked. --- Shūko No Omit is a trio of Yonju Miyaoka on guitars and vocals, Yuya Oishi on drums, and Taiju Sugimori on bass Liner notes by Patrick O'Brien --- An' Archives, 2021

1980 was an incredible year for London’s experimental music scene with many different strands. Recommended Records were rereleasing the first two Faust LP’s, L. Voag had found ‘the way out’, Swell Maps were ‘in occupied Europe’. Throbbing Gristle and other industrialists were giving plenty of live actions. Nurse With Wound had just released their first LP, as had This Heat. The other great LP on Piano Records by Steve Beresford was also on the shelves. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the capitol Adam Bohman was making his first recordings working with two budget cassette recorders. Bunhill Row was the first complete album of material, but whilst the aforementioned artists were pressing up their recordings and making them easily available via Rough Trade or the Recommended Records ‘shop’, Adam’s releases remained in tiny cassette editions made for friends or exchanged on the mail art network. So here for the first time is Bunhill Row, released as it should have appeared at the time - on vinyl. It must be said that this is quite unlike any of Adam’s other releases, and quite unlike his work with Morphogenesis, or his work as one half of The Bohman Brothers. This is ‘songs’ - 30 in all, and the main instrument used is a trumpet (an ordinary trumpet), along with other acoustic instruments and a vast variety of objects and junk, much of which is still part of the Bohman armoury. The overall feel sits somewhere between R. Steevie Moore and Caroliner, but this is British of course. Somehow it all works, and all in all, opens another window on to the incredibly fruitful astral alignment that occured over London at this time. Pressing Information Archived from the cassette master in 1999 Numbered edition of 500 copies

Delighted to see this Cafe OTO recording get a vinyl pressing. Stunning duo from France's Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Heimat). At the centre of their sound is one of the last remaining ondes Martenot's - an instrument loved by Messiaen and Varese, and carefully packed up and shipped across the channel to OTO last year by a worried Julie. Beautifully paced, the pair create a sort of precarious evensong for an alternate universe. Published by Vlek in Belgium. "Sometimes, precarious habitations - those places of freedom stolen from their abandonment and which are less and less commonplace - make you understand more and more the extent to which a growing world can seem more and more unequivocally to be in some of the last inhabited places on earth. Dreams and explorations of worlds, renewed fantasies, air bubbles, washed up beings and the most tenacious music lovers have drawn from the past and demonstrated that the diversity of sound instruments created by man doesn’t go back to the space age, even though everything has accelerated since. Thomas Bloch and his crystal organ or, in this case, Julie Normal and her Ondes Martenot have appeared, from Tokyo to Brussels, on stages usually reserved exclusively for rock’n’roll and its heirs. The audience, always hungry for the bizarre, took the bait. By pure coincidence, both characters are originally from Alsace, and Julie Normal has now shacked up in Rome where she is one of the French escapees who have taken it upon themselves to breathe new life into this eternally charged city which, if it’s not in flames as I write these lines, is nevertheless infested with trash cans and tourists. Her partner in Accident du travail, whom we know from the undeniably charming Parisian garage outfit Cheveu, is half of the Heimat duo alongside the wonderful Armelle Oberle, the manifest connection of the Triple Alliance de l’Est that spawned the most highly regarded rock/garage out of France from the last twenty years. Through the act of travelling, the feeling of going around in circles, and certainly of being fed up with “playing music while Rome burns”, the mastery of this “classical” instrument which opens doors to unknown territories, the Ondes Martenot, like the theremin before the Beach Boys in Man or… Astro Man made their entrance with the mandatory delay, in squats from Strasbourg to Rome, and also Brussels. It’s not only garage rock and no-wave. This music now holds its place next to garage post-punk disco, despite its static appearance and perhaps thanks to its slowness and the introspective quality of an equivalent nature for those who also wish to accept the invitation to introspection offered by said music.Vlek, coming from a different background, that of electronic music stricto sensu, continues its exploration beyond the established binary paths and henceforth starts on the road taken by this arrhythmic music with a mini live album by Accident du Travail, recorded during a concert at the mythical Cafe OTO in London. Opening the album are very strong tracks, which are at once the most essential. Ouverture All’Inglese, a definite wink at a different song, the beautiful Merluzo. With La Boule, the group revisits a song previously released so one can get a better sense of their roots, descended from rock, such as the passage through Krautrock bands in the Kosmisches Musik vein (Klaus Schultze, Cluster) - subaquatic, exploratory music. With La Reine we take off towards the noisiest patches that approach us with the clearest of drones upon which the calm and luminous keys of the Martenot are scattered about. It’s perhaps the most nervous song, considering the live setting  to which the Londoners’ applause bear witness. After these peaks we are brought down towards something more terrestrial through Lycaon, with playful percussive sounds brought to the fore and which completely contrast the melodic and almost narrative virtuosity of the ondes in the background. Encore loops the loop, with the live sound coming from a tone of a blocked synth, peppering notes from a melodica or an accordion and once more, taking a trip on the Martenot towards celestial zones; a layered construction, a return to the outset of the trip which started at the beginning of this record and which we soon wish to repeat. To be played on all good turntables.

"Before sitting down and listening to this new release by UK-based, Canadian artist Xenia Pestova Bennett, one is immediately struck by the vibrant, compelling images on the cover design. This is one of those exceptional instances where the sonic expression found therein sounds just as its extramusical inspirational sources look: stunning chemical elements that glow and pulsate. From Pestova Bennett’s liner notes: “Radium is an element which glows pale blue, Plutonium glows deep red, Tritium is green and the gas Radon is yellow at its freezing point, and orange-red below. I added the fifth, obsessively-repetitive loop… this element is silvery-white, glowing blue.” Glowing Radioactive Elements, the five tracks that correspond to the colours depicted, unfold in a well-curated and scintillating arc. The beauty of sound that emerges from Pestova Bennett recording this music on a piano with magnetic resonator – designed and trademarked by Andrew McPherson – enhances the sound world and draws the listener in, through dips and heights of pianistic gesture. The effect is akin to watching slow-moving landscapes in isolated, unfamiliar parts of our globe. The range of expression and musical material here is impressive: spontaneous at times and focused, personal and singularly driven at others. This disc rolls on to its significant final track, featuring the Ligeti Quartet in a companion work to the first, Atomic Legacies. Pestova Bennett directs the action in a florid series of closely connected gestures, deconstructing Haydn’s music and her own."

We are thrilled to be issuing the debut vinyl release from Private Anarchy, the solo art-punk project of Clay Kolbinger (Maths Balance Volumes, Termite Acropolis). His previous eponymous cassette on Round Bale Recordings found its way into Marc Masters’ Best Cassette Releases of 2017 list for his Hi-Bias column on Bandcamp where he wrote, “Coursing with wiry riffs, rattling beats, and deadpan singing, the debut tape by Private Anarchy (aka Madison, WI’s Clay Kolbinger) echoes the fiery racket of many post-punk forebears. In other words, you could say Private Anarchy sounds like the Fall, Swell Maps, and lots of bands who sound like those bands. But there’s something idiosyncratic about Kolbinger’s bent geometry that’s harder to pin down. It’s not so hard to feel its effects though: the 11 tracks here all carry the insular DIY genius that often inhabits basements, attics, and garages, with Kolbinger banging away as if music is his only source of heat.” On Central Planning, Kolbinger further expands upon this skewed framework, introducing a more elastic vocal approach and a more experimental edge to the production. But, the basic formula is still intact: you’ll hear rapid-fire minimalist punk songs that feature buoyant rhythms and dueling guitar parts performed with jittery exactness. It’s a DIY sound that begs to make its way out of the basement, and with this larger LP edition, we hope that you’ll invite a slice of Private Anarchy into your own life.

Formed through a complex web of friendships in and out of the improvised music scene and contemporary art world B.C.F.W are bonded by a common love of musical exploration. In 2018 they all made arrangements to meet in New York City. The fruits of this meeting are the freaked out jazz tracks contained on this album. Melted and dreamy reeds, gurgling synths, clattering drums, and silky guitar weave in and out of each other in an electrifying dance. It is a jazz album… but one that is at the further reaches of composition and expectation. B.C.F.W is Andrew Barker (synthesizer and cello) Daniel Carter (tenor sax, soprano sax, and trumpet), Pat Foley (guitar), and Fritz Welch (drums).Available in a limited vinyl pressing of 500 copies. Cover photograph by Chase Allgood.

"… a kind of ideal duet, no imitation conversation but two simultaneous composers each repeatedly provoked and silenced, prodded and enchanted by the other…" – Stuart Broomer (liner notes) ---Sophie Agnel / piano John Butcher / tenor and soprano saxophones ---recorded on 29 November 2019 at ausland, Berlinengineered by Andrew Levineedited and mixed by John Butchermastered by Andreas 'Lupo' Lubichliner notes by Stuart Broomerlp design by Yaqin Siinner sleeve photography by Cristina Marx/Photomusixmanufacturing by Daniel Klotz/Die Lettertypen

unreal. brain warble/garble. its bells. bells? bells. its hypnotic in the quit smoking way. i'm down to 2 a day. can't speak for anyone else's vices or poisons. this isn't a sermon just where this music takes me. here's a more clear headed perspective from Miles Bowe: "A bell rings and we see a bell. Whether its chime seeped from a speaker or floated through an open window, that bell is now in front of us. With each strike, its resonance, symbolism and physicality impacts us before we’ve even perceived these sounds as “music”. To our ears, this is not immediately an instrument — it’s a bell. On Bell Formations, arriving on vinyl this spring through Ryley Walker’s Husky Pants label, sound artists Max Eilbacher (of Horse Lords) and Henry Birdsey never let you lose sight of this singular instrument, even as they turn it inside out. Originating from a series of orchestral bell recordings by Birdsey, Bell Formations is the result of two years of trading files and sculpting sounds on a microtonal level. Showcasing both Birdsey’s precise skill at coaxing sounds through his recording and arrangements, as well as Eilbacher’s one-of-a-kind electronic processing, these sprawling pieces accentuate the natural elements of bells rather than distorting them. Embracing both subtle and extreme detunings (and retunings), the pair approach each attack and sustain as a doorway to limitless sonic possibilities. As Eilbacher explains, “Henry's bell recordings are some of the most malleable acoustic material I have worked with.” For all of Bell Formation’s dense processing, Eilbacher and Birdsey push us infinitely closer to the instrument with every strike. Our understanding of these sounds grows more intimate, even as the sources become completely transmuted. Far beyond melting, it’s as if these bells have sublimed entirely, each ring unleashing a cloud of copper and tin. For both its careful sonic unraveling of such a powerful, seemingly unchanging instrument and the inspiring musical conversation at its core, Bell Formations stand as a thrilling debut collaboration and one of the most unique experimental recordings of this year."

The cycle of compositions collected under the title Plane/Talea reflect Alessandro Bosetti interest in vocal polyphonic music. They envision an “impossible choir” constructed through the sampling of thousands of fragments and pieces of voices, my own and those of others, and their recomposition into polyphonic garlands and textures. This cycle can be intended as the utopic sonification of an impossible community in which the voice is atomized into primary particles and later reconstituted into sonic masses and clouds. These are too dense and complex for a chorus of real human beings to sing. The music of Plane/Talea is the sonic projection of such a community. The voice is not processed or altered in any way but subjected to molecular reorganization. Theoretically, a hyper-chorus could sing material of this type but, perhaps fortunately, such a choir does not yet exist. Up until now, in the process of creation of my vocal music, I’ve kept two poles and influences in balance: that of madrigalism in its late renaissance and contemporary incarnations and that of hyper-polyphony, which is close to spectral music. Though not ever having actually written in one or the other of these two styles, I’ve always felt this unresolvable and fertile tension in my work. (A.B.) ---Recorded, composed and mixed by Alessandro Bosetti at GMEM (Centre National de Création Musicale in Marseille). Additional recordings by Attila Faravelli at Spazio O', Milano. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M;, Berlin.pressing info: 300 copies on black, embossed lettering

Channelling temperaments of dislocation and wanderlust, filtered through impressions of distinctly American landscapes – coasts, cities, prairie – and the sonic material of everyday experience, defamiliarized by crisis, the New York based composer and multi-instrumentalist, Lea Bertucci, delivers A Visible Length Of Light. Conceived across much of 2020, A Visible Length is the product of real-time reactions to, and reflections upon, the instability of the year, distilled into a series of prescient auditory typographies that shimmer with life and hope. Recorded at Bertucci’s home in New York City and in Omaha, Nebraska, during her residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, A Visible Length Of Light comprises seven condensed works – deploying bass clarinet, alto sax, manipulated tape, organ, a venu wooden flute, and field recordings made in places as wide-ranging as Rio de Janeiro, the California coast, and Dead Horse Bay – surrounded by four “Refrains” – brief, minimal segments that capture Bertucci improvising, via whispers of flute, with the sounds upfolding outside her apartment. Foregoing the long-form compositional approach that has marked her previous albums, it emerges as one of her most pointedly melodic, harmonically rich, and structurally distinct efforts to date. Laced with subtle nods to Bertucci’s long-standing immersion in early 20th century American traditional music (folk, bluegrass, jazz, and gospel), vast washes of spatial ambience, long-tones, pointillistic texture, and delicate interplay, weave an abstract vision of place in the face of displacement – what the composer describes as “the feeling of physically inhabiting a space, when the relationship to that space has become overwhelming, and provokes the desire to seek truth, transcendence, and moments of comfort, disquiet and catharsis through confusion” – that doubles as an intimate contemplation of collective experience and what it means to be American during turbulent times. Indulging beauty, while simultaneously challenging notions of what that might be, fleeting impressions of emptied city streets in the midst of lockdowns and the overwhelming sprawl of the American midwest, merge with tense, aural metaphors for the necessary social unrest that has underscored their disarming quiet over the last year. A Visible Length Of Light marks the relaunch of Bertucci’s Cibachrome Editions, conceived as a home for various projects and art objects, including recordings and music scores. It will be issued on vinyl in a standard edition of 475 copies and a deluxe edition of 25 copies that includes a custom-printed endless loop cassette containing an extended version of the track “Threshes”, as well as digital formats.

Collection of recordings by the Italian sound and concrete poet Arrigo Lora-Totino (1928-2016). His place in the history and development of poetical intermedia is undisputed. This LP holds fourteen voice-based tape works made from the years 1968 to 2000. While there is some use of cut-up tape manipulation, the artistry truly lies in his performance of the sound plays. Multi-tracking is utilized and Arrigo’s nebulous voice paintings splat and click and glide. His bold expression is inspiring to me: it leads by example in encouraging the pulling of oneself further into their art. I was staying at a hotel in San Francisco when I awoke in a sunfilled room to an email from Giovanni Fontana telling me that Arrigo had passed away. I was saddened by the departure of such a creative man, yet proud to be working with and perpetuating his legacy.