Experimental Music

Showing all 13 resultsSorted by latest

• Yureka Cash Veritable Witness’ Exemplary Resolve “VWER is documentation of my own durability as a trans woman in the noise scene. It’s really small here. No one cares about this music. Its niche drives us all crazy and we are assholes to each other. None avoid the under attended shows, losing money on tour, and general public disinterest. I certainly haven’t. I get some extra alienation though. I’ve been to shows where I was explicitly forbidden from talking to certain people or told not to come because I would get beat up for attending. There’s less of that now where I live. I just don’t get booked to play anymore. I don’t get asked to release either. Friends have even told me they wish I wasn’t trans. Maybe that’s unrelated. Maybe it’s not. The noise scene certainly isn’t special in the way it treats trans people. Then there’s all of the life stuff I’ve been through the last few years: getting beat up for being trans, getting raped at my job, breaking my ankle, being ostracized at the whim of a certain cis woman, and trying not to kms. I can feel the eye rolls already. I deal with my life stuff quietly. I know you don’t feel bad about it, but I’m proud. I exemplify resolve. I hope you can hear that in the cd.” €12.00
• Faithful Affixt Enactivist — Box Set Music understood as a radical form of qualitative theory which reaches beyond the confines of human language, including mathematics: music too displays a logical independence, an unprovability despite its truth. Music makes possible new admissions/transmissions of the insufficiency of self, personhood, observation, science, and philosophy; as an ideal generic science, music communes with the concept of the generic itself which: “operates by extracting a minimum invariant from the various scientific disciplines…these invariants have to be superposed, to be introduced as theoretical givens into the mode of superposition: the materials of science or philosophy are thus to be supplied to a material, conceptual formalism, i.e. they are themselves to be put into the mode of superposition as vectors, that is, into the context of generic science, which operates with the (vectorial) notion of wave rather than with notions such as corpuscle and point” Music as generic science, with its vectorial notion of wave, is both sensible and mimetic: what we see or hear in music is ineliminably tied to what we do, to our own bodily awareness of sensed waves. Music as generic science has to operate in such a way as to produce more complex results than the materials it uses from science and philosophy, if it is to develop its own undulatory, superposed practice—music can produce deeper complexity from any and all materials chosen in any composition, by superpositioning its vectors, as waves. Thereby, music provides a complementary image of the Real, a cloning of that which is foreclosed to understanding in all human languages, formal sciences, and interpretations: its genericity of scientific output unites where all other languages can only divide. The subject of musical truth is the subject who can subtract themself from the given state of the situation, leaving behind and adhering to the deviating vector of an event, with this event understood as the withholding of human decision, rather than the realization of it. References: Belevan, Krebs, Loughlin, Laruelle, Wittgenstein, Attali, Szepanski, Faulkner, Gödel, Galloway €20.00
• Michael Speers Ground Drum What in the possible environment of this impossible drum would be the language of a community (fleshy, photosynthetic or air) which is gathered by, sounded through, the gut of these musical ideas? This text inscribes a first part flux or fluctuations of this old future ground. A real, synthetic, notional language for an imagined community of organic life grown out from the site of these sounds: these breathing pit, an actual breþynge fragrance imparting, sinks from. vapour. n’protoluib blad relieving mīcaply lif, ficxio. our grind, membracaer. becauz it ismattering. attends-ÿous, limbs of the trassing plaa, placed. apart we’k ymagin them heaving toned. μεταβολή whip, a fungal hold. something else gaswaljo lip edge wi hekstis gorse fu’molēroot apersuasõx. carbon, or u sunk compression is opening ha s a’ready soil, will happen, again. we knead wheeze of actorz calm charging drifts ripple, wider is organised or grown. how generous bodies have been. into life – Paul Abbott Ground Drum: a predrum membranophone, constructed with an animal skin (membrane) stretched over a pit in the ground (resonator) €14.00
• Michael Speers Ground Drum Poster Impossible drum and environments What in the possible environment of this impossible drum would be the language of a community (fleshy, photosynthetic or air) which is gathered by, sounded through, the gut of these musical ideas? This text inscribes a first part flux or fluctuations of this old future ground. A real, synthetic, notional language for an imagined community of organic life grown out from the site of these sounds: these breathing pit, an actual breþynge fragrance imparting, sinks from. vapour. n’protoluib blad relieving mīcaply lif, ficxio. our grind, membracaer. becauz it ismattering. attends-ÿous, limbs of the trassing plaa, placed. apart we’k ymagin them heaving toned. μεταβολή whip, a fungal hold. something else gaswaljo lip edge wi hekstis gorse fu’molēroot apersuasõx. carbon, or u sunk compression is opening ha s a’ready soil, will happen, again. we knead wheeze of actorz calm charging drifts ripple, wider is organised or grown. how generous bodies have been. into life – Paul Abbott Ground Drum: a predrum membranophone, constructed with an animal skin (membrane) stretched over a pit in the ground (resonator) €20.00
• Patiño Actually Laughing Out Loud Actually Laughing Out Loud is a project by Rubén Patiño which explores the sound of laughter as a compositional material as well as a means of psychological conditioning. It originated as a re-interpretation of the “laugh track” sound effect featured prominently in many beloved TV sitcoms. ALOL stretches the boundaries in between the enjoyable and the uncanny while addressing certain aspects of contemporary entertainment and popular culture. At the same time, it is an attempt to explore humour as a subversive tool that allows Patiño to question, through a playful approach, rigid standards and a persistent excess of “seriousness” in contemporary electronic music. The album is a compilation of sonic assemblages of manipulated laughter samples that have been featured in Patiño’s concerts and spatial interventions over the last years. Such as No Laughing Matter, a performance created with Kay Schuttel presented at Berghain as part of CTM 2020, that included 5 laughing vocalists live and numerous compositions included in the CD. This compilation also incorporates two tracks featuring Stine Janvin Joh. Mixed and mastered by Giovanni Ferlinga at Tapewave Mastering in Milan in 2019. €12.00
• Eric Frye Constant-Pattern Solutions In terms of modality, firstness is associated with possibility, secondness with actuality, and thirdness with necessity. It is illuminating to think these categories through the question of constant-pattern solutions since they are indeed directly related to the difficulty of discriminating change across a sensory continuum. It should firstly be acknowledged that the categories are not to be thought as discrete and sequential operations, but are methodological divisions that are so general, vague, and indeterminate that they do not even amount to conceptions but evanescent ‘tones or tints on conceptions’. The categories themselves are thus below the difference limens. – Inigo Wilkins Did you know? Did you really know? I can’t believe you don’t know! I dare you to show me a way that you can know that there’s a way to know that you can be sure that you can win at life! Don’t be afraid if this doesn’t seem like your kind of thing! The opposite of mathematics is pure love, and you can quote me on that – big time! And the only authentic way to engage with the deep time of evolutionary biology is through eating hot spices – they are meant to scare off dinosaur predators, and so one gets very scared. Like in a horror film – neurokinetic kickflips over consensus reality, livestreamed first and buried in the ground second – to ward off dinosaurs. Something growing in the face, the thing that is the ultimate precondition for intensity. Sound music is the sweat on the forehead of the bellhop at the pearly gates – the temperature is rising there, just like here, which David Attenborough won’t mention. Everyone is supposedly overconnected today in the world. What? Well actually we are more likely underconnected. What? A grenade explodes in the Twitch stream we are all watching. You are a dumbass. What? What you said doesn’t make any sense. What? What do you mean? We are authentically connecting with people probably less than is probably good for us. The shooter in the first person shooter stands in a room in a destroyed church’s crypt. He’s hiding and then gulps down a potion. I don’t give a fuck. Sure, yeah totally, except you definitely do because why else would we be watching this stream. Because it’s funny. You don’t like jokes? All this, to ward off dinosaurs. — Alexander Iadarola €16.00
• Alfredo Costa Monteiro Endlessness Endlessness is the long-awaited and last instalment of a trilogy of pieces for electric organ by artist Alfredo Costa Monteiro. A follow-up to Umbralia (2011) and Insula (2014), this third piece is composed by two parts, essentially austere in approach but extremely rich in tonal range, with a strong mesmerizing atmosphere. Through the circularity of their forms, it explores the idea that persistence of time is our measure of infinitude. Play loud. €22.00
• Die Reihe Vocoder His first new release since 2016’s Housed, die Reihe, America’s lovable sonic provocateur, returns with VOCODER, a 12” record on Anòmia which features a new piece on side A and two exciting dance remixes by up-and-coming producers on side B. Using only voice and a vocoder created in Max/MSP, the piece “VOCODER” is “an exercise in creating as self-contained a piece as possible, using as little material as possible while still maintaining a certain level of interest and coherence.” For fans of Alvin Lucier, John Baldessari and Bruce Haack. €15.00
• Lag OS Pantano Stereomorfico Lag OS is the project of multimedia artist Rubén Patiño. It explores the potential of soundscapes as illusory spaces. This series of works recreate artificial environments trough synthetic sound and other forms of media. Pantano Stereomorfico plays with biomorphism, textural characteristics, cryptic visual information and tactility. It is introduced as a collection of sonic scenes from a mysterious imaginary wetland.This exercise results in evocative narratives that muddle the periphery of ambient music, abstract sound and amorphous club music. This project is presented as an art object produced in a very limited edition, which includes a music album that can be downloaded online. These tablets consist of a 12 cm by 14cm rubber urethane object and were produced broadly during Patiño’s artist residency at Hangar in Barcelona in collaboration with Ali Yerdel. The Pantano Stereomorfico album compiles three long audio compositions recorded by Patiño during 2016-2017 and mastered by Rashad Becker. €55.00
• Bhob Rainey From Null Lands Led, Starrily CD The late radical Brazilian theater-maker Augusto Boal wrote extensively about the benign role of catharsis – “a harmless release of emotions” – in Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy, from which he argues most Western storytelling and mass forms of communication descend. Boal argues that catharsis “functions to diminish, placate, satisfy, eliminate all that can break the balance – all, including the revolutionary, transforming impetus.” There’s an account in Aristotle’s Politics of “wild and restless music” being used to relieve patients gripped by religious mania. Following treatment in which their frenzied spirits were purged, patients resumed their lives as if nothing happened. It’s natural for us to look to music to help us understand our place within a given moment. Our unprecedented political and environmental circumstances call for suitable aesthetic responses – ones that don’t simply facilitate a compassionate purge. In 2017, Bhob Rainey’s From null lands led, starrily arrives at a kind of music that somehow embodies amoral catastrophe – out of our control, nothing personal – but doesn’t exonerate civilization’s role in accelerating it. It might be the first music I’ve encountered that addresses imminent catastrophe without making me a spectator to my own demise or an Omega Person wandering the scorched earth. There’s a science fiction quality to the record almost by default, but Bhob’s music doesn’t render disaster as a discrete, omnipotent force. Instead, disaster appears in the cells of everyday life, churning out renewals and taking few, if any, requests. One process ends, another emerges – for the time being, at least. For all of Bhob’s seemingly arcane methodology – stochastic procedures, data sonification, and the like – the results are positively primordial. And there’s an unabashed sense of play. Loops emerge from nebulous dust but resist repetition and disintegrate. There are false starts, false endings, abrupt shifts in dynamics – fun for the whole family. As the sounds unfold, seemingly in response to the fluctuating environment, the knotty relationship between powerful, ambivalent forces and our sense of being in the world, so predisposed to ignore or struggle against those forces, comes into view. What a relief to be in dialogue with my own destruction instead of just an innocent bystander! It’s exciting to be led down to an insect’s perspective and explore the wealth of activity at a granular level. It’s equally exciting to experience violent crescendos like the last third of “Canopy of Catastrophes”. This expressive range extends to the unfettered collection of techniques employed throughout the album. Acoustic instruments emerge periodically from the synthetic landscape; digital sources appear to mimic unearthed field recordings. Much like Bhob’s clear resistance to clean resolutions, dynamics and timbres are less “and/or” propositions and more like complex lattices where moments of celestial beauty find themselves embedded within abject terror – and vice versa and everything in between. From null lands led, starrily proposes no theoretical solutions that pacify individual and collective desires. It resists attempts to glean meaning where there clearly is none and avoids sentimental dichotomies between humans and nature (in either direction). Without being didactic, the music still manages to convey transformative power. There’s a refreshing matter-of-factness to the way the sounds are presented. I’m invited to find my own relationship to the “chaos,” which, taken on its own terms, offers a vast, vibrant universe to explore. — Jonathan Pfeffer €12.00
• Oscar Abril Ascaso + Sedcontra Oscar Abril Ascaso + Sedcontra An LP with recordings by the self-defined industrial project Oscar Abril Ascaso + Sedcontra is finally available. The group operated between 1990 and 1996 in Barcelona. An exceptional event considering how damned this project was from the start. Considering the fact that, after releasing their one and only cassette they decided not to publish anything else and making their weekly Radio Show at Ràdio Pica into their exclusive medium of diffusion for all of their sound works. Even though they were reluctant to appear in public, their shows —being strongly performative — were characterised by sonic aggression, battering, danger and scenic disaster. The ten cuts in this album are comprised of recordings that have been recovered thanks to a deep work of sonic archeology. They are representative of the personal, free and unbiased modus operandi of the band, in which lo-fi industrialism, musique concrète, unrepentant loop-ism, tape manipulation, sonic extractivism and a nihilistic spirit came together. €22.00
• LXV Clear ‘Clear’ is a follow up to LXV’s last solo effort, ‘Asylum/Theophany’ (Soft Abuse, 2015), which was an examination and representation of experiencing the realm of phenomena associated with spectral consciousness. ‘A/T’ sought to further qualify if this experience is genuine or the result of a psychosis referred to in the occult as ‘Chapel Perilous’. ‘Clear’ seeks to address the aftermath of such an experience. It resides in a tabula rasa wiped clean by epiphany. Where ‘A/T’ was a collection of music about amazement, confrontation, and fear of a new reality, ‘Clear’ is a representation of the material world and the new, artificial voices that emerge out of it to recreate this experience of spectral communication. Distant whispers and chants spin into processed virtual light refracting off spatially arranged hypermedia superimposed over the decaying row-homes and warehouses. The album is also very much about the more desolate aspects of urban life: modern ruins, wide, empty streets in industrial neighborhoods. These muses instill in ‘Clear’ a mournful quality and, at times, a redemptive one. The fractured voices in ‘Clear’ represent the existential churning of the world, a churning which suggests there is a world underneath this imposed reality, just under the surface, wavering in and out of view. ‘Clear’ also comes in the wake of ‘Sirens’ (Umor Rex, 2015), the well-received collaborative LP between LXV and Montreal recording artist Kara-Lis Coverdale and ‘Witness/Recall’ (Monorail Trespassing, 2015) which features solo work from the artist. €17.00
• David Lost, DJ Zero, Mark Cunningham, Rubén Patiño, Vactor anòmia Acció #001 Poster (2012) €15.00