Originally composed and performed as a part of the "Reaching the Moon"
exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon
landing, hosted by History Meeting House in Warsaw, Poland.
Slow Machines brings together veteran Stephen Vitiello and 12k newcomer
Michael Grigoni, whose debut Mount Carmel (12k1090, 2019) made an
impression for its merging of the pedal and lap steel guitars with a
hushed, ambient sound. With both calling the southern mid-Atlantic
region of the United States home, the two met up and discussed a
collaboration in which Grigoni would provide the guitars and Stephen the
electronics and processing with a goal of combining each of their
artistic languages into a new form.
Vitiello, whose work is steeped heavily in the installation and art
world, utilized both his trademark field recordings as well as
recordings from the oddly whimsical kinetic sculptures of artist Arthur
Ganson. The clicking and rattling sounds of these sculptures were the
inspiration for the album title as the metal forms whirl and whir in
repetitive motion like slow machines. A feather on one of Ganson’s
pieces softly touches the string of a violin and recordings from
Vitiello’s fieldwork in Sheridan, Wyoming provide a tactile sense of
place as the duo creates a series of new sonic machines that morph and
evolve over the bending, lulling tones of the steel guitars.
Good listening for in between sleeping and waking times.
released August 20, 2019
Since the mid 1970's, Randy Greif has been pushing the boundaries of
auditory arts, often incorporating electronic, computer and concrete
music with spoken word, "sound theater", and field recordings. Location
recordings in places such as Amazonia, New Guinea, and Thailand have
found their way, often manipulated, into some of Greif's music, branding
it as "tribal" electronics. Trademark styles are dense layers of
atmospherics, cut-up vocals, and shifting minimal rhythms. "Dark" and
"hallucinatory" are often used to describe the overall tone of his work.
^^ To my surprise there's been next to no interest in this, in my view, one of the finest albums of 2019
This one is a brand new album and no words written about it:
released January 28, 2020
(track 10)
From the comments:
I love this subtle shift in tone! Your music has been a source of sonic bliss and inspiration to me for many years. I am so glad you are still making music that my ears, heart and spirit love. Thank you!
THE LAST DREAM OF THE MORNING is the new band from
three UK masters of contemporary improvised music – they released a trio
cd under this title on Relativ Pitch (NYC) in 2017, now choosing it for
their bandname for continuing activities.
Shackleton: Tunes Of Negation - "Reach The Endless Sea"
As it has become a somewhat common occurrence in his discography, Shackleton’s Cosmo Rhythmatic debut as Tunes Of Negation opens with a song. Its structure and, most importantly, themes, can be integrally traced within his rhizomatic net of creations, consistent with a process that’s regularly wandered through spiritual depths by means of sonic perseverance. Sung by Heather Leigh, the double – cantos continuum of “The World Is A Stage” and “Reach The Endless Sea” deal with time, or rather its illusory, treacherous nature, as well as spiritually investigating ideas of immortality, memory, and grief. . . .
. . . Shackleton’s usual arsenal of resonating woods and metals, ceremonial polyrhythms and astral melodies acquire a freer, more spontaneous character by the intervention of keyboardist Takumi Motokawa and mallet player Raphael Meinhart, whose symbiosis with the producer generates a truly beautiful and multi-directional flow of energy. The sacral austerity of the music is paralleled by its sheer, seductive, harmonic power, one that draws new trajectories in time and space with its seemingly endless layers of arpeggios, beats, and drones. . . .
Over the past decade, Danish double bassist Jasper Høiby has become
renowned the world over for his fearlessly expressive sound, charismatic
stage presence and distinct compositional prowess.
This album is the first as part of a series of 4 albums over the next 4 years, that carries highly personal messages and themes including Humanity, AI, Monetary Reform and Climate Change. This is Jasper's major new project featuring saxophonist Josh Arcoleo and drummer Marc Michel.
The Wine Dark Sea is Bissonnette’s fifth solo studio album. The album’s title is derived from the writings of Homer, where he oft referred to a rough and stormy sea as “wine-dark”. Homer’s descriptions of colour are devoid of any reference to the colour blue. And any suggested meaning in his description of the sea point to the colour red. This apparent contradiction has brought much speculation about the significance and understanding of colour in ancient Greece. Keeping with the motif of colour, track titles on the album are based on references from contemporary artists and their insights on colour, form and implied meaning.
The album represents a shift for Bissonnette’s work, moving from an exclusively synth-based series of explorations to a hybrid of electronic and acoustic methods. The result is a rolling and slow-moving tide of tones and undulations. The textures are in some passages soft and mollifying but fluently shift to moments of tension and unease. The Wine Dark Sea is an aural allegory to sound and colour and our tenuous understanding of abstract meaning.
To mark this year’s 88th day and as an acknowledgement to these
unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in, Piano Day founder,
pianist and producer Nils Frahm releases a collection of eight solo
piano pieces titled Empty out now.
Conceived of just before Nils broke his thumb and composed the similarly
intimate solo piano album Screws, Empty is a soothing vessel of eight
simple and serene pieces originally recorded as the music to a short art
film he shot with his friend and film director Benoit Toulemonde.
Drifting through emotions from the stark and sobering opener First
Defeat, to the gently euphoric No Step On Wing and the contemplative but
hopeful closer Black Notes, with its poignant minute of silence, Empty
is a comforting score for these turbulent times.
X-Legged Sally is a Belgian avant-garde rock/jazz-band founded in 1988
by composer Peter Vermeersch, and disbanded in 1997. They were one of
the first bands from Belgium to combine a set of very different musical
styles (jazz, rock, improvisation and classical), becoming a starting
point for the Belgian indie music scene that developed in the nineties.
Gillian Lever is a sound artist and composer whose interests include sound and memory, the voice and narrative, and sound
spatiality. She
makes finely detailed, meticulously constructed works that engage with
personal histories and resonate with the embodied listener. Her nuanced
approach to creating immersive sound extends the intimate into the
universal.
The releases are themselves not new, but their availability at Bandcamp or in any download form is (I think). Releases on Dave Stryker's Strikezone label, including his own of course, are now showing up in Jazz New Arrivals. Stryker has played with many of the top soul jazz leaders such as Turrentine and McDuff. And Gerry Hemingway's Auricle Records seem to be adding all their releases, too; these date from the 1970s and have only been available in vinyl until now (the vinyl is still available from Hemingway, but not from Bandcamp). This is interesting and relatively seldom heard free jazz.
Agitations: Post-Electronic Sounds is an 11-track album
of post-digital, post-electronic music. The recordings are deeply
acoustic - no electronic processing features anywhere. The sounds are
produced by the experimental manipulation of repurposed recycled objects
subjected to electromagnetic force fields. The 'infinite world
of the real' offers up richly unpredictable effects, with fields of
vibration producing psychoacoustic flourishes, along with spontaneous,
arbitrarily microtonal and harmonic compositions.
London-based electroacoustic quartet
have been giving workshops and performing live experimental improvised
music together since 2004. The group is comprised of Fari Bradley, Toby
Clarkson, Christopher J Weaver and Daniel Wilson. Characterised by
their repurposing of found objects, they began using self-built
electromagnetic assemblies in 2007. Oscillatorial Binnage employ
everything from springs to woks; from books to ice, to create sounds
that entwine the domestic with the industrial, and the scientific with
the alchemical. This is reflected in the diversity of spaces in which
they have performed, including a subterranean vault, a testing factory, a
water tank, a disused bus station, a yurt, a kitchen, churches,
ballrooms, caves, aircraft hangars, museums, tunnels, kiosks, sheds,
galleries, as well such established venues as The Tate Modern, The
Wellcome Trust, The Science Museum, IKLECTIK Art, and Cafe Oto.
In the Open by Asuna + Tomoyoshi Date + Federico Durand During Spring 2017 we were touring together in Japan and had the chance to visit the old city of Kanazawa. After the concert we had a free day. We wanted to make recording sessions together but, at the same time to walk around Kanazawa, which has a famous castle and beautiful gardens. So, we decided to do both things at the same time. We took small battery-powered keyboards, tiny instruments and a recorder to go out. We made field recordings alongside castles, gardens and ponds, a soba house, sometimes playing while walking the city. All of these tracks are live recordings of that day in the open.
"It's a collision of Neu!, John Barry, John Coltrane and My Bloody
Valentine, which Joe Meek has collected up and put into one great
melting pot. It’s genre non specific as all great experimental pop music
should be and this album is great, it captures the many moods of life
from the hip swinging happy to the crestfallen beauty of the sad.
Bearsuit Records have once again released an album of true original
beauty and if there is any justice in the world should be finding
themselves in the best LPs of the year lists come the end of the year,
and be a constant fixture on BBC6’s saving grace the Freakzone radio
show, in the coming months. Another gem."
[Monolith Cocktail]
Walls of Sounds is a music of sonic sensations. It is a physical
and sensual approach to the phenomenon of thick sound worlds. Sound
waves become physical objects, four-dimensional sonic sculptures to be
experienced, bodily and mentally.
Ulrich Krieger is well known as a saxophone player in contemporary composed and free
improvised music as well as a composer of chamber music and electronic
music. His recent focus lies in the experimental fields and fringes of
contemporary Pop culture: somewhere in the limbo between Noise and Heavy
Metal, Ambient and Silence. He also arranged works by Merzbow,
Throbbing Gristle, Deicide, Terry Riley, Henry Cowell and others for
chamber ensemble. He collaborates with: Lou Reed, LaMonte Young, Phill
Niblock, Text of Light, Lee Renaldo, Phill Niblock, John Duncan,
Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, Thomas Köner, DJ Olive, Christian Marclay,
Kasper Toeplitz, Antoine Beuger, Radu Malfatti, Mario Bertoncini,
Michiko Hirayama, Miriam Marbe, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Ensemble Modern,
Berliner Philharmoniker, Soldier String Quartet, zeitkratzer, just to
name a few. Krieger has received prizes, grants and residencies from:
Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Villa Aurora Los Angeles, Deutsches
Studienzentrum Venedig e.V., Akademie der Künste Berlin,
'Meet-the-Composer' Forum New York, DAAD, Darmstädter Ferienkurse für
Neue Musik, and many others. Since 2007 he lives in Southern California,
where he is associate professor for the composition faculty at the
California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
"Mantra and Me"
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful, because
it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say the first
syllable Om it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the practice
of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice of pure ethics, and Ni
helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and patience. Pä,
the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance, Me
helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final
sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.
"So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the
six practices from generosity to wisdom. The path of these six
perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times.
What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish
the six perfections?"
—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones
- "I have had this mantra with me for many years. I first became aware of it through the channel of Ram Dass, when I was about 18. It has stayed with me, an ever-cycling theme of my awareness, meditating, sleeping, cycling, on the bus, at the dentist.
It had been difficult to find musical renditions of this mantra which
were more in keeping with Western musical taste, not annoyingly clangy
and syrupy Asian pop, so I decided to make some of my own for people to
use in their lives. The fact that the music would appear on CD’s and
spin around like a 21st Century prayer wheel was also appealing.
So, I hand them over to you to use as you see fit."
Om Mani Padme Hum
Blaine L. Reininger
Athens, 2020
SLEW TEW: A Compilation of Compilation Tracks 2003 - 2017
Thomas Dimuzio's recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun, Sonoris, Drone,
Record Label
Records, Odd Size, and other independent labels. Among his frequent
collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Nick
Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers,
5uu's, Matmos, Wobbly, and Negativland
^^^Thanks for pointing this one out. I also snagged these from the Free Music Archive now at archive.org. The only Thomas Dimuzio I have (as far as I know) in the library is Monk Style or Scream (from Emusic, now gone). Can't wait for the Ts.
Comments
For those who liked the M.Grig Mount Carmel release, this is a collaboration on the same label involving the same artist.
^^ To my surprise there's been next to no interest in this, in my view, one of the finest albums of 2019
This one is a brand new album and no words written about it:
(track 10)
John Edwards: double bass
Mark Sanders: percussion
New Dark Age - Antiterra Live at Klang
Shackleton: Tunes Of Negation - "Reach The Endless Sea"
This album is the first as part of a series of 4 albums over the next 4 years, that carries highly personal messages and themes including Humanity, AI, Monetary Reform and Climate Change. This is Jasper's major new project featuring saxophonist Josh Arcoleo and drummer Marc Michel.
released March 19, 2020
from 1993 to 1998 intitled Utopian Diaries.
Chaos in Expansion was released in 1993.
Conceived of just before Nils broke his thumb and composed the similarly intimate solo piano album Screws, Empty is a soothing vessel of eight simple and serene pieces originally recorded as the music to a short art film he shot with his friend and film director Benoit Toulemonde. Drifting through emotions from the stark and sobering opener First Defeat, to the gently euphoric No Step On Wing and the contemplative but hopeful closer Black Notes, with its poignant minute of silence, Empty is a comforting score for these turbulent times.
released April 1, 2020
produced by the experimental manipulation of repurposed recycled objects subjected to electromagnetic force fields. The 'infinite world
of the real' offers up richly unpredictable effects, with fields of vibration producing psychoacoustic flourishes, along with spontaneous, arbitrarily microtonal and harmonic compositions.
- Sub Rosa, March 18, 2020
In the Open by Asuna + Tomoyoshi Date + Federico Durand
During Spring 2017 we were touring together in Japan and had the chance to visit the old city of Kanazawa. After the concert we had a free day. We wanted to make recording sessions together but, at the same time to walk around Kanazawa, which has a famous castle and beautiful gardens. So, we decided to do both things at the same time. We took small battery-powered keyboards, tiny instruments and a recorder to go out. We made field recordings alongside castles, gardens and ponds, a soba house, sometimes playing while walking the city. All of these tracks are live recordings of that day in the open.
[Monolith Cocktail]
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful, because it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say the first syllable Om it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the practice of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice of pure ethics, and Ni helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and patience. Pä, the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance, Me helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.
"So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom. The path of these six perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times. What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish the six perfections?"
—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones
It had been difficult to find musical renditions of this mantra which were more in keeping with Western musical taste, not annoyingly clangy and syrupy Asian pop, so I decided to make some of my own for people to use in their lives. The fact that the music would appear on CD’s and spin around like a 21st Century prayer wheel was also appealing.
So, I hand them over to you to use as you see fit."
Om Mani Padme Hum
Blaine L. Reininger
Athens, 2020