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Zdeněk Liška ‎- The Cremator (2013)


Galvanising our ongoing commitment to the lost music of the Czech New Wave cinema movement from the late 1960s and 1970s, Finders Keepers Records follow up our series of previously unreleased music to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, Daisies, Saxana and The Little Mermaid with a short series of soundtracks for films by the country’s master of the macabre and the nation’s first point of call for freakish fairytales and hallucinogenic horror, Mr. Juraj Herz.

As another late entry to the unparalleled creative cinematic unison known in Europe as “the Czech film miracle”, Juraj Herz’s 1969 feature film The Cremator was one of a clutch of certified cinematic literary adaptations that used the apolitical subjects of fantasy and surrealist horror to evade the communist censors’ abortive measures; dodging the overzealous cutting and burning process which poetically echoed the films own macabre and fantas- tical screenplay. Unifying a cast and crew of some of the Czech New Wave’s leading lights, Herz’s macabre depiction of Ladislav Fuks’ fictional account of a local crematorium boss whose hallucinogenic burning obsession with the afterlife is ignited by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead and intensifying manipulative Nazi propaganda is undeniably one of the greatest underexposed European horror films of all time.

Drawing similarities with other stark monochrome thrillers such as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Herz’s comparatively untravelled classic also boasts a beguiling score and theme tune that remains one of the most memorable and spine-chilling melodic soundtracks by the country’s finest experimental soundtrack composer Zdeněk Liška (Malá Mořská Víla) providing the movement with one of its best loved signature scores. Featuring an ongoing part- nership with studio conductor František Belfín (Daisies) and soprano singer Vlasta Soumarová Mlejnková (Marketa Lazarová), Liška puts his radical con- crète and resampling techniques (see Ikarie XB1) to one side in favour of celestial choral and orchestral arrangements; menacing giallo-esque tension and recurring rhythmical motifs of Eastern bells and chimes illustrating Rudolf Hrušínský’s Kopfrkingl character’s demise into murderous infatuation and the momentary cameo shots of the hallucinogenic death figure played by Helena Anýzová (Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders/Daisies).

From a country and era when isolated soundtrack music remained commercially unreleased Finders Keepers Records are proud to rescue, remaster and reincarnate this intense and timeless score by one of Europe’s finest composers taking a rare excursion into horror territory as part of a filmography of more than 200 formerly unpressed film scores. (finderskeepersrecords)

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David Jackman & Philip Sanderson ‎- 0° North (1982)


Originally released as a cassette on Aeroplane Records in 1982, this is a bleak yet satisfying collection of drones and rhythms from UK experimental synthesists. A superbly creative album, pretty much ahead of the game.


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Zoltán Jeney - OM (1986)


Zoltán Jeney (ur. 4 marca 1943 w Szolnok) – węgierski kompozytor.

Studiował kompozycję u Ferenca Farkasa w Akademii Muzycznej im. Ferenca Liszta w Budapeszcie (1961–1966), następnie u Goffredo Petrasiego w Akademii Muzycznej św. Cecylii w Rzymie (1967–1968).

Przedstawiciel minimalizmu, od 1995 dziekan wydziału kompozycji Akademii Muzycznej im. Ferenca Liszta. Jego kompozycje były wydane na płytach wydawnictwa Hungaroton. Skomponował muzykę do szeregu filmów, m.in. do filmu Sindbad (węg. Szindbád) z 1971 roku. (wikipedia)


Zoltán Jeney (4 March 1943) - Composer, head of department and professor at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy, a significant figure of the Hungarian contemporary music.

He started his composing studies with Zoltán Pongrácz in the Zoltán Kodály Secondary School for Music (Debrecen, 1957-1961). Later on, he studied at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy (Budapest, 1961-1966) as pupil of Ferenc Farkas, and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome, 1967-1968) as pupil of Goffredo Petrassi.

Returning from Rome and encouraged by Albert Simon, Jeney founded the New Music Studio with Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kocsis, László Sáry and László Vidovszky in 1970. The studio soon became an internationally renowned workshop for composers and performers, and introduced more than 600 contemporary music works between 1972 and 1990. In 1972, Zoltán Jeney visited the lectures of György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff and Iannis Xenakis on the composing courses of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. Especially the personality and music of Christian Wolff made deep impact on him.

In order to research unknown connections of soundings, from 1973 he’s started to get involved in diverse non-music materials (texts, chess games, meteorological data, telexes and from 1979 even fractal lines) to rewrite them into music processes. Between 1975 and 1984 he sang in the choir of Schola Hungarica, conducted by László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei. Being acquainted with the Gregorian music praxis significantly influenced his thinking about music and composing. Based on two, each other completing antique Greek tones, he developed a so-called pseudo modal scale system (Delphi, 1978) that was first used in his composition To Apollo. In 1982 he studied computer music at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris.

In 1985 he was research professor for four months at the Columbia University, New York. From June 1988 he was scholarship holder of DAAD in West Berlin for a year. From 1986 he’s been teaching at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy. First he taught practical skills of composing, and then in 1995 he became head of the composing and conductor-training department. Since 2002 he’s been head of the doctoral school as well. In 1999 he taught as guest professor at music department of the Northwestern University, Chicago (School of Music). In 1993 he was elected to member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Art – his inaugural concert was in October, 1996. He was chairman of the Association of Hungarian Composers (1993-1996), board member of the ISCM, International Society of Contemporary Music (1993-1999), and in frames of the latter organization he was also vice president between 1996 and 1999.

Among his works we can find orchestral compositions, chamber works, songs, choir works, electronic and computer music works, co-operations with other composers and incidental music (theater, movie). He permanently worked with Gábor Zsámbéki and Zoltán Huszárik (Jeney composed the soundtrack of Huszárik’s movie, Sindbad). With László Vidovszky he composed music for the Hungarian pavilion of the Sevilla World Expo in 1992. In 2005 he finished his monumental oratorio, Funeral ceremony, which he had permanently worked on since 1987. The premiere of the six-piece work was held 22 October, 2005, in the Palace of Arts with the National Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Zoltán Kocsis.

Many of his works premiered abroad as well. He’s been regularly invited to Ny Musik of Boras. In frames of a ten-concert series, the orchestra introduced more than thirty works by him in Sweden, 1984. A number of his CDs were published by Hungarian and foreign record companies. In 1979 he received the Kassák Prize from the literary periodical Magyar Műhely that was published in Paris.

He was honored with the Ferenc Erkel Prize (1982), the title Merited Artist (1990), the Kossuth Prize (2001), the Artisjus Music Prize (2001) and the Aegon Art Co-Award (2006). He also received the Bartók-Pásztory Award two times (1988 and 2006). (info.bmc)

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Kluster - Zwei-Osterei 1971 (1996)


Some bands sell their souls to the devil, Kluster sold theirs to the church. This is probably another of those albums best enjoyed by those of us who speak little German. You see, Kluster were only able to get this and their previous record released by using a Christian label, the deal being that one side would have a religious voiceover.

It must have been a pretty liberal church, though, because those Kluster boys are banging away at the limits of sound in the background on ‘Electric Music and Text’. The authoritative voice sitting right on top of the mix with the strange, atonal electronics in the background.

Cluster fans coming here to check out the early works of Moebius and Roedelius may be a little underwhelmed at first but fans of Conrad Schnitzler will find themselves in the right place right away.

They work up an isolated cacophony of what sounds like a dieing robot flute player, a lunatic sawing at a cello and humming electrics. When it fades down to ghostly echoes and the voice returns, he has an air of told you so about him. Perhaps the band had been asked to literally raise Hell?


Then comes a wave of deep echoes that foreshadow ‘Cluster II’ but with the Schnitzler abrasiveness. However, the voice returns and by now he is really starting to sound hacked off about something. Perhaps he is cross about people who spoil great avant garde records with their pompous prattle?

Over on the second side, you get “Kluster 4″ which features some of the most depraved, insane, devilish flute playing ever. It sounds like they’re on flute, guitar and percussion and abusing all three mightily. The guitar sounds like it’s being wrestled with by a gorilla on ketamine, the “percussion” is someone chucking about blocks of wood and then adding so much reverb and effects that makes it sound like a robot throwing up its own innards. It is, of course, bloody great fun.

The track then descends into ghostly echoes and tappings, like a seance gone wrong. There are foreshadowings of the abstract industrial sound of David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” soundtrack, especially towards the climax of almost mechanical dissonance.

Its hard to imagine people ever doing acid to this album and coming out unscathed. This is what sets Conrad Schnitzler’s discography apart from most of what we call “krautrock”. This is not mellow ambient music or trippy electronics. This is brave, fearless experimentalism. Not to say that this is difficult, joyless music – I get a lot out of it – but just to make clear that listening to Cluster or the second half of ‘Tago Mago’ in no way prepares you for this. This is the hard stuff. (wasistdas)

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Henry Wolff & Nancy Hennings - Tibetan Bells II (1979)


The original release of this album, in the autumn of 1979, included a description of what you were about to hear. "Tibetan Bells II is a space-poem in two sections," wrote Wolff, describing the two sides of the LP. "Journey To The End and The Endless Journey. The music charts the progress of an individual soul or spirit as it proceeds through the last recognisable phases of existence …" So, right away, we know we're some way off the usual roadmap here. Wolff and Hennings first LP, Tibetan Bells I, had been a seriously popular gateway record into the emergent New Age and yogic musics back in 1972. Building upon the resonant, rubbed tones of Tibetan Singing Bells and Bowls, instruments that had been used for centuries as an aid in to spiritual discipline, the pair created new compositions that avoided traditional styles and used the most modern recording techniques available while aiming for something deeper and more esoteric. There certainly is a complex and questing sense of spirituality here, the pair are clearly reaching for something that's situated within an unimaginably vast and inky blackness, but the care and space they give each note means this remains a warm, enveloping album. There is a world of utterly brilliant, largely home-produced, often fantastically odd New Age music made between the early 70s and the mid-80s, music that is a long way from the washed-out blandness that term has come to represent. Hopefully we'll get a chance to return to records by Constance Demby, Kay Gardner and Peter Michael Hamel, but for now let's sink into Tibetan Bells II, as powerful an experience today as it ever was. (theguardian)




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Áron Szilágyi - Doromb On (2005)


Áron Szilágyi was born in 1977 as the first son of Zoltán Szilágyi, the only one Jew's harp maker in Hungary. He could play the instrument, when he was three but started to take it seriously at the age of 16.

Since 1997 Áron has been an active member of the international JH movement and has been a regular guest of the international festivals. At these festivals he was deeply inspired by the different styles and playing techniques of the other virtuoso players. Especially learnt a lot from the Swiss Anton Bruhin. His creativity and extravaganza with this instrument has given Áron a great push in developing his own style. He also got a deep inspiration by the spiritual JH music of the Yakut Spiridon Shishigin.

Áron Szilágyi performed at the International Jew's Harp Festival with Alex Horsch in Molln, Austria in 1998. Their performance was published on the compilation CD of the festival. The Hungarian national TV channel, MTV also published a program on the festival and made a video footage of Áron and Alex's performance.

He was also invited to the 5th North American JH Fest, Oregon, USA 1998. That performance was released on a compilation CD, too. In 1999 he played in Molln again and founded the electronic world music band, Navrang. In 2000 Áron moved to Ireland. In the summer 2000, Navrang had their first international appearance in Molln again where they earned a big success. In october they made their first CD.

In 2001 he has given concerts in Dublin with Kai Band jazz band and had solo performances and workshops too in Ireland and London. In the year of 2002 he organised a festival in Hungary where JH players and other "underground" musicians came to play from 10 different countries. Áron was invited to the International JH festival in Norway. Still in this year he started the auralinstruments.com business that is selling traditional hand made woodwind instruments of the Eastern-European region.

In 2004 he was seen on most of the nation-widely receivable Hungarian TV channels as a JH expert. His band, Navrang got an invitation to the International Donaufest, Ulm, Germany. The festival organisers published a concert CD of Navrang and it was a huge success. They also found a record label which published their new CD, Pangea. His solo track, Dervish and the other songs on the CD can be heard more and more on radio stations.

In October 2004 Leo Tadagawa, the head of the Japanese JH society, invited Áron to Tokyo. He gave four concerts and two workshops in Tokyo and Yugawara. They are filming the video for the Navrang track, Pangea (same title as the album) in winter 2004.


Áron Szilágyi's first solo album, DOROMB::ON, came out in 2005, published by G50 Records. In this year, he joind the band Flótás, who play Moldvan Chango traditional music. The only Hungarian region, whre Jew's harp is traditional.

Took part at the Marranzano Festival in Catania, Sicily. 2005 and was the first Jew's harp player at the Izraeli Didjeridoo Festival in 2006 where he had an outstanding success.

Organizer of the Hungarian Jew's harp festivals in Kecskemét, Hungary. These festivals are held and co-organized by the Kecskemet Youth Centre every year in September. These lively events represent the Hungarian Jew's harp scene and also pay attention to introduce the internationally acknowledged "top" Jew's harp players to the Hungarian audience.

In 2006 Áron was the one of three members of the program committee of the International Jew's Harp Festival in Amsterdam and was also elected as a board member of the International Jew's Harp Society.

Still in 2006 he was assigned as the leading project manager of "20 years later..." animation film making project, supported by Bipolar German-Hungarian cultural funds.

In 2007 he established NGO Eurokult, that will realize international Jew's harp events in the future. (The 2010 International Jew's Harp Festival in Kecskemét, Hungary, too.)

In spring 2007 he founded a new project called Airtist. With one of the best didjeridoo player in Europe, Markus Meurer and the beatbox champion Tamás Dömötör he makes purely acoustic, ancient trance music. They recorded their first EP, Turbolence in 2007, published by Áron's record label, Aural Records. (jewsharpsociety)

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Else Marie Pade - Et Glasperlespil (2001)


Else Marie Pade (b. 1924) is one of the pioneers of electronic music in Denmark. From the beginning of the 1950s, she, in close co-operation with technicians and assistants on Radio Denmark, produced a substantial amount of concrete and electronic music, partly in the shape of independent works for radio broadcasts, partly in the shape of accompaniments to various radio dramas. She started taking private lessons in composition from both Vagn Holmboe, Jan Maegaard and Leif Kayser. It was in 1952 that Pade discovered the means by which she could bring into being her universe of sound. The impulse came from a broadcast on Radio Denmark about Pierre Schaeffer, the originator of the new movement within the French field of electronic music: musique concrète. After visiting Schaeffer in 1952, Pade began to study the concrete aesthetics of music and the technique behind it. In the latter half of the 1950s, Pade, together with Lauridsen, organised an interimistic electronic sound studio at Radio Denmark, where one could work with both concrete and synthetically produced sound material - a synthesis which was also a prominent issue in the new Italian sound studio, Studio de Fonologia Musicale, where people like Luciano Berio, Henri Posseur and John Cage were working. From 1957 until the middle of 1960s, Pade experienced a productive period in which she created a long series of electronic works and thereby made a name for herself, both in Denmark and to a certain extent in international electronic circles. (dacapo-records)


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Jüppala Kääpiö - Animalia Corolla (2012)


Jüppala Kääpiö (literally "woops" in Swiss-French and "gnome" in Finnish) is a Swiss/Japanese duo formed in 2006 by Carole and Hitoshi Kojo. They are settled in Belgium since 2011 after living in Switzerland, Japan, Canada and Mongolia. The duo uses various folk/ethnic instruments, handmade devices, found objects, field recordings and voices. They delicately weave them into colorful and textural organic sound tapestries through electric devices. This hybrid style crosses over various fields which would be described as cosmopolitan folk, psychedelic drone, authorial ambient, atmospheric noise, psychic field recordings… However, the inspiration has always been derived from the nature and the supernatural on the earth. Their recordings have been mostly released by their own label omnimemento, except two cassette releases from Peasant Magik (USA) and Lal Lal Lal (Finland). Their later titles from omnimemento are presented in crafted packages made by themselves, which are also a vital part of their work.



Carole Kojo is a book lover (professional librarian), a needleworker, a singer and primarily plays viola in Jüppala Kääpiö. Her handmade stuffed-animal/spirit and other figures are deeply related to the world of Jüppala Kääpiö, so that the works have been featured in the album cover of Jüppala Kääpiö since the beginning. Her sensitivity for contemporary folk music and European classical music creates an unique reaction to Hitoshi's sensitivity for ethnic music and abstract sound, which also gives intimacy to their experimental approach. She also played viola as a member of In Gowan Ring during his tour in 2006.

Hitoshi Kojo has worked with multiple media, such as music composition, installation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, photo and those mixtures since late 80's. His work has been lately getting focused on music composition and the release of those recordings via his own label omnimemento (formerly Octpia until 2006). His recordings have also been released by various experimental music labels such as Drone Records (Germany), Mystery Sea (Belgium), Kaon, Taâlem (France), Helen Scarsdale Agency, Alluvial Recordings, Olde Spelling English Bee(USA), etc. Several early works were released by aliases, mostly as Spiracle until 2010. He has been also working with other artists such as Michael Northam(as Kodama), Yannick Dauby, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, Paul Bradley, Emmanuel Holterbach, The New Blockaders, Uton, My Cat Is An Alien and so on. (omnimemento)

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Tod Dockstader - Aerial #1 (2005)


Producing a slim but groundbreaking body of work possessed of a truly musical sensibility typically lacking from the tape constructions of his contemporaries, Tod Dockstader was among America's foremost composers of musique concrète, creating electronic soundscapes informed by genuine drama and mystery. Born March 20, 1932, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Dockstader spent his childhood enamored of radio broadcasts, intrigued not only by the popular programs of the era, but also the static and noise separating stations on the dial. In time he turned to producing his own ham radio broadcasts, and while a graduate student at the University of Minnesota he studied film and painting, funding his education by drawing cartoons for local newspapers and magazines.

In 1955 Dockstader relocated to Hollywood, where he was hired as an apprentice film editor at Terrytoons Animation, working alongside future luminaries such as cartoonist Jules Feiffer and director Ralph Bakshi. He soon graduated to writing and storyboarding his own cartoons, earning renown for his The FreezeYum Story before relocating to New York in 1958, where he landed a job as an assistant recording engineer at Gotham Recording Studios. There Dockstader began collecting interesting sounds, in his off-hours assembling his earliest musique concrète projects. The end result was 1960's Eight Electronic Pieces, his first major work; shortly thereafter Gotham purchased its first stereo Ampex recorder, allowing Dockstader to revise piece No. 8 for his first stereo project, Traveling Music.



On May 20, 1961, New York's WQXR broadcast the world premiere of Traveling Music on a program also featuring Edgard Varèse's Poeme electronique. That year proved a remarkably productive period in Dockstader's development, as he completed two major works, Luna Park and Apocalypse. (Two Fragments from Apocalypse, also from 1961, consists of a large chunk edited from the latter.) His creations at this time reflect his increasing mastery of the studio and its endless possibilities, making use of techniques including tape-echo antiphony, channel delay, placement, and panning; best labeled as "organized sound," Dockstader's radical construction and manipulation of audio fragments eschewed the harmony and rhythm that typically define music, yet their flow, balance, and spatial dynamics suggested an artistry far beyond the noisy experiments of his peers.

Revolutionary projects like 1962's Drone and 1963's Water Music followed, and by the time Dockstader completed his masterpiece, 1964's 46-minute epic Quatermass, he had accumulated a sound library of about 300,000 feet of tape equaling 125 hours of source material. A year later, however, his career in musique concrète essentially came to a halt with the test-generator piece Four Telemetry Tapes -- soon after, Dockstader left his engineering position at Gotham to work as an audio-visual designer at the Air Canada Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, where he crafted dozens of soundtracks while shooting thousands of slide photographs as well as a film. Concurrently, he also wrote music and book criticism for Electronic Music Review and Musical Quarterly.

Around this same time, the Owl Records label issued three LPs of Dockstader material that were reviewed favorably in a number of national publications, earning him the widest recognition of his career. The exposure, however, proved fruitless -- without his Gotham job he was no longer able to access the technology necessary to continue his sound experiments, and without the proper academic background he was denied grants and shut out of electronic music facilities, rejected by the Columbia-Princeton Center, among others. The end result was that Dockstader returned full-time to his audio-visual work, in the years to follow writing and producing hundreds of educational filmstrips and videos for schools. Long out of print, his music was finally reissued to great acclaim during the early '80s, becoming a seminal influence on the electronic artists of the following decade. During the early 2000s, Dockstader and David Lee Myers collaborated for the electro-acoustic albums Pond (2004) and Release (2005). Additionally, Dockstader produced the three-volume Aerial series (2005-2006), derived from shortwave radio recordings. On the evening of February 27, 2015, Dockstader died while listening to his music beside documentarian Justin H. Brierley. Dockstader was 82 years old. (amg)

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VA - Music of the Jívaro of Ecuador (1973)


"The rugged, forested hills of the eastern slopes of the Andes have long constituted one of the last great sanctuaries of American Indian groups relatively independent of white domination. Of these groups, probably none has been more prominent than the Jívaro of eastern Ecuador who, at present, number approximately 15,000 persons. For almost four centuries the Jívaro successfully resisted attempts by would-be conquerors to settle permanently in their territory despite the fact that they occupy one of the richest regions of placer gold deposits in South America..." (folkways)

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Daphne Oram - The Oram Tapes Volume One (2012)


Perhaps the only bright side to the passing of one of the most ambitious but relatively unsung figures in early electronic music, is that the archives of hundreds of reels of unreleased recordings of sound experiments, tape compositions, field recordings, cinematic sound effects and Musique Concrete are just starting to be released to a wider audience. Young Americans did a stellar job with the first Daphne Oram vinyl overview, Oramics, which was a retrospective of her long and varied career from her time as a wartime radio technician to becoming an electronic instrument pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now that her invention, The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument designed and built by a woman), has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, Daphne Oram's legacy is finally moving into its rightful place. This deluxe compilation is the first in a planned series of releases that dig deep into Oram's vast recording archive. Painstakingly compiled and restored from over 400 tapes and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, The Oram Tapes Volume One features 37 previously unheard recordings (a bit less than what was on the vinyl version). While most of the pieces are short, they show a darker and more layered compositional style than what one may be used to from the bigger names of The Radiophonic Workshop. While the typical Workshop compositional bloops and bleeps were often steeped in a science fiction futurity, Oram was more often concerned with the mystery and science of sound composition, and the place where the sounds of machines and nature overlapped. That is probably why her effects reel for the film 2001 sounds more like haunted insects and cathedral-like atmospherics rather than say, robotic whirrs and laser-like phasing. There is a thoughtful and cerebral consideration in her compositions that allows us to imagine and nearly inhabit the world she is building in sound. Quite stunning! (aquariusrecords)


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Christina Kubisch & Fabrizio Plessi - Two and Two (1976)


During her 25 year career, Berlin based sound artist Christina Kubisch has pioneered the creation of site-specific sound and light environments, sound sculptures and sound installations. The roots of her abstract sound realities began in the intense collaboration with Italian visual artist Fabrizio Plessi in 1973 and are presented here, in the first of two planned archival releases, with the performance piece Two And Two. Performed in Europe and the United States in the '70s, Two And Two was a live performance for two performers (Kubisch and Plessi), two video cameramen, a wall of monitors and uncommon objects and instruments. Throughout the performances, people were invited to walk around and observe the live action in real time as close up images of the performance were projected on video screens and unusual objects as sound sources -- a vibrator, water, swanee whistle, voice, contact microphone on ventilator, prepared alto flute, electronic metronome, waterjet on steeldrum -- were sonically 'blown up' through self invented systems of amplification. The resulting four pieces on this 1977 recording alternate between heavenly, rhythmically shifting drones to gamelan tinged blistering electronics that sound like distant, corrupted morse code dispatches. The entire album is an organic revelation of the discreet acoustic nature of everyday objects, intensely mechanical, startling and elemental. (waysidemusic)


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Art-Errorist & Zsolt Sörés - The Wasp Boutique (2014)


Absolutely loving this musique concrete mixer: its powertooled psych-o-delia of mis-shapes pleases me no end, quivers a satisfying kraut dot’n’dashes too. The overall sprawl is akin to a modern rework of The Faust Tapes, and well, I wouldn’t expect anything less, as The Wasp Boutique is one part Jean-Hervé Péron after all. This is rousing fare for sure, thrown into the light by Peter Strickland of Berberian Sound Studio fame and housed in a Babs Santini collage that’s definitely designed to keep you awake at night.

Aptly-monkiered The Art-Errorist, he’s coupling the sonic limelight with the multi-talented Zsolt Sőrés. Now, I’m unfamiliar with this chap’s work, but going by the sounds on this handsome slab of double vinyl he certainly shares more than a few Venn intersections with Mr Péron’s erroneous spirit and plenty of his DIY enthusiasm too, looking at Zsolt’s equipment list of homemade sonorousness and circuit-bent gadgets. A match made then; and struck as you taste the sulphurous conductivity behind it all in the unforced, un-contrived happenings. Yeah, that’s ‘happenings’ not as in ‘hip,’ but energy: the fact that this feels like a live recording unfolding before you, a bloody good live recording at that, niftily conspiring by accident, design, a bit of both? to deliver… Man, some of the noisier parts actually sound like Einstürzende Neubauten from their autobahn wrecking years; how good’s that? Anyway, lets ditch the synopsis and get into the sprawling guts of the beast.

“Was Ist Los Da Oben?” grabs the attention in a mighty 13min opener which embarks apprehensively at first on a soft abrasion to a synthy twilight, until the bass guitar and circuitry find a wavering equilibrium and repeat togetherings, further bolstered by a firm plough of bassline and begrudged metal. The torque full of vocal apparitions and tactile questions thrown into lovely melodic shivers, spurs caught on momentum chasing Français. Surging away all anarchically on a fanfare of elephantine trumpet raising from a grave of petrol vapours. Smokin’ like a Thatcher anniversary party effectively sawn off and shotgunned into the mellow throb of distant piano. The fidelity soon tunnelling down some barrel’s bowls in muffled mystery, the lo-hertz values ignited in the Germanics of the song title.



The over-amped guitar slabs on “100gr De Protéine” are brilliant, leaving your speakers like a delinquent jihad full of discordant Arabic hex(es), not to mention the graceful swan slides of psalterion and viola that precede it, all scooped necks and lacy fingers interwoven with poetic fragments. “Saute” is more a celebration of Chinese burns and whelping percussiveness. A four minute sonic dance, romanced in interesting vigours, ruins and verbby sphericals… I swear Blixa B. is in there somewhere icing the black forest gateau with his larynx. The jacked bat in a box  start of “Sorry, it’s Illegal” makes way for a surprise baritone, an operatic lullaby reminiscent of Scott Walker spinning in a squeaky river of reverb and sustained conicals. Plucked and bowed viola following, tilting hinges scraping away, then frequency combed…  split… into bendy processed edges, transpositions, rhetorical dramas jigsawing the betweens, all ending in a meditation on (well, I didn’t see this coming)… Scheiße.. yep that’s shit … luxuriating in the shh sounds… the arupt ‘it’-ness.. .the purring syllables of ex-crrrreeee-ment… oozing through a scraped/rubbed backdrop that sounds like a robot undergoing colonic irrigation.

The second record begins with “20th September” – a classical guitar piece that’s all sparky chords, shining in repeating tides, overwrought with marauding harmonics. Sub-currents plying motives, throbbing to a globetrotter beat. Shimmer gild-caught lines curling on a motorik vibe as tins are thrown out of a cupboard and ping-pong the floor, vaccuumed into a paper diagram before roaming off elsewhere(s). This is something which this album excels at, as dictaphone wordy chuffs are put paid to by a machine-tooled bleeping, the clinical severity of which is softened in echo/delay, simply sequenced , a soriée of brief tape betweens dropping over a brothy burble of lo-fi backward slur and gluttonous murk.

“Sans Parole” is more caterlike. A droning gudgeon struggling to find a heartbeat. Flounders a little before it rhythmical finds itself in a chemically reactive didgeridoo of heavy meat suitably splattered in hot oil. “Luvoco” is journeys end – a gorgeous 15 minute flange-callipered “Castles of Spain” trumpet duelling with electronic blancmange. Phantom rasps of voyeur vox slipping on a nagging tangle of industry drifting away on a requiem of lumpy clay limbs. (freq)

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Katsuya Yokoyama - Japon: L'art du shakuhachi (1997)


Katsuya Yokoyama was one of the greatest masters of the shakuhachi in Japan of the post-WWII generation. He was born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1934 and studied Kinko-ryu and Azuma styles of music with his father, Rampo Yokoyama, and grandfather, Koson Yokoyama.

At the age of 25, Yokoyama began to study with Fukuda Rando, founder of the Azuma School and with Watazumido-doso, a legendary Fuke master who sought to synthesize shakuhachi music and spirituality within the context of Zen Buddhism. Guided by these two eminent masters, Yokoyama was able to combine the modernism of Rando with the deeply religious traditional spirit of Watazumido in his training. With this foundation, he came to develop a remarkably powerful and creative style that embodied both ends of the continuum. A true descendant of the Kinko tradition transmitted down through the generations, he also pioneered a revolution in modern music that swept across post-War Japan.

In 1960, Yokoyama completed his studies at the NHK Japanese Traditional Music Training Center and, one year later, formed Shakuhachi San-Jyuso-dan, a trio devoted to furthering new music for the instrument. In 1963, he founded the Nihon Ongaku Shudan (Japanese Music Group) and Shakuhachi Sanbon-kai (Group of Three Shakuhachi ) with Kinko master Aoki Reibo and Tozan master Hozan Yamamoto. This historic group helped to establish a new genre of music for shakuhachi trio.



In 1967, Yokoyama was selected by the renowned composer Toru Takemitsu to perform the premiere of "November Steps," his modern composition for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra led by Seiji Ozawa and the New York Philharmonic. Since its opening over thirty five years ago, Yokoyama has performed this epic piece hundreds of times around the world.

Katsuya Yokoyama was head of the Chikushin-kai Shakuhachi Guild. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, amongst them the Geijutsu Sen-sho (Art Award) in 1971, the Geijutsu-sai Yushu-sho (Art Excellence Award) in 1972, the Geijutsu-sai Tai-sho (Art Festival Grand Prize) in 1973 given by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Ongaku no Tomo-sha Award in 1991.

In 1988, Yokoyama founded the Kokusai Shakuhachi Kenshu Center (International Shakuhachi Training Center) located in Bisei-cho, Okayama, Japan where he hosted the first International Shakuhachi Festival in 1993. This event precipitated founding of the World Shakuhachi Society and Festival held in Boulder, Colorado in 1998. At this gathering, five of the world’s greatest shakuhachi masters, including Yokoyama, performed in a single venue for the first time ever.

In 2002, the Japanese government honored Katsuya Yokoyama for a lifetime of achievement by awarding him the esteemed Shiju Hosho (Purple Ribbon Medal) award. He died in 2010, leaving behind a rich legacy of shakuhachi tradition to the world. (shakuhachi)

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