Aperture
(23five - 23F06) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Coarse streams of electrons flange and pulsate within caustic firestorms recorded without overdubs in real time by kick-ass Mills composer who’s been using computers and electronics since the ’70s. Plenty of cold wheezatronics and busy, subterranean computer hoot. Guest appearances by piano, percussion, and water manipulator Kenneth Atchley.
Radio Ghosts
(23five) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Catlin’s recorded output stands among the best that Glenn Branca, Keith Rowe, and Jim O’Rourke have mustered from their six strings hard wired into the histories of electroacoustics, minimalism, and post-punk experimentation. The Melbourne guitarist incessantly tinkers with the mechanics of his instrument, envisioning it as a mimetic sculptural object and as a pure sound generator. Through his experiments with alternative tunings, atypical string gauges, and Rube Goldberg contraptions of interconnected motors, speakers, and radios, he seeks rasping textures of strings vibrating against each other, acoustic phase patterns of two microtonally tuned strings, and the electrical purity of circuits feeding back upon themselves, essentially creating a polyglot drone symphony cast in smoldering monochrome. Radio Ghosts is devoid of Marshall stacks, Sunn amps, and stomp boxes; Catlin captures the acoustic phenomenon of the guitar’s transient vibrations and steers clear of any tricked out sonic demolition.
Oxide
(23five) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
New York-based sound artist Scott Konzelmann's activities have comprised installations featuring his speaker construction assemblages and sonic compositions since 1987. His sound and noise are intrinsically connected to his sculptural objects, which, forged from re-purposed junkyard fragments fitted with functional loudspeakers, compress and articulate particular frequencies into hissing static, jet-engine drones, and noxious rumbles. The original analog tapes of Oxide happened to become moisture-damaged, creating drop-outs, print-throughs, and ghostly noise shadows of Konzelmann's muscular drone music, and the tape itself also began to crumble during playback, in eerie parallel to both William Basinski's Disintegration Loops and Hafler Trio's Intoutof. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2008.
Glass Sponge
(23five) Used CD $12.00
The textural flutters, squeaks, and mobile scrabblings of Loren Chasse (Jewelled Antler Collective, Thuja) and corrosion aficionado Jim Haynes bring minimalism back from the dead. Bell tones, ghostly feedback, and tuning fork resonations all spiral together into translucent drones.
JOHN DUNCAN / C.M. VON HAUSSWOLF
Our Telluric Conversation
(23five) CD $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
A bold, expressive piece of sound art, confident in its multiplicity of perspectives caught in a constant flux of attraction and repulsion. Performed with shortwave, data streams, uncanny use of the human voice, oscillators, sonar, and wire tapping microphones, the recording comes with a 40-page booklet with an interview between Duncan and von Hausswolff about their histories, ideas, and methodologies. Packaged in a curiously tactile O-card, embossed with braille and covered with a rubbery coating.
TETSUO FURUDATE / ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI
World as Will II
(23five - 23five003) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
While the influence of Karkowski’s tutelage under Xenakis is obvious in World As Will II's orchestral clusters and general density, it is dwarfed by elements solely serving that notoriously untrustworthy god, the human ego. Xenakis’s opaque masses of sound grow from the interaction of mindless external forces, beyond the realm of emotions and personality. Furudate and Karkowski, though, dwell in glorification of the self. Whatever one may think of Schopenhauer's writings, from which this album takes its philosophical cues, it's hard to deny the CD’s exceptional belligerence, courtesy of myriad bombastic tokens -- martial drums, ominous orchestral drones, primal screams with echo, Wagner samples.
Sub
(23five - 23five018) 2xCD $14.50 (Out-of-stock)
Marc Zeier’s first major album since the cryptic electro-acoustic Reuters (Tochnit Aleph 2008) is a sprawling masterpiece of modern day musique concrete, reflecting the early pioneers’ use of razor cut tape with a grandiose revelation of an existential horror. Zeier describes is as a manifestation of amorphous conditions that lead to (or interfere with) representational forms or states of being. For every malignant drone and turgid thrum, Zeier punctures fluttering, frozen methane surfaces with jagged incisions, pneumatic hammerings, and decompressed gasps. This fragmented punctuation is a signature to the G*Park aesthetic, used effectively in mapping clinical situations turned septic. The exact nature of the sound object is informed more by a shadowy deconstruction than by a direct representation, thrust into an absurd existence as an abomination, a violation, a monster.
Areal
(23five - 016) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Garet has employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film; he has also flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. His ongoing research in interference continues here with electromagnetic disturbances through radio: the process of transmission and reception is treated as a routing system for the audio signal, while the nodes that direct the course of that signal are deliberately agitated and distressed. For example, an electrical motor might be situated near a radio's antenna, disrupting its ability to properly receive a transmission. Through the controlled use of electro-acoustic techniques (some rough and volatile, some refined and delicate), he organizes the signal distortion, the crackling static, and the ever-present tendencies for feedback into swarms of chiming resonance, electrically sourced harmonics, tactile bricolage, and impressionist din.
Vinyl Anthology: The Complete Gum Recordings From 1987-1990
(23five - 23five005) 2xCD $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
Back in the late ’80s, Australians Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis gathered up thrift store turntables and soiled records and formed Gum. The duo’s caustic rupture of skipping records and smoldering surface noise predates current avant-turntablists like Philip Jeck, Janek Schaefer, and Otomo Yoshihide. Between 1986 and 1990, Gum piled thick layers of electrically charged static, spiraling repetitions, and arrhythmic palpitations. Vinyl Anthology includes everything from their self-released albums Vinyl and 20 Years in Blue Movies and Yet to Fake an Orgasm, comp tracks originally released by RRRecords and Korm Plastics, as well as plenty of previously unreleased material.
Vanishing Point
(23five - 23five015) Used CD $9.00
American sound-artist Jason Kahn is exacting when it comes to the principles of noise. His application in composition is not that of Merzbow or Masonna, with teeth-gnashing explosions of distortion, feedback, and volume; rather, Kahn's psychoacoustic techniques employ the specific frequencies of white, pink, brown, and blue noise in works that reflect the ideals of minimalism. These are sounds that regularly occur through the constant vibration of machinery; and Kahn is more than happy to appropriate such events through field recording. He also generates complementary noises through systems that involve the rattling architecture of a drum kit and an analog synthesizer. For all of the phenomenological studies and stoic mesmerism attributed to much of Kahn's catalogue, Vanishing Point is a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned colored noises.
Soundmatters
(23five) CD $12.00
The compositions of this French-Canadian sound artist have rarely emerged beyond of the context of international electro-acoustic competitions and festivals. His only widely distributed piece has been Mantra, which Metamkine released in 1997 through their Cinéma Pour L’oreille series. This exceptional work of acoustic minimalism drew considerable notoriety thanks in part to a public misidentification that Laporte sourced the composition on the resonant frequencies of a Zamboni. This anthology includes the aforementioned 25-minute masterpiece, plus four accompanying compositions that share Mantra’s unique sensibility; it’s a series of visceral compositions that build upon the traditions of minimalism, graphical composition, and phonography. Given the numerous parallels to Xenakis’ smoldering electro-acoustics and Tony Conrad’s delirious harmonics, Laporte’s work demands the attention from devotees of avant-garde composition.
Live In San Francisco
(23five) Used CD $12.00
Spectral timbres and ominous fluctuations layered into a massive lump of sonic force by famed concrète composer with over 130 releases to his name. One track was culled from the infamous Hexaphonic show at The Lab in August 2000, and the other from an intimate performance at 3feetofftheground in July 2001. Comes with a blindfold to enhance the phenomenological experience of Lopez’s dramatic compositions. Insert firing squad remark here.
Commonwealth
(23five - 23FIVE013) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock) (Out-of-print)
A central figure in Boston's sound art vanguard, Brendan Murray specifically shapes his repetitions and sinewy tonalities within the rigors of compositional frameworks and temporal restraints, setting himself apart from the conventional wisdom that drone-based music is an open-ended exercise into the "realm of the infinite." A single crescendo terminating at the end of 49 minutes, this epic investigates subtle harmonics and overtones expressed through layered slippages of pure sound conceived through guitar, analog synthesis, and plenty of digital manipulation. A worthy parallel to the work of Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, and Iannis Xenakis.
Thought Provoking III
(23five - 017) Used CD $8.00
The final document from the late electro-acoustic composer who described his work as "reflections on society structures, the blindness of modern and informed masses and everyday functionalism in between civilization." His intensity of expression took Schäfer around the globe, but his recording output is relatively small, focusing mostly on collaborative work with noted extremist Zbigniew Karkowski. Thought Provoking shifts away from his brutalist electronic engineering, toward a spatialized, open-ended composition based on the muffled tones from an ad hoc instrument he built from salvaged church organ pipes and hair dryers. The first presentation took place in Graz, Austria in 2003; the second was a collaboration with violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner in Vienna two years later; the third and final performance was in 2006 with percussionist Will Guthrie and Gmiener at the St. Andre Church, where he first presented it in Graz. After Schäfer's death, Guthrie reconstituted the rehearsal takes from that performance. The bellowing hums from Schäfer's organ pipe and hair dryer contraption ebb and flow amid intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronic mark-making. On the second track, Karkowski pays tribute with a smoldering electro-acoustic remix.
Wind Keeps Even Dust Away
(23five) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Through installation, performance, and composition, Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod reinterprets the physical detritus of the landscape within a hypothetical topography where dirt, soot, and smog emerge as privileged materials, in to which he grafts the potential for a transcendent response. Field recordings are fundamental to this creative process, bolstered by sympathetic sounds activated by Sprod’s own hands rummaging through crumbling leaves, rusted bits of metal, broken concrete, and shattered glass, to name some of the more obvious sources. Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second documentation of Sprod’s compositions but it’s an accomplished work on par with the contemporary sound ecologists such as Chris Watson, Eric La Casa, and Toshiya Tsunoda. Sprod intertwines compacted collages that tease aquatic references from abandoned and overlooked sites of the arid Australian landscape. Every sound of a pipe gurgling with water is but a mirage of sand, rust, and dirt cleverly tricking the ear.
Take All of the Ships From the Harbour, And Sail Them Straight to Hell
(23five - 23five014) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Corroded locations where mankind has scarred the surface of the earth feature prominently in the work of Melbourne sound artist Eamonn Sprod, documented through field recording and sympathetic actions with found objects from those sites. One such location that features prominently in Take All of the Ships... is Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay, once the home of an immigration station at the turn of the 20th Century and later a Nike Missile site for the US military; it now rests in the hands of the US National Park Service, which has left some of the buildings to succumb to the forces of decay. From the sounds culled from this site and others closer to his antepodean home, Tarab diligently overlays and stitches together a tactile composition with few digital treatments. As the opening ominous rumble ebbs and flows, with its frequencies appearing to emerge from the center of the Earth and liquefy the surface upon impact, Tarab unveils a revolving series of exaggerated details from a hyperbolic gash of two heavy pieces of metal grinding against themselves to a toxic chorale of nighttime insects to sand, wind, and surf detourned into sedimentary white noise. Tarab's compositional sensibility shifts throughout the album, at first sparsely situating these sounds into shadowy vignettes. Gradually, an arcing crescendo exhibits sustained harmonics rarely heard in the best of the contemporary dronemusik technicians, much less from the realm of sound ecology.
I’m Lost
(23five - 23five019) CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
A schizoid-concrete opus of environmental sounds heightened, stimulated, decontextualized, and teased into a psychic puzzle of industrialized and post-industrialized detritus, I’m Lost’s harsh edits and disjointed collages render sound with dysphoric associations through vacant drift, crumbled gravel, scalding plasma-tube frequencies, and putrid factory noise. Eamon Sprod achieves the same psychological gravity as Sudden Infant, P16.D4, and John Duncan with an even greater sense of dislocation from those pioneers of radical tape splicing. Listen to an edit of track number four here: https://soundcloud.com/23five/tarab-im-lost-track-4-edit
33 RPM
(23five - 23F/SFM 903) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
The third anthology in nonprofit org 23five’s sound event series presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The selections here, chosen from SFMOMA’s Ten Hours of Sound From France, emphasize acousmatic approaches toward electroacoustic construction, which means a heavy historical influence from musique concrète and computer music. Tracks by Kasper T. Toeplitz, Kristoff K. Roll, Jean-Claude Risset, Lionel Marchetti, Christophe Havel, compiler Laurent Dailleau, Mathieu Champagne, pizMO, Jean-Phillippe Gross, and Mimetic. 24-page booklet includes essays and detailed program notes about the MOMA installation.
Variable Resistance
(23five - 23F/SFM 902) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second anthology in nonprofit org 23five’s sound event series presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The selections here, chosen from SFMOMA’s Ten Hours of Sound From Australia, emphasize the composers’ use of the titular electronic gizmo, as well as their diversity of approaches. You get environmental, plundered, and digitized sound from compiler Phillip Samartzis, a cybersonic lullaby by Pimmon, and a duet for jarring guitar and creaking door by David Brown, along with exclusive tracks by Oren Ambarchi, Rob Avenaim, Xonk, Thembi Soddell, Darrin Verhagen, and Deliere. 24-page booklet includes essays and detailed program notes about the MOMA installation.
Ju-Jikan
(23five - 23F/SFM 901) 2xCD $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first anthology in nonprofit org 23five’s sound event series presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The selections here, chosen from SFMOMA’s Ten Hours of Sound From Japan, emphasize the stylistic diversity achieved through electronic synthesis (computer music, anti-academic, noise, anti-pop permutations, ambient, field recordings, post-improv, etc.). With tracks by Merzbow, Otomo Yoshihide, Masonna, Astro, Tetsuo Furudate, Pain Jerk, Yuji Takahashi, Yasunao Tone, Ryoji Ikeda, Nerve Net Noise, Hanatarash, Tamami Toro, compiler Atau Tanaka, i.d., Kozo Inada, Ichiro Nodaira, and Kazuo Uehara. 20-page booklet includes essays, milestones, timeline, detailed program notes about the MOMA installation.