Viosphere + Selected Works 1984 – 1991
(Art Into Life - AIL007) CD $19.00 (Out-of-stock)
As a continuation of some of these ideas formulated during art and improvised violin experiments in the late 1970s, Hideaki Shimada started adding tapes, which led to the creation of the Agencement electronic project in 1985. Art into Life’s reissue of Viosphere (Pico 1991) adds three previously unissued tracks from the same period. Of particular interest is a heavily avant-garde performance for guitar, amplifier and autoharp from a 1988 studio session with Toukaseibunshi’s Hironari Iwata. With twelve-page booklet of period performance photographs and several 2011 visual works. Edition of 200.
Naked Tape And Others
(Art Into Life) Cassette $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
Ten pieces for hurdy gurdy and tape (forty minutes) recorded between 2008 and 2013. With book-based covers about the human body (each one unique), an insert, gut-string, cotton, ninety-minute private sound recording entitled the “Naked Tape,” box of paulownia wood.
ARTBREAKHOTEL / NEW BLOCKADERS
Haikagura
(Art Into Life - AIL002) 2xCD $26.00
Rusting metal junk, discarded as valueless trash, but when filled with blood, flesh, and bone, transformed into potent sources of energy, chunks of which rouse the savage souls, dragging us out of comfortable, everyday reality into an imaginary world — a choking, vacuum-like, hermetically sealed space where one loses touch with the senses as they are push toward freedom. Cover art is a classical, elegant portrait photo by Rupenus walked over and spat upon by Yamada. Package consists of a long box, containing a handmade objet card made of scrap metal (each unique in shape and design) and twelve-page booklet of artwork. Edition of 250. Listen to an excerpt from “Syntax Destruction 3” here: https://soundcloud.com/a_i_l/the-new-blockaders-artbreakhotel-syntax-destruction-3
Radio Embudagonn
(Art Into Life - AIL004) 2xLP + cassette $39.00 (Out-of-stock)
An intensely distinctive approach to sound collage by Wataru Kasahara, who has been active since the1980s. Art Into Life’s reissue rescues the double-CDr and booklet (Erinyes 2009) from self-released-in-an-edition-of-eighteen-copies obscurity. Includes handmade twelve-page booklet (purpose-made prints, porn mag collages), packaged in a envelope, tied with a black-dyed kite string. Edition of 100.
HARTMUT GEERKEN / MICHAEL RANTA
The Heliopolar Egg
(Art Into Life - AIL009) 5xCD $50.00 (Out-of-stock)
The CD reissue (original LP, Qbico 2010) of documentary recordings of the duo’s late 1976 tour of Iran, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Korea, and Japan includes an Osaka concert with Toshi Ichiyanagi on synthesizer, solo performances by Ichiyanagi and Shoko Shida, as well as a rare Delhi performance. Twelve-page booklet with flyers from the period. Edition of 500.
Archives Box 1983 - 2005
(Art Into Life - AIL008) 5xCD $50.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first archival release to cover this French composer’s work in its entirety: Devil’s Picnic (Ding Dong 1983); Lxgrin (CRI 1984); Aha (DMA2 1984); Monétacheck (Rangehen 1985); Bishérigori (Rangehen 1986); Rementact (Rangehen 1989); Encored Dust with GX Jupitter-Larsen (Noisopoly 2000); Euragine (Sounds For Consciousness Rape 1994); most of her compilation tracks and eleven previously unreleased tracks. Dense and detailed work, ripe with ancient dreams, bodily functions, darkness, secrets, and beautiful seclusion. Her tools of the trade include water, catgut, skin, latex, steel, bronze, everyday actions, feedback, voice, sewing machine noise, flute, and crumpled magnetic tape. Includes twenty-page booklet. Edition of 500.
Love Song
(Art Into Life - AIL006) LP $36.00 (Out-of-stock)
The singularly strange storytelling power of Jun Konagaya had been largely overlooked until Folk Songs For An Obscure Race (Haang Niap 2009), which collects the group’s early ’80s material. Love Songs is a story in eight volumes, ripe with deviant madness and gathered salvic capacity. Handmade clock artwork (each one is unique), eight-page booklet. Edition of 300.
Roadless Travel
(Art Into Life - AIL003) CD $22.50 (Out-of-stock)
Unparalleled works of tape manipulation by this Solid Eye veteran. With twenty-four-page booklet of liner notes (essentially a full history of Hammer) by T. Sakaguchi, the foremost Japanese LAFMS historian.
Travel
(Art Into Life - AIL013) CD $21.00 (Out-of-stock)
The second part of the story begun with Organ (Eskimo 2012) about a young girl named Magnolia and a monster called Gamahead. This installment documents the many things she sees and hears on her journey between dream and reality, where she stumbles across ruins in the middle of a forest, hears a woman singing underground, and engages in other possibly imaginary adventures. With forty-page book of illustrations. Edition of 300. Listen to an excerpt from “Sanctuary” here: https://soundcloud.com/a_i_l/jun-konagaya-sanctuary
Quasispecies Four
(Art Into Life - AIL010) LP $22.50
Two twenty-minute tracks of indeterminate and neurotic noise from a 2012 quartet session by Toshiji Mikawa of Incapacitants and Hijokaidan (electronics); Agencement’s Hideaki Shimada (violin, electronics); Artbreakhotel’s Nobuo Yamada (metal junk objects) and Katsuyoshi Kou of Soundings (guitar, electronics). With obi attached by string that encircles the whole jacket, insert with photographs. Edition of 250.
Roundup Two
(Art Into Life - AIL001) 2xCD $26.00 (Out-of-stock)
Live performances with vacuum tube analog computers, solid-state manifestations of chaos and harmony, musical interventions on political tunes, virtuoso performers interlinked with hybrid processing, and more by composer, performer and developer of unique circuitry and software whose labors extend back four decades. Several of these pieces were previously released on cassette (Slowscan Editions 1987), and have been re-mastered; some that were originally presented as excerpts are here complete and unedited. Other works not on the original have been added. An essential, historical document containing important examples from a sixteen-year period in this innovative artist’s extraordinary, pioneering work. Second edition of 300.
RICHARD RUPENUS / NOBUO YAMADA
81/44
(Art Into Life - AIL011) LP $35.00 (Out-of-stock)
Heavily armed with random discharges of radio-wave theatre and metal noise. Multiple blows with a heavy hatchet along the time axis, but no blood flows. From the speakers, the right and left wing exchange blows but reconciliation remains eternally unreachable. Steeped in idle repetition in a comfortably heated secret chamber. With several random passers-by, sounds like those made by slapping a wet towel alternate between life and death but in a continual state of existence. Misshapen metal objects roll around randomly, liberated in their movement. Junk noise flies about in every direction, howling at distant objects, wildly spasming, rolling around on the floor, having sudden heart failures, and constantly apologizing for its own violent impulses. Unique handmade jacket consisting of a decorated transparent acrylic sheet, the background color of which changes according to the light conditions. Edition of 150. Listen to an excerpt from “SA/D12-12” here: https://soundcloud.com/a_i_l/richard-rupenus-nobuo-yamada-sad12-12
Stratosphere Sound
(Art Into Life - AIL012) LP $20.00
Passionate concept album about transparency by Hironari Iwata, who was active in the mid- to late ’80s — as solo artist (translation: Transparent Molecules); as one third of Haiginsha (with Merzbow’s Masami Akita and Agencement’s Hideaki Shimada); and as head of the Angakok label, which released the skull-crushing 1988 double-cassette compilation Angelic Tecnology I [sic] — and abruptly ceased all musical activity. PSF’s edited 2009 CD reissue of Toukaseibunshi’s Meta-Inorganicmatter Meta-Newlon cassette brought Iwata back to the material plane, and here we are. Clear vinyl, with photographic print transparent film. Edition of 200. Listen to an excerpt from “Alive To The Sky” here: https://soundcloud.com/a_i_l/toukaseibunshi-alive-to-the-sky
VOGELSCHEISS UND SEINE VERRÜCKTEN KRÖTEN
Vogelscheiß Und Seine Verrückten Kröten
(Art Into Life) CD $22.00
(Art Into Life) LP $37.00
This barely premeditated collaboration from the late 1980s by Strength Thru Joy's John Hubbard and Christoph Heeman and Andreas Martin of HNAS would make a perfect soundtrack to a paranormal thriller in which the living aren’t exactly haunted by ghosts and apparitions and poltergeists so much as fucked with. Not even pranked, just pointlessly confused for the poker-faced amusement of the quasi-dead. You know how it is in eternity — lotta time to kill. Records skip and wobble off center. Self-tuning radios pogo in and out frame. Violin, banjo and recorder slip across corrupted harmonic grids. A piano piece, oh my god, a piano piece. Plus: toads. You’re welcome. LP includes download code and insert. Edition of 300. Each CD comes in a handcrafted paper jacket, differing in color and texture. Edition 200
IYS
(Art Into Life - AIL005) LP $30.00 (Out-of-stock)
“This is a field of action implied, in the many possibilities and several contextualities of time...” states Giancarlo Toniutti in The Histories of Noise, “[P]rojecting music outside the realm of musicology, with a well-structured leap into the biological realm of sound and perception….” IYS – stem, branch, expression. Radiative expansion. The tree is silent. Make it speak. Assault on Venus. Cartesian grid or dimensional zones? Plants and animals. Airplanes, birds. When we hear a natural sound, how is it perceived? Is destruction an aberration in space-time? Process music. Nature can be quite quiet. Infrequent sounds in isolation. Overnight Campsite. Revealed roots. Primitive sound genesis. Time lapse structures. Wild environments. Some things in nature are meant to be broken, like the shell of a nut. Sound of life torn apart. Not the brittle crispiness of dried fall. Pattern perception. A specific, localized sound environment. Tree removal. Reverse animation. Search for the right sized subject. Madrona. Logging roads, island trek. Sacrifice. Microcosm in sound recording. Detailed exclusion. No looping. A finite numbered sequence. Its inversion alongside. A trailer full of dissected specimen. Ladder and camera. The cultivation of a sonic germ. Is the spirit intact? A single flower tops the tree. The waxy green leaves are first plucked. It's a skeletal reversal rehearsal. Displaced matter. Three days of taping. Prepared systematic process. Horizontal reorientation of sound contents. Wood audio emissions. Tanglewood. Time compression shifting. Tiny becomes tinier. Tinny becomes tinnier. Analog reels reality analogue. The beast has left. Careful with that axe! Levels zero and one on up to the branch tips. Field drawings and photos. Archeological dig in the dirt. Unearthed trunk. A missing organism is globally dispensed with. And still this thing persists. A strange evolution through sound. Creepy. Gatefold jacket, tree diagram poster, insane printing, gray vinyl. Edition of 300.