Concord
(Corpus Hermeticum - HERMES001) LP $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
1993's no-fingers-on-the-strings opus, aka the free noise barrage heard 'round the world.
International Domestic
(Corpus Hermeticum) Used CD $5.00
In these duets by Akiyama with guitarist Greg Malcolm, no-input mixing board whiz Toshimaru Nakamura, and Bruce Russell on electronics and clavioline, you’ll hear “how aggressive and off-balance a music founded on restraint can get,” promises Paris Transatlantic. “Akiyama leaves vast spaces between his jagged twangs and clanks…, and does things to his guitar pickups with a steak knife that would have a sushi chef sweating. Nakamura’s work is more disjointed here too, and their fourteen-minute duet packs a few nasty surprises. The duet with Malcolm sounds more like what you’d expect to hear in Tokyo’s Off Site, but Russell … is more confrontational…. Their duet emerges out of a babble of audience noise … [and] exists in a permanent state of impending catastrophe, building a fantastic sense of tension that’s all too often lacking in Japanese-style micro-improv.”
Copula
(Corpus Hermeticum) Used CD $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
With guitars, bass, synthesizer, organ, and drums, Kim Pieters, Sara Stephenson, Adria Morgan and Andre Richardson elegantly roll through clouds of blissful free improv noise, angular guitar abstractions, and buried distant voices.
In Search Of Spaces
(Corpus Hermeticum) Used CD $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
Fifty unbroken minutes of audience-captured live recordings from 1994. Beautifully smeared and blurred drones and ever-present feedback, vaguely guiding beacons that emerge from the dense fog of tape hiss — sounds like unrecognizable snippets of voice, occasional drums that fade in and out of audibility, and guitar bellowed from the depths of a cave.
LIONEL MARCHETTI / JÉRÔME NOETINGER / MATHIEU WERCHOWSKI
Marchetti / Noetinger / Werchowski
(Corpus Hermeticum - HERMES034) Used CD $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Marchetti and Noetinger on tape decks, amplifiers, and “kick up an impressively varied array of whizzes, scrapes, whistles, groans, blips, and bleeps, all dynamically arranged,” says Dusted, “With both intuitive intelligence and a fine appreciation for a good racket. Werchowski tends to assert himself [on violin] by holding one texture or gesture while the sounds of electricity and metal under duress surge around him -- his conservatory trained technique makes him the one idiomatic voice in an untranslatable babel.”
Painting The Passports Brown
(Corpus Hermeticum) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
With guitar and analog tape loops, The Dead C’s Herr Sideburns creates a volatile collage of feedback and noise. The mood is spontaneous to the point of being shambolic. One of the label’s more striking releases.