Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey. 

"After his self imposed exile from the global world music niche, Mamer found his stage at Shenzhen’s two annual music festivals – Tomorrow Festival and OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival – curated by his loyal friend and supporter Tu Fei, who would always reserve at least one set for Mamer’s newest sonic experimentations. Mamer’s most recent album Faintish Radiation documents his full performances of solo improvisation at the seventh (2017) and eighth (2018) OCT-LOFT Jazz Festivals, in which he performed electric bass, guitar, dombra, jew's harp and vocals. These recordings register Mamer’s trajectory towards a maturing avant garde composer who is able to capture the audience with an everchanging bizarre sonic kaleidoscope, one which summons industrial noise, doom drones, heavy metal riffs, dark and punchy grooves, and broken pieces of folk melodies. In each of his solo performances, Mamer would start from random notes and eventually build up an overpowering atmosphere that is distinctively his own, knowing only too well when to release a delicate Kazakh tune as a reward for intensive listening. Here “Daidiydao”, a heartbreaking love song believed to be composed by Kazakh poet Magzhan Zhumabayev, was unleashed towards the end of the 2018 performance, before an abrupt, typically Mamer stop that ended the whole set. --- 录音 Recording：曾君 Zeng Jun；罗绿野 Luo Lvye混音 Mixing & 母带处理 Mastering：刘英 Liu Ying制作人 Producer：涂飞 Tu Fei设计 Design：尹思卜 Yin Sibo封面照片 Front Cover Photo：@Waitetc_等等其它摄影 Other Photos：阿瓜 Wain；陈鸿@DAFA；蒙润

Finis Africae, a group without fixed members organized in Spain in the early 1980s by Huang Alberto Arteshe Guell, is a studio project that emphasizes work, especially "Amazonia" (1990) in the far north. It is a standing masterpiece. Inspired by Conan Doyle's adventure novel that he once read, Huang Alberto develops a soundscape that depicts the fantasy unexplored Amazon that circulates in his brain. In the late 80's, Arteshe upgraded his studio equipment to 16 tracks, and the technique he had tried on his two albums was complete. Manipulating many European and African instruments, overdubbing most of them alone, and combining the natural sounds of wind and rain, birds, insects and creatures, this "Amazonia" has a mysterious atmosphere and a mysterious sign. Expression. His unique organic groove feeling is also very comfortable, and it became a masterpiece worthy of its name (* note).* "Africae" is an old name for "Africa" in Europe based on Latin, and adding "finis" creates nuances such as the farthest land and unknown places.+ Japanese / English publication+ CD version: Paper jacket, liner included

Cover material from a consummate original. Mats brings his Swedish reeds to compositions by Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor and Mats Gustafsson!

Made over a period of five years, Luc Ferrari's Cycle Des Souvenirs is a large-scale electoacoustic work that revisits numerous periods from his five decades of composition, a veritable "best-of" composed of entirely new material!

Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is the quintessential work of artist/filmmaker/composer Tony Conrad. Comprised of both film installation and minimalist score for amplified strings, Ten Years leaps across genre and medium to connect his revolutionary structural filmmaking with the experiments in long-duration sound that Conrad had begun in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music."Ten Years began with image before sound," writes Andrew Lampert, "a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture."For its 1972 premiere at New York's The Kitchen, Ten Years included Conrad on violin as well as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel performing on instruments of the composer's own making. Chatham played the Long String Drone – a 6-foot long strip of wood with bass strings, electric pickup, tuning keys, tape, rubber band and metal hardware – while Spiegel carried out an arrhythmic bass pulse throughout.Superior Viaduct is honored to present this previously unreleased recording of Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain's breathtaking premier performance. As Chatham recounts in the liner notes, "When I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate."Track Listing:Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain (1:28:18)

MacLise's brief-but-legendary life was an incessant pursuit of the dharma, and the tapes he left behind in his archive testify vividly to the distances he was inspired to go. Astral Collapse is one of several culls from the archival recordings eventually made into posthumous releases, featuring his DIY tape collage assembly of field recordings, chants, ARP synth, bells, bongos and organ drones, making a kaleidoscopic sequence of sonic encounters and a backdrop for intermittent recitations of Buddhist prose and poetry. Purely mind-altering transmissions from a past where such experiences were prized and pursued like rare magic.

One of his final works, Les Arythmiques finds the late musique concrète veteran Luc Ferrari engaging with the cardiac condition that struck him towards the end of his life. Inspired by the jolt of electricity that was prescribed to combat his arrhythmia, this album is a collection of all the sounds Ferrari recorded on his travels over the final few years of his life - an assemblage of images he bluntly describes: "as one says of a drowning man's life passing before him". The forty minute montage pieced together here is continually interrupted by surges of electricity and stuttering timeline edits, designed to mimic the electric jolt Ferrari experienced in hospital. Given that Ferrari passed away not long after the composition was completed, there's an extra degree of pathos installed in these recordings, and the metaphor at the heart of the work proves to be a powerful one indeed, expressing the relationships between age, memory, sickness and mortality.

Acclaimed NYC experimental musician Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion on "Of Shadow and Substance". “More so than any of my other music, I don’t feel that these works belong to me,” Bertucci writes. “There is something about them that is beyond myself as an individual and provides, if anything, a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene.” Working with instrumentation in the ancient “just intonation” tuning structure (in which notes are spaced exclusively at whole-number ratios of frequencies) and a textural approach to composition, even commonly-heard timbres such as cello, harp and double bass in Of Shadow and Substance are afforded a sense of deep, ancestral knowing. The record opens with “Vapours”, whose contemplative, semi-improvisational, interflowing lines of acoustic instrumentation swell and expand like the passage of time, as if revealing an ancient, eternal memory, old as humanity itself. Its spacious, mutable open strings and droning harmonies do not favour a soloist or even any single melody, but instead blur and coalesce into one entity, drifting from consonance to discordance in harmonic clusters. A dizzying middle section gives rise to a sense of panic, pulling the strands of languid, drifting vapours into a volatile tumult before resettling into a misty, atmospheric trance-state. Bertucci writes: “A “vapor” is a molecule that exists on the verge between a liquid, gaseous or solid state, and the archaic term “vapours” was a pseudo-scientific term to diagnose types of hysteria in women.” The piece was commissioned and performed by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice, who were prompted to visualize vapours in air and to meditate on hysteric fits as they play, while Bertucci controls the sonic space with subtle processing and spatial mixing. The latter half of the album - just as moving and evocative - comprises the composition “Of Shadow and Substance” for double bass, cello, harp, percussion and electronics commissioned by the Philadelphia creative foundation ARS Nova Workshop and performed by Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Stravros and Matt Evans. “This piece measures the accumulation of events over glacial periods of time as a metaphor for social and environmental shifts,” Bertucci tells us. “It is a meditation on time travel, asking the listener to consider the way events from the past propel themselves into the future.” Its construction reflects the strange concertina of time we find in recorded history, suspended densely in the moveable center of an empty space. Using experimental mixing techniques, Bertucci loops and layers fragments of the performance in real-time, resulting in a diffuse, swirling, self-referential mass of experience, both familiar and metamorphic. Lea Bertucci is a New York-based artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques. Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2021 she founded her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, to focus on releasing her own music. The title "Of Shadow and Substance" is a reference to an episode of cult TV favourite The Twilight Zone. Available in limited edition of 500 vinyl, CD and digital download. A special edition of 25 will include hand bound prints of graphic scores to both pieces. 

Ergodos is proud to announce the release of "Strange Waves", an enveloping new record from cellist Kate Ellis and composer Ed Bennett. A large-scale work in six parts, "Strange Waves" blends music for eight cellos with field recordings made on the County Down coast and on Ireland’s northernmost island, Rathlin, in the North Atlantic. The music unfolds with an extraordinary sense of inevitability: Dense constellations of rapid figures evolve into rich, swirling synth-like textures. Ravishing microtonal sonorities overlap hypnotically with the steady pulse of lapping waves. Surreal chorales are revealed slowly, deliberately – at once mysterious and reassuringly, uncommonly elegant. Kate Ellis on the evolution of the project: "This record began with an email in my inbox from Ed early in 2020 saying: 'I'm dabbling with a piece at the moment for 8 multi tracked cellos... I’m thinking quite big, and it could be record in itself with multiple movements...' Ed sent a first draft of the score in June of 2020. The music he had created was immensely beautiful and resonated strongly with the strange sense of calm and slowing of time that I was experiencing and so began the recording of ideas between lockdowns. The final recording of the piece took place between May and June of this year at home in Crumlin, Dublin." Ed Bennett on the inspiration for the work: "Growing up by the Irish sea, the sound of waves has been ever present in my life and in recent years has found its way into the music. At first, I didn’t notice this, but as I started to hear overlapping textures and loops in my work, I realised that there was something about this seemingly endless quality I was seeking." "Strange Waves" can be performed by a soloist with seven pre-recorded parts or as a live octet. On this recording all eight parts are performed with extraordinary poise and precision by Kate Ellis. This record marks a major statement from two of Ireland’s most dynamic and prolific contemporary music practitioners.

Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music. Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit. In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form. Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP. Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve. While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm. What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms. 

"ILOG3 was recorded only a little more than a year after the epic ILOG2 session. In-between the two album releases the duo has performed a few high profile festivals like Jazz Em Agosto in Lisboa, A’Larme in Berlin, Meaksuma in Eupen or La Nature in Wallonie. While ILOG3 originally was only intended to be a video shooting session the duo put down another suite of incredible music and decided to release it in triple format as DD, CD and LP. The music is a succession of densely improvised electro-acoustic mayhem, highly abstracted and chopped up beats and surreal textures. Schick and Steidle follow the path they started to engage in on ILOG2: multilayered and thus poly rhythms of the drums contrasted with the rapid crosscut tricks and beat jugglings of the turntables. Steidle who in the meantime armed up with two new midi controller pads integrated in his drum kit with which he can control in a much more fluid and virtuoso way his portion of samples, while Schick for this session brought in a stack of new and quite „ lubby" vinyls which he chops up in his brutalist way not worrying at all about any of the known/classic scratching conventions. ILOG3 comes in two versions, a long extended suite for the CD, and a compact compressed version for the LP. Best if you simply get both to enjoy the different constructions and the each time unique flow of this rather crisp display of music.“

"During one of my early teenage trips to Strasbourg/France in an urgently needed escape from provincial Lower Bavaria and with the aim of making some money by basking in the streets of France with my saxophone I found amongst some other jewels a copy of „Jila-Save! Mon. - The Imaginary Suite“ LP by George Lewis & Douglas R. Ewart in the sales bin of a local Jazz record store. I had already seen George Lewis performing live with Bill Frisell and John Zorn as "News For Lulu", and listened to a lot to his quartet recordings with Anthony Braxton, but Douglas R. Ewart I had only heard and read about and I was eager and keen to listen to his work. Back home when putting the record on the player it was one of those desperately needed shocks: this unique mix of contemporary abstraction with AACM roots and blues on Side A and then a totally outer space electronic drone scape with some spiritual woodwinds and brass on Side B, all this in extreme instrumentation. When buying the record and from what I knew at the time I had expected some Art Ensemble of Chicago type tribal Afro-Americana, but this stunningly abstract, pure and almost naked interplay of extended brass and woodwinds, self-made instruments and electronics combined with a totally non-conformist/unfashionable and honest sound palette opened another window for me, a window that encouraged me to trust isolated/honest nakedness in music making, risking formal extremes and non-obvious collage but also the attempt to achieve musical friend-/kinship in the process. Many years later, we are now talking times of internet and social media, not so very long ago, one of those messages randomly popped up on my screen: it is Mr. Douglas R. Ewarts birthday! After sending a few words we connected online and finally a year later and during a several months long composer residency I had in Los Angeles and thanks to the practical help of different friends (Chris Cogburn from No Idea Festival who connected me with Jesse Goin from "Crow With No Mouth“) I managed to fly to Minneapolis, rent a rehearsal studio and record for two days with this exceptional visionary, multi-instrumentalist, maker-inventor, poet, afro-logical conscience keeper and critical thinker. I still remember how I arrived with a very bad flew that I had caught on a festival in Austin/Texas right before the trip up North, but what to do, this was an one off chance not to be missed. So I tried my best to ignore the symptoms and just set-up the borrowed turntables, my sampler & Zoom H6n recorder, installed two overheard microphones for Douglas’ multi-instrument collection and after a short test recording we started the musical dialogue right away. The tracks of "Now is Forever“ were recorded exactly in the order they are presented, there are no changes, overdubs or edits. The highly critical poems narrated by Mr. Ewart anyway would have not allowed to mess around with the material or the track order. After two lovely but at the same time straining days of recording and receiving wonderful Jamaican rum recipes for treating any cold, we performed a final live-set of electro-acoustic creative music in front of a small but generous audience. What strikes me most with this collaboration is how seemingly natural this two traditions and generations of creation (Afrological AACM aesthetics and post-2000 European Electro-Acoustic Improvisation) blend and connect. For me it was an old childhood dream to come true. After the concert along with some close friends we went for some late food and drinks, killing some time until Mr. Ewart was being so kind to drop me off at the airport ready to fly out to LA at 4:30 AM with my ears close to pop and break with unbearable pain and them needing two days to open up again after landing. For whatever reasons it took quite a while until Mr. Ewart and I got back in touch again, long after this session, but we did, and while listening to and mixing this jewel, it became clear that none of the music should be left out. One, for the delight of witnessing the development of a first time musical meeting and two, for unfolding the whole story and content of Mr. Ewart’s poetry. A narration and cultural/socio-ecological critique of our time that has even six years after it’s recording not lost any of its relevance and urgency. Pls look at and listen to „Now Is Forever" as a pan-generational and pan-cultural warning, an outcry and message from us, with which we are supporting the one and only last generation.“

"With Hawking Extended the two Berlin based musicians Ernst Bier & Ignaz Schick present their duo Hawking (formed in 2013) in addition with the Munich based composer, guitarist and live-electronics player Gunnar Geisse. While Hawking performed entirely with live-electronic instruments – in Hawking Extended however additionally to the three different electronic set-ups the musicians also make use of their original acoustic instruments. The purely acoustic setting (saxophone, guitar, drums) is mirrored with the entire electronic display (Wave Drum/Electronics, Laptop, Turntable). The music consciously uses the tension between acoustic free improvisation, electro-acoustic/electronic music, noise and contemporary jazz and continuously oscillates between those different stylistic poles. Hawking Extended are building obscure sculptural sound objects, risky, sometimes fragile and often eclectic. They allow themselves to touch musical taboos and walk on the thin line between „Kitsch “, sharp electronics and refreshing anti-preset-music often resulting in a music which sounds like an acoustic science fiction film. A year after their first concerts in trio in 2017, the three spent some time in the luxurious recording studio Bonello in Berlin and are now presenting the exciting results of this seance with this CD. A music that picks up on many different elements and influences from past and current waves & inspirations. Each of the three players being an idiosyncrat of their own on their chosen instruments, each of them have created their own personal language and stylistic field. Adding this three unique characters creates an outstanding collage of musical layers, unpredictable and surprising."  Ignaz Schick [alto saxophone, turntables, sampler] Gunnar Geisse [laptop guitar, virtual instruments] Ernst Bier [drums, wave drum, electronics]

This is a 2022 trio recording where the unique Kresten Osgood meets the two living legends: Bob Moses and Tisziji Muñoz. Bob Moses is one of the greatest living drummers in the world. H Started his career in 1964 with Roland Kirk while still in his teens. Since then he has collaborated with such artists as Gary Burton, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Steve Kuhn, Sheila Jordan, Todd Rundgren, Larry Coryell, Gunter Hampel, Darius Jones, and many many more. Bob Moses is also a respected educator and drum innovator who is constantly expanding the vocabulary of the drumset.  Tisziji Muñoz is a brilliant guitarist composer, producer, author, and astrologer, who has been active since the early 70s when he worked with Pharoah Sanders. He has released over 65 albums on his own label Anima with such artists as Dave Liebman, Billy Hart, Marilyn Crispell, Paul Shaffer, John Medeski, Cecil McBee, Ravi Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Hilton Ruiz, and Bob Moses. A completely original voice on his instrument and a leading light for many musicians who consider him a spiritual mentor.  Kresten Osgood is one of these people who at the same time defy and totally own categories. An extraordinary drummer and improviser with the fullest respect for tradition, without fear to challenge it at any given moment of his creative endeavors. He has about 100 albums to his credit, toured practically everywhere, and has been performing and/or recording with legends like Roscoe Mitchell, Paul Bley, Lee Scratch Perry, William Parker, Masabumi Kikuchi, Derek Bailey, Wadada Leo Smith, Jason Moran, Michael Blake, Oliver Lake, Kurt Rosenwinkel, John Tchicai, Tim Berne, Justin Vernon, Peter Brötzman, Joshua Redman, Eugene Chadbourne, Billy Preston, Alan Silva, Brad Mehldau, Mats Gustafsson, Bennie Maupin, The National, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Sam Rivers, Henry Grimes, Dr. Yusef Lateef, Warren Smith, and many many others. With two drum sets and electric guitar, the trio's music is powerful and completely unique, played freely and with a fierce spirit. Tisziji Muñoz was the one who named the album Spiritual Drum Kingship. He felt that the meeting of drum kings Bob Moses and Kresten Osgood created energy of a seismic nature, and also considers his guitar a six-string drum on this recording. 

Legendary double bass player, multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer & activist William Parker is back with the music for AquaSonic waterphone quartet – a mystic instrument built by Jackson Krall. The band consists of two acclaimed visual artists, Anne Humanfeld & Jeff Schlanger, and two versatile musicians, William Parker himself & an Estonian drummer and composer, Leonid Galaganov. The music probably sounds like nothing you've heard before: tribal? contemporary? electronic? free improv? future? …? It's a one way trip. He did it again.

VHW7 stands for VELOCITY HOLOMATRIX WARP 7. This music is also featured in its totality in the virtual reality immersive digital visual-sonic experience designed by Theo Triantafyllidis & Sun Araw. VELOCITY HOLOMATRIX WARP 7 was shown at: Berliner Festspiele, Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Berlin, MIRA Festival in Barcelona, Eugenides Foundation Planetarium in Athens, and continues to travel the world.