'I met SUGAI KEN a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San’s aesthetics speak of a great knowledge of these performing arts. An open invitation: “the traditional local performing arts in the 21st century intrinsically conceive “fragility” as they are vulnerable to extinction. The Japanese local performing arts that appear in this recording is no exception, endangered by the declining birth rate and aging population which are typical to the country. (SUGAI KEN)” I bring the original recordings into conversation with new elements (corresponding field recordings and or additional percussion and strings, performed by Antwerp musicians Jeroen Stevens and Roman Hiele) like a ‘monomane’ - tr. imitating – sound game. But when i throw these old and new figurines together on the podium, the objects immediately disappear in the cracks of the stage wood. Thus only the understament of the suggestion remains. And relentlessly the significance of every movement now becomes a question. Furthermore, what’s in focus? The manipulation? Or the content? Or are we zooming in on the aspect of archiving ~ preserving? Dubious. In KAGIROI – tr. heat haze - people coexist for a moment severely carved in time like a high contrast still of dancing flames. When you bring this composition home, it will never boil yet merely evaporate. And when you gaze at the clouds of condensed droplets inside your own darkness, on a soft volume, You complete our puzzle.  . -Lieven Martens --- SUGAI KEN - field recordings, liner notes Lieven Martens - collage, additional sounds and field recordings Jeroen Stevens - additional percussion Roman Hiele - double bass, mastering Kohei Oyamada - liner notes translation Jeroen Wille - artwork --- Edições CN, 2021

Preceding a debut album proper for the label due soon, '17 roles (All Mapped Out)’ takes us on a journey from a ringing railroad crossing and domestic rustle, thru quietly glorious inner landscapes and into reverberating x pastoral strings and lambent pads that coalesce to attune the ear to claire’s aural purview with half-heard riffs on friends, life in the digital realm, and the afterlife. Set to the slightest but most transfixing shifts in tone and texture that possess an incredible capacity to bring you to tears, often unexpectedly, her everyday sounds are magnified to gently distort their meaning and heighten their sensuality, effectively glimpsing the firmament from far away in a sort of waking dream gaze. As with claire’s myriad releases during the past few years, her music’s low-key treatise on loneliness, friendship and existentialism has uncannily come into its own this year, appealing to atomised souls seeking connection thru music. This one in particular feels to strongly capture and characterise a mix of fleeting and torpid emotions in a way that evokes the passage of time and the fragile sense of place in the world like nothing else you’ll hear on the scene, like a rare orchid poking out from the crumbling facade of ambient convention. --- Shelter Press, 2021

Don't test the waters; a gut-rigged amalgam of disengaged tape remedies, mouth whiplash and last-limb electronics. --- TracklistA1 untitledB1 untitledB2 untitled --- Regional Bears, 2021

"KENMORE / LINDORFF EXCHANGE marks two collaborations from 2009: one pairs New Orleans-based radio producer and DJ Joe Shriner with multimedia artist Evan Lindorff-Ellery, based in Kingston, NY; the other features Lindorff-Ellery and Gary Lindorff, an author and poet living in Vermont. Though performed and recorded independently, these two pieces share a common approach; they are informed by the specific acoustic environments in which they were made and exhibit an ambiguous passion for the liminal space between interior and exterior, both psychologically and literally.The title of KENMORE EXCHANGE refers to two locations on Kenmore Avenue in Chicago. Using a shoebox cassette recorder, Shriner captured various sounds at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus. In the basement of a building that has since been razed, he recorded himself playing a persistent F minor chord on one the school's practice room pianos, enclosed by brightly-lit concrete walls and a single window. In Lindorff-Ellery’s airy apartment (five windows total) six miles due north, the two manipulated these tapes along with field recordings Evan made as he biked between the university and his home.LINDORFF EXCHANGE is a document of Lindorff-Ellery and Lindorff's late afternoon, mid-winter experience in a cabin in the Vermont woods. No artificial lights were used in the creation of this aural portrait, and each lighted and diffused section of the cabin became darker as the recording continued; needless to say the objects merged with each other. Somehow, very faint classical music appeared on this recording, and there may or may not have been post-production tape manipulation. What we have is what we’ve got. --- Regional Bears, 2021

Page 29 and Page 44 are part of an iterative text-sound project Hopkins began in 2018. In this ongoing project, text generation software is used to repeatedly alter a page of text. Each alteration is collated in an expanding document that he uses to inform recordings and performances. The pages were read, but not a great deal was said.Flakes 1 and Flakes 2 are collages made from test signals and found audio fragments from Australian television between 1974 – 1979. Anticipating the broadcast, but nothing begins. ---Recorded and assembled in 2021 on Gadigal and Wangal land.Mastered by Renato Grieco.Artwork by MP Hopkins.

'Mentos Gulgendo (1)' is the Nowacka sisters' consuming Slip debut: a mercurial set for transfigured organ and voice, shaped to shudder, creep, or take flight. From the rough, anchored sound of a Unitra Estrada 207 AR organ, Antonina and Mila alchemise 6 nagging, fearful pieces, which alternate between burrowing, prickly beds of processed instrumental sound and more spacious sighs, buoyed up by dancing, full-blooded vocals. The Polish duo's careful ear for the grain of the organ - sometimes allowing it to sink in, more often urging, pressuring it onwards - makes for a magnetic, addictive listen. 'Mentos Gulgendo' is a new project by Antonina Nowacka and Mila Nowacka, who make possessed, hallucinatory sound and visuals as WIDT, most recently in a wild, unnerving collaboration with German producer Christoph De Babalon for Bocian in 2018. --- Music composed, performed and recorded by Antonina Nowacka and Mila Nowacka at the Family Allotments "Kaloria", using a Unitra Estrada 207 AR organ. Mastered by Filip Marcinkowski Artwork by Masia Debska --- Slip Imprint, 2020

Lament & Rejoice is a debut album by a Finnish experimental musician Juho Toivonen.Dubbed on to a 30-year old Hardcore Punk tape found from Toivonen's rehersal room in Pori, the hissing album experiments with continuous sound created either with clarinet, viola, synthesizer and chants - or just with piano and synthesizer.In these two pieces you'll find sounds and energies being emancipated for the purpose of unity.Thank you Charlotte.Performers: 1. Lament - Juho, Saija, Antti2. Rejoice - JuhoArtwork by Dima RabikCassette layout by Kryptinen Käki

Collage for found text 2018-2020 Voice – Claire Bloom, Daffy Scanlan, Duncan Harrison, Josh Peterson --- Regional Bears, 2021

Gnarly, ruff cut up sounds from actually cut up flexi discs. Direct to 4 track from Brighton's garbled gonk purveyor Duncan Harrison. No mercy! Released on Robert Ridley Shackleton's Cardboard Club  

Objects at Hand is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Dirty Electronics (John Richards) and T M Shaw.   Just before lockdown in 2020 Richards and Shaw finished a tour, Points of Failure, which involved building performance-installations in various venues across the UK. These environments, made up of DIY devices and found objects, were constructed in response to the performance spaces, and consisted of sound, light, smell, smoke and other sonic processes.    Objects at Hand was recorded retrospectively in remote locations and then edited and mixed as a memory trace and document of the sounds, physical spaces and objects encountered on the tour.   Action, uncontrollable instruments, unstable systems, performative failures, reimagined affordance of objects, playing with resource, improvising inside electronics, assembling and disassembling sound devices, architectural features are folded into this performance document.   Richards and Shaw see their work as a form of ‘cybernetic wayfaring’, improvising with materials, feedback and new situations, as they continue, and repeat.  --- 1. Praxis [4:34] - coil, circuits, feedback, motors, metal sink, tin can, transducer 2. Imposed_Adjacent [4:35]- rubbing motor, interjections, radical nails, tin can, voice, large glass vessel 3. Opus 25 [3:48] - sparkler, filtered noise/whistle, hacked speak n’ spell, vowels, tin can, Tesla coil 4. Thinking in Time [5:35] - boat, creeky platform, gated noise, thrupenny synth, spring reverb feedback 5. Temporary Needs [7:18] - disposable cameras, large capacitor discharge, circuits, AM radio, prepared speakers, spark gaps 6. newCorpus [1:59] - travel, flights, hotel, coil, Dictaphone, large speech corpus, pd patch (disorderly jukebox --- Opal Tapes, 2021

Saxophonist, poet and puppeteer, Ted Milton, brought his band Blurt to the 4th Tomorrow Festival with an unusual musical scene. He has recited 5 of his poems before the performance. The full set of 19 tracks, including poetry readings, are included exclusively in the special edition of the digital album. --- Ted Milton / 主唱 vocals, 萨克斯 saxophoneSteve Eagles / 吉他 guitarDavid Aylward / 鼓 drums --- 录音 Recording: 曾君 Zeng Jun / 罗绿野 Luo Lvye母带处理 Mastering: 刘英 Liu Ying制作人 Producer: 涂飞 Tu Fei摄影 Photography: 陈悦湘 Chan / 许益铭 Bug @ Dafa设计 Design : 尹思卜 Midori Yin

Super limited tape. A narrative-musical work, a Babylonian library in which sound and word give shape to an evanescent sonic space with infinite historical, archaeological, science fiction and future references. Etrusca 3D is a new band that merges two current Audio and visual artists from the 21st Century, Francesco Cavaliere and Spencer Clark. The album is the first to be released by Spencer Clark's label Pacific City Discs, as a subsidiary and in collaboration with Discrepant. Etrusca 3D is the juxtaposition of two imagineers friendship, as Francesco says, 'because I am Etruscan and you (Spencer) are 3D." There is a piece of the future of Etruscan civilization contained within this disc. It is with Spencer's remote viewing of a past and future creative culture and Francesco's birthright that we find a true insinuation of civilizations world body. --- Pacific City, 2021

Olive and Naka's collaboration pairs two musicians working with lo-/mid-fi sonics and modified/self-made instruments. Through extensive recording and touring, the duo has honed a patient aesthetic, allowing each other's sounds to unfold with minimal, sure-footed interactions, akin to moving along a path up the mountain for which this release is titled. Naka's sources here consist mainly of "long loops of sagging/distressed cassette tape winding into and out of similarly distressed portable tape players, with real-time analog processing." Olive uses magnetic pickups and analog electronics. This leads to sounds of uncertain provenance, playfully emerging from a thick analog haze, building toward surprising, subtle crescendos. This is work that results from, and produces, an active semblance of stillness.

Melting Bridge 融化橋 is John Tucker and Pia Hsieh. With one half hailing from California, and the other, Taipei, this peculiar meeting of minds led to the forging of an incredible musical bond.  The Taiwan-based ambient/experimental duo have formed a unique set of sounds from their extensive experimentation with beautiful acoustic Eastern instruments such as the Guzheng, Suona, Dizi and more modern digital tools such Environmental Sounds, Drum Machines, Prepared Electric Guitar and Synthesizers. "The environments we inhabited during the recording process really shaped the sound. Tainan, the original capital city of Taiwan— that houses antiquity in a sonic environment that is both rich with the sounds of Taoist ceremony as it is with internal combustion engines — inspired a balance of religious influence and abrasive textures. Taipei’s polarity to Tainan, as a metropolis that is teeming with fierce energy of expansion and rising as a monolith of modernization produced a sense of conflict and reconciliation." Described as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Melting Bridge 融化橋guides the listener into a continuum of time and space, with the vessel being their incredible 9-track full-length debut "我們從明天來" (We Come From Tomorrow), out now on Evening Chants.  --- Recorded and Produced by Melting Bridge 融化橋 Mastered by Madzine Artwork by Pia Hsieh Design by Jasmine Ho --- Released on Evening Chants

Mind bending spoken word from the weird brain of Eric Schmid.  Released 2020 by Regional Bears

"Stumbling into the Age of Loneliness I carry cloudy glass bottles to the edge of the Pacific. After 100 years in dirt beneath San Francisco they breathe fresh ocean air, fill with the energy of breaking waves. Microphones inside, ear to conch, I hear shadows: scurrying, wing flaps, chirps and chatters, whimpers and bellows. So many creatures, once emerged from the sea, now gone. How many vessels would the disappeared fill? What is the weight of a lost species? I make an offering of listening to help me carry all these ghosts we made." ⟶ Cheryl Leonard Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelatory, empty, full, sad and comforting. In Schism’s title track Cheryl E. Leonard treats us to her own imaginings of the world within her laptop; a pulsating, flickering, stuttering morass of coil pick up recordings, set amid the co-mingling of crickets, squirrels, birds, bats, and sounds played on natural-object instruments. She asks: “What does it mean when our mediating technologies have both the power to connect us to and distance us from the ecosystems we are part of?” Certainly this is a question which predates the pandemic, but it is one which we grapple with now with a set of new knowledges which speak to both the possibilities, and the shortcomings of a life lived digitally.In addition to her laptop recordings Leonard also turns to mics placed inside bottles to render the second piece on this release, Eremozoic. In the context this simple gesture takes on new resonances; a separation, enclosure, limitation which captures and reverberates particular tones, while missing others entirely. When I think of the computer in this era, I think of it like this, it exists as both echo chamber and conversation; alienation and hope. I think many of us have felt the last year, a little like life was lived inside a bottle. With this release Leonard reminds us of what we lost during the pandemic, but more profoundly what we might lose more permanently as we continue into the climate crisis. - Kate Carr --- Composed, performed, and recorded by Cheryl E. Leonard Mastered by Thomas Dimuzio at Gench Studios   Liner Notes by Cheryl E. Leonard Words by Kate Carr  Artwork and design by Juliána Chomová  Stone composition and photography by Ester Sabik  Risograph print by Kudla Press  Photography by Zoltán Czakó Dedicated to Patty Chen-Wei Liu Released by mappa as MAP026 in 2021

Earlier this century Spencer Clark created a sound phantasy with Skaters and after that he pursued a new alchemy under various aliases (Charles Berlitz, Fourth World Magazine, Monopoly Child, Typhonian Highlife, etc.) and projects (like Egyptian Sports Network, Tarzana or The Temple Defectors). He’s back with a new album under a new name, Star Searchers, a futuristic eco-friendly record. It’s life on earth as you never heard it. The story goes like this: Spencer Clark wanted to do a soundtrack for the yet to be made Avatar 2. And if you know Spencer’s work, you’ll know that he engaged on this mission reading material that influenced the rich and crazy imaginary world of Avatar. If you think about it a little bit, something like Avatar could have really come out from the mind of Spencer Clark. But it didn’t. So, he dwelled around the idea of that soundtrack, working on what is now known as Avatar Blue. The record we now release is a selection he made from the 2CD released last year on his own Pacific City Sound Visions.Like many of Spencer’s other alias or incarnations, Star Searchers introduces the listener to a new world. Besides making sounds/soundtracks for alternative realities he cares about making a world for his music to live in. It’s never superficial or dedicated just to the act of imagination, Spencer creates sounds that sustain the reality he imagined. That’s why they’re so rich and consequential in the realisation of music as a medium.Avatar Blue is music but also literature. And cinema. Star Searchers’ sound creates an absorbent sound about what’s happening in aquatic life. It goes beyond the perception of what we’ve seen or what we’ve known, it’s a neo-future aquatic life, with a world building structure and sounds and narratives that go along with it. All done with a sound-aesthetics that could be described as slowed-down-trance, that fits 1980s synth nostalgia and dreams of sci-fi to come.

XXTREMELY RARE, THINK KWIK!! "In October 2018, the manager of ESP-Disk', Steve Holtje was invited by the 8th OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival to give a lecture titled 55 Years of Nurturing Avant-Garde and Outsider Music: ESP- DISK's Perpetual Revolution, in Shenzhen, China. During this event, Tu Fei, the curator of the festival, as well as the co-owner of Old Heaven Books, reached an agreement with Steve on further co-operations. For over half a century, ESP-DISK' has been publishing a massive amount of great records, among them are many free jazz masterpieces. And with great honor, the Old Heaven Books is authorized to produce and release this cassette boxset including 5 selected ESP DISK' classics, as a tribute to the label concept “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk.”' This cassette boxset include 5 ESP-DISK releases: Albert Ayler- Spirits RejoiceRecorded Sept. 23, 1965 at Judson Hall, New York CityMarion Brown Quartet - Marion Brown QuartetRecorded in New York City in November 1965Sonny Simmons - Staying on the WatchRecorded in New York City on August 30, 1966Ronnie Boykins - The Will Come, Is Now© & ℗ 2009 ESP-Disk' Ltd./Syndicore Music (BMI)Sun Ra - Concert for the Comet KohoutekRecorded live at Town Hall, New York City, December 22, 1973. Limited Edition to 300 CopiesReleased by ESP-DISK' & Old Heaven Books