The Collective Orchestra was a visionary, short-living creative music collective led by Gaetano Liguori, who was one of the main protagonists of Italian free jazz since the early 70s. It was an important attempt to put together young musicians from the two main towns in Italy, and its respective leading figures: Giorgio Gaslini in Milan and Mario Schiano in Rome. Previous attempts to set up anything similar were, in fact, either frustrated by rivalries between the various personalities or were destined to be one-off events.Liguori's vision is simply wonderful here – even bolder and more expressive than on his previous works for PDU, and the energy which he summons and transmits throughout is just extraordinary. The near-telepathic interplay of the core set of Gaetano Liguori on piano, Roberto Bellatalla on double bass, Filippo Monico on drums, Guido Mazzon on trumpet, and young musicians Edoardo Ricci, Giancarlo Maurino and Massimo Urbani on soprano and alto saxophones, is given a richly expanded sound palette by the addition of Danilo Terenzi on trombone, Roberto Del Piano on Fender bass and Sandro Cesaroni on flute.There's something really magical about the reciprocity that occurs when he plays these exceptional improvisers - and the album's still has a "sense of the new" feel (after 40 years!) that's as gripping as anything recorded by Italian ensemble around the same time.The sound is strong and freely exploratory, at a level that's completely fresh and very striking, and handled here with a wonderful balance between playful arrangements and fierce improvisations. Filled with power and imagination and originally released in 1976 on Pdu.

1. Luna Turca - 01:44 2. Om Shanti Om - 06:55 3. Chenrezig - 11:49 4. Nana's Solo - 03:56 5. A Chi Chi Ou - 01:39 6. Koye - 06:32 7. Flute Song - 05:16 8. Dissolution - 09:29An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, with the desire to merge the knowledge and stimuli gained during numerous travels across the World in a single sound experience. Don's pocket-trumpet is melted with the beats of the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki. A pure hippie aesthetic, like in an intimate ceremony, filters a magical encounter between Eastern and Western civiliziations, offering different suggestions of sound mysticism: natural acoustics in which individual instruments and voices are part of a wider pan-tribal consciousness. A desert Western landscape marries Asian and Latin atmospheres. Indigenous contributions with berimbau explorations find fossil sounds of rattles and clap-hands invocations. Influences of Indian mantra singing are combined with eternal African voices or with folkish-Latin guitar rhythms , while flute and drums evoke distant dances. In the Organic Music everything becomes an act of devotion and love, an ecstatic dwell in the dimension of a sacred free-rejoice.

Two pieces made with dismantled toy pianos, wind-up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, and voice. Percussive rhythms, hypnotic sounds and Cantonese words used like magic formulas. Somewhere between minimalism and gamelan, but still unmistakably unique.

Holidays delivers one of their most important and captivating releases to date: Hartmut Geerken’s “Requiem for the Snake of Maidan”, a mind-blowing body of archival recordings from the 1970s, made on a stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains of Afghanistan, encountering the artist locked in a sprawling performance on a self-made “percussion environment”. An absolutely visionary revelation from this sinfully under-recognised collaborator of Sun Ra, John Tchicai, Michael Ranta, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and numerous others, few experimental percussion records soar like this. towards the end of the 1970s, a film about me and my work was made in kabul for the south german tv program. the director was arpad bondy. in order to find a venue for my music that is typical for afghanistan, it was agreed that my “percussion environment”, a tubular cube of 2x2x2 meters including the associated instruments, would be transported on a barren, stony ridge in the hindukush mountains. the people called the place “maidan”, which means nothing but “place”. while a couple of men dragged the frame pipes and the instruments up the hill, I decided to carry my large wuhan gong (100 cm diameter) up the mountain, in a kind of ritual. michael ranta sent me this gong from wuhan/china to kabul. – with slow and careful steps, carrying the heavy gong like an umbrella on my head, I walked over the difficult rocky terrain without a path up. suddenly a snake about two meters long came out of the rocks towards me and hissed aggressively at me. I could only take the gong off my head and put it like a shield in front of my legs. as I later discovered, it was a very venomous snake! since I couldn’t go on or back without her attacking me, I had to bring myself to kill the beautiful animal. I managed to smash her skull with a rock that I threw at her while standing behind my gong. finally I hung the lifeless body around my neck, put the gong back on my head and continued my way up, with a pounding heart. when the percussion environment was set up, I hung the dead snake between my instruments and spontaneously decided to name my solo performance “requiem for the snake of maidan”. since I was able to reach an orbit between heaven and earth while playing in such an unique and very privileged place, I definitely didn’t want to be disturbed or interrupted by a film team and made the following parameter a condition: I will play six hours continuously, and the filmmakers can do what they want, but are not allowed to interfere with or talk to me. – while I was playing I only had one musician with me: the wind. sun ra entitled one of his records “my brother the wind”. I hung my metallophones on the linkage so that the wind could touch them and create sounds. the recording captured a few parts where I didn’t have to lift a finger and the wind did everything that was necessary. the room was a wide landscape without any echo. if an echo can be heard in the recording, it is the reverberation from the big gong. only a few noises came, apart from the wind, from outside. flying insects passed near the microphone from time to time, few shouts of the film team from a nearby hill or you could hear a jet at a great height. sometimes, if you listen carefully, you can hear steps on loose rock: I was not sitting all the time within the cube but also played on my percussion environment from outside, for example throwing small stones or clods of earth onto the big gong from a greater distance. the big gong and the boo chals (tibetan cymbals) produced a whole series of overtones. the string instruments, the metallo- and lithophones dominate the recording. in addition to the acoustic environment of my instruments, in some parts of my improvisation I used a battery-powered tape recorder (uher 4400 report stereo IC) with a pre-recorded feeding tape that I had pre-recorded before alone or together with michael ranta in kabul. the stones of the lithophone were collected by ranta and myself in the valley of goldara around an old collapsed buddhist stupa. almost each of the hundred stone plate we had lifted was ringing. (hartmut geerken)

Includes an 8-page booklet with lyrics in English and Arabic.Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album – whose title means “Promenade of the Souls” in Arabic – explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new.On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir – who plays most of the instruments herself – revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it’s at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless.Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East’s cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space – and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty.

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall. Described by Suzuki as the “culmination” of their sound, New Sense of Hearing features the two musicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radio transmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, and kikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention. Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city’s Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of “Sound Objects and Sound Tools,” an exhibition of Suzuki’s homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of the exhibition “MA: Espace – Temps au Japon,” organized by architect Arata Isozaki and composer-writer Tōru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before traveling with the exhibition to Stockholm and New York—critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice that he had “seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the same performance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be.” For New Sense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from their collaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observed in 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are “in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no direct relationships. . . . Only coincidence.”

First-time vinyl edition. Recently remastered by Mikey Young and featuring insert with newly found images from Jaroslav's archive. absolute ambient gold, orginally issued in 1992 on cassette, by Czech improvisator, multiinstrumentalist, composer and photographer Jaroslav Kořán

Recorded live at the “Holland Festival”, City Theatre, Amsterdam, June 1983. All instruments played by Hessel Veldman and Kees van Ede.

"Siamo tutti in pericolo" is the third album by Golem Mecanique, the nom de plume of French multi-instrumentalist composer Karen Jebane, to be released on Ideologic Organ. Jebane works within the fringes of contemporary folk (aka La Novea community), microtonal and early modern spheres, as well as touching upon the ashes and fibres of back metal and the DNA of gothic music, literature, sorcery and most of all - poetry. Jebane's work with the "drone box" (a mechanised hurdy-gurdy) and zither as a smooth and rippling surface for her singing is immediately evident in a nearly ceremonial way, inviting into a space of clear-dark creativity-beauty. On "Siamo tutti in pericolo", Jebane works with her forms of composition in new ways, poetic and spare execution of her techniques, through her homage/hymns/meditations on the highly irregular circumstances and questions/mysteries of the passing of the soul of master artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. A perfect pairing with collage artist Julien Langendorff's cover art, "Siamo tutti in pericolo", presents a pure presentation of Jebane's "Golem Mecanique". –Stephen O'Malley « Siamo tutti in pericolo » ( we are all in danger ) are words from Pier Paolo Pasolini. These were the last words he gave in his last interview. And then, we do not know what happened till his murder on an Italian beach. Pasolini has awakened me to many things, and his movies are usual companions of my days. I remember seeing Accatone and Teorema when I was 14 years old, and I fell in love. I then discovered silent violence, erotism, desire, the raw aesthetic, ancient myth, and wrath. « Siamo tutti in pericolo ». We do not know what happened when he left the place he gave the interview. There was no clue, no witness till the discovery of his severed body a few days later. « Siamo tutti in pericolo ». I tried to be the eyes that saw in the dark, the voice that told what his last day and night were, the ghost that summons the memory. I have composed songs as if they were traditional ones, using repetitive patterns in traditional rhythms, like tarantella. The drone is minimalist, and I tried to give the drone box the sound of a traditional hurdy-gurdy ( even if it is a kind of hurdy-gurdy ). « Siamo tutti in pericolo ». Maria Callas and Scott Walker are also haunting this album. I just wanted his body not to lay alone on that cold beach. « – There’s nothing left, there’s nothing, nothing.
We have never existed.
Reality is these shapes on the summit of the Heavens » from La Rabbia/Anger by Pier Paolo Pasolini

First LP in the ‘Signature Series’, a small new series in the Metaphon catalog, documenting previously unreleased archive works of less known composers. Metaphon presents their ‘signature’ in the most personal and elementary way. Raoul De Smet (1936), mainly known for his numerous instrumental and chamber music works, started composing in the early 1960’s. Between 1974 and 1989 he also recorded several electro-acoustic compositions at the IPEM in Ghent, one of the more approachable crossroads for experimental music creation at the time. His work carries different moods and contrasts, a sort of expressive eclecticism where straight forward evolution often prevails over far-fetched intemperance. However, his work is far from obvious. The four distinctive tracks on this album portray a fresh and unpretentious enthusiasm of a composer discovering new electronic tools.

Robert Fesler: "μP RPF78" 4LP box - Metaphon 017 - 2024 An anthology of the intensely arresting work of Robert Fesler (1936-2023), revealing many of his compositions (1975 -1987) created with his self-built synthesizers, with as pinnacle the μP RPF78. Except one, all tracks are previously unreleased. With profound simplicity and devotion, Fesler paints a hermetic inner world with strong emotions of confronting solitude, sensual alienation and traumatic angst. His music was as much a therapeutic treatment as an artistic expression. Fesler quotes, "Building my synthesizers and working with them enabled me to sublimate my anxieties". Most tracks were played and recorded real time, often with two synthesizers (the Synthese 756 and the μP RPF78), capturing the heat of the moment in one take, without multitracking. The austere and reductionist approach reinforces the overall spirit of his work, resulting in an engaging, mysterious solitary journey. It’s quite incredible how one person can put so much technical cerebral content in the development of a machine and use it in such an emotional way. The music of Robert Fesler might be considered as very Belgian. To situate it within a close entourage, one can say it has: the endurance of Baudouin Oosterlynck the purity of Dominique Lawalree the mysticism of Arsène Souffriau

4LP box – Metaphon 022 – 2024  Metaphon is thrilled to present this collection of 14 phenomenal electronic and electro-acoustic works by French composer Fernand Vandenbogaerde, realized between 1967 and 1984. After his science studies Fernand Vandenbogaerde (1946) studied at the Conservatoire de Roubaix and did various classes and courses with a.o. Jean-Etienne Marie, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bruno Maderna. He wrote analytical essays on mathematic music, in particular the work of Iannis Xenakis. Vandenbogaerde taught electro-acoustic music at various institutions and was director at the National School of Music and Dance in Blanc-Mesnil, near Paris. As a composer he wrote works for orchestra, instrumental and chamber ensembles, sometimes in hybrid form including tape and electro-acoustic configurations. He also recorded numerous tape compositions in Bourges, Paris, Ghent and at his home studio. His works have been presented worldwide on various leading festivals and events. The compositions included in this edition are primarily tape works, meticulously recorded and produced, radical and most of all timbre oriented which makes his compositions focus mainly on sound while other parameters hardly change. In Vandenbogaerde’s own words: “What determines my pieces, at least all the ones in this collection, is that it’s the material that dictates me, that will predetermine the form”. This particular approach distinguishes him quite a bit from many of his contemporaries within the field of electro-acoustic music. Another interesting aspect in Vandenbogaerde’s work is the integration of micro tonal scales (conceived by Mexican composer Julian Carrillo), on the compositions 'Modifications III' and the intriguing trilogy 'Drei Nachdenken über Hymnen an die Nacht'. All tracks are previously unreleased except the proto power electronics piece 'Anschlag' which was self-released in 1971 on his own Point Radiant label, as a compilation LP which also included a track by Tristan Murail.

Rolf Gehlhaar (1943-2019) was an instrumental and electronic music composer, and a pioneer in computer controlled interactive music. He grew up in the US where he studied philosophy and composition at Yale University. In 1967 he moved back to Germany to become Stockhausen’s personal assistant and member of his performing ensemble. In 1969 Gehlhaar co-founded, along with Johannes Fritsch (Metaphon 012) and David Johnson, the Feedback Studios in Cologne, a new-music performance center and publishing house. He later moved to England, where he became in 1979 a founding member of the Electro-Acoustic Music Association and later on senior lecturer in design and digital media. Gehlhaar's compositions include symphonies, instrumental works, experimental and electronic music, interactive computer controlled music and everything in between. The three previously unreleased tracks on this LP only show a glimpse of the versatility of his adventurous and innovative musical ideas. The LP comes with a foldout insert including photos and extensive program notes

A- ‘Kyo Mu’ (1982) – 30:20 Johannes Fritsch: Tape (viola, electronic and concrete sounds) Hitomi Endo: Shakuhachi Weltmusik-Kongress, Vlotho 11.10.82 – première recording B- ‘Hochtöner’ (1974) – 18:19 Johannes Fritsch: Viola and Tape Rolf Gehlhaar: Percussion David Johnson: Flute, Synthesizer Composed 1974, recorded 1975 at Feedback Studio Cologne ‘Kyo Mu’ and ‘Hochtöner’ both reveal a mesmerizing symbiosis of innovative sound exploration and visionary interior music, a sublime compound of fine-drawn intricate arrangements skillfully projected in space and time, or perhaps beyond space and time. Johannes Fritsch (1941–2010) was an award-winning composer, musician, publisher, studio owner, author and music teacher. He studied viola and composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and was member of the Stockhausen Ensemble from 1964 to 1970. Together with Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson (also from the Stockhausen Ensemble) he established the Feedback Studio Köln and the Feedback Studio Verlag, the first publishing house owned by composers in Germany. Fritsch’s complex musical estate consists of approximately 130 works: it covers electronic music, chamber music, ballet, theatre and film music, organ compositions, an opera and pieces for large orchestras. Although Fritsch’s compositions are varied, all of them convey a strong interest in new sound combinations and sound colours.

Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi originally got together in the summer of 1975 for an open-air concert in Sapporo. The concert felt like a great success but was unfortunately not recorded. As the desire arose to record together, they managed to arrange a studio session in the NHK Studio in Tokyo, with presence of sound engineers. What was supposed to be a soundcheck for this session became the session itself: a haunting 50-minute séance of intense avantgarde improvisation using a large instrumentation and live processing (tape echo, ring modulation, phasing). A trident travelogue of the momentum masterfully controlled by the ensemble spirit, transcending the boundaries of psychedelic underground. Official reissue of this underground classic from 1975, originally released in a tiny edition on the small Japanese Iskra label. As the original master tapes of these recordings seem to be lost, the master had to be taken from an unplayed original LP copy. It was carefully restored and mastered by Jos Smolders with amazing result.

Quiet Ends’, the 2nd album by Lumine, draws an isolationist scenery with subtly merging halftones of twilight. The penumbra diffuses mysterious textures and a melancholic hypnotic atmosphere conductive to introspection. In the gathering darkness all troubling details of reality melt into large evocative masses and abstract surfaces.

Elodie’s Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk present their soundtrack for Peter Hutton’s ’Skagafjörður’, responding to the film’s desolate imagery of Iceland with half an hour of exquisite, weather-beaten, smoke-curl atmospheres, highly recommended if yr into the cold tonalities of Kevin Drumm's 'Imperial Distortion' or Aphex Twin's 'SAW II'... Recorded as part of ‘Night of Experimental Film’ event in Ghent, Belgium, 2018 that also saw screenings of Derek Jarman’s ‘The Angelic Conversation’ and performance by Tom James Scott, the recording captures the quintessence of Chalk and Van Luijk’s richly evocative music and the natural mystery of Hutton’s film, which is handily available on YouTube for you to synch with its suggested soundtrack for optimal zoner times.  Following a cassette edition in 2020, this vinyl edition gives the performance more room to breathe, with Chalk and Van Lujik’s patented atmospheric magick seeping out from the peripheries to best envelope the listener in their tantalising descriptions of the Icelandic landscape. Chalk & Van Luijk are masters of this kind of layer-within-layer rendering, where you no longer know if you’re listening to vast winds or analogue interference, where harmonic washes are often punctuated with frequency fuckries; feedback, jolts of electricity. The effect is quietly stunning and effortlessly transfixing; like so much of their peerless catalogue --- Faraway Press 2021