Y allí afuera no hay nadie, todo lo diría si lo preguntáramos en voz alta; y si se nos escuchase preguntarlo; o si se consintiera en recoger esta absurda pregunta. Nadie, salvo el reflejo difuso de todos los rostros en los vidrios intactos empavonados de nadie. / Fragmento de: La pieza Oscura , Por: Enrique Lihn
John Zorn (born 2 September 1953 in New York City) is an American composer and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist. He owns the Tzadik record label and has worked with a large number of experimental musicians, particularly in improvised music, incorporating modern classical music, jazz and even death metal and grindcore as well as having produced music to include most styles.
As a child, he played piano, guitar and flute. He went to college in St. Louis, Missouri at Webster College (now Webster University) where he discovered free jazz, before dropping out and moving to Manhattan. There he gave concerts in his small apartment, playing a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, etc; almost anything (sometimes he played “musical optics” which involved no instruments or sounds at all, but rather the arrangement of lights and objects in a dark room). In the mid 1980s he signed to the Elektra-Nonesuch label. Since then, Zorn has been quite prolific, usually putting out several new records each year. His breakthrough recording was perhaps 1985’s The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone, wherein Zorn offered a number of often radical arrangements of Morricone’s famed songs from various movies. The Big Gundown was endorsed by Morricone, and incorporated elements of traditional Japanese music, soul jazz, and other diverse musical genres.
Arrington de Dionyso (b. January 4th, 1975) of Olympia, Washington uses performance as a vehicle for driving through the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll.
After living in Chicago, Arkansas, and Spokane, Arrington moved to Olympia in 1992 to attend the Evergreen State College, where he studied Ethnomusicology, Music Therapy, and Butoh dance theater. In 1995 he founded the avant-rock group Old Time Relijun, which has since toured and recorded throughout the US, Europe, and Israel, and has released eight albums on the K Records label from Olympia, enthralling audiences with an approach to performance described as deep hermetic practice and/or "some fuckin' scary shit" by critics in the know.
As a solo artist, Arrington performs on the bass clarinet, jaw harps, and his voice with a distinctly multiphonic ability inspired by Tuvan throatsinging and the ecclesiastics of Albert Ayler and Don Van Vliet. Pushing the envelope between musicality and pure energy, between shamanic ecstacy and lunacy, he enwraps rooms with resonant sound. His devotion to bringing traditional Tuvan musics into an experimental music context has been acknowledged by Tran Quan Hai, the famous ethnomusicologist and the world's leading expert on throatsinging.
In addition to Old Time Relijun and his solo projects, Arrington devotes a significant amount of his time to furthering the cause of free improvisation. He is the founder and curator of the Olympia Festival of Experimental Musics, in its twelth year. Arrington tours constantly, and has performed or/and recorded with notable improvisers throughout the U.S.A., Canada, Italy, France, Israel and Lithuania. He presents workshops on improvising with the human voice in conjunction with his touring around the world.
Arrington has received increased attention for his visual artwork, which deals with many of the same themes of spirit, sensation, and improvisation as his music. Recent exhibits have been held in Los Angeles, New York City, Vancouver BC, Paris, Bologna, and Beijing, China. A series of several dozen ink drawings is on view at www.krecs.com/oldtimerelijun. His work is represented in Paris by Atelier Cardenas Bellanger. (www.ateliercardenasbellanger.com)
The Legendary Pink Dots formed in August 1980 in London. In 1984 the band transplanted itself to Amsterdam which led to a shift in the original lineup, the original bassist Roland Callaway leaving at this time.
The core members of the group are vocalist/songwriter/keyboardist Edward Ka-Spel and keyboardist Phil Knight. Many others have passed through the group over the years. As of 2007 the group is comprised of:
* Edward Ka-Spel - vocals, keyboards, songwriter * Phil Knight (a.k.a. The Silverman) - keyboards, electronics * Martijn de Kleer - guitars * Niels van Hoorn (a.k.a. Niels Van Hoornblower) - saxophones, clarinets, flutes, MIDI wind controller * Raymond Steeg - live sound engineer
The story behind the band's name is a source of speculation because Edward has given multiple explanations behind its origins. The most plausible and common explanation traces back to the mysterious pink dots on certain keys of the bands main recording studio piano named "Osbert", the dots that can be found at either end of the keys do not make any particular chord or scale pattern and the reason for them remains unknown to this day. The piano itself is still owned by one of the founding band members April White, and can be found at her home recording studio in Cambridgeshire.
Their music touches on elements of neo-psychedelia, ambient music, electronic music, tape music, industrial, psych folk, synth-pop and goth rock, with a distinctly experimental/avant-garde bent; their sound has evolved over time and remains distinctive, making it difficult to place the group into a concise style or genre. The groups overall sound combined with Ka-Spel's distinct lyrics and singing have earned comparisons to Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett; the group has also been compared to classics Seventies deranged bands as Can , Faust, Brainticket, Magma or Neu! (whose "Super" they covered on the 1999 tribute album "A Homage to NEU!").
David Grubbs (born September 21, 1967), guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in The Red Krayola and The Wingdale Community Singers.
Squirrel Bait was a 1980s Louisville, Kentucky punk rock group that released a 12" EP and an album on Homestead Records. Grubbs's next group was Bastro, which released two albums on Homestead. In 1991 Bastro morphed into the more avant-garde Gastr del Sol. This project soon became essentially a partnership between Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. The albums released by the duo (including Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, Upgrade & Afterlife, and Camoufleur) have been described as a visionary and theoretical deconstruction of the songwriting process.[citation needed]
Since the partnership's breakup in 1997, Grubbs has released numerous solo and collaborative records, mostly on the Drag City label. In 2000, his album The Spectrum Between was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He operates his own label, Blue Chopsticks, which has released both new and archival recordings from Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Van Oehlen, and Mats Gustafsson. He has appeared on recordings by Tony Conrad, Matmos, Palace Music, Pauline Oliveros, and many more. Grubbs is also known for his collaborations with writers Susan Howe, Rick Moody, and Kenneth Goldsmith as well as with visual artists including Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Stephen Prina, and Cosima von Bonin.
Grubbs's soundtrack work includes music with Matmos for Thierry Jousse’s feature film Les Invisibles. He has composed the soundtracks for Angela Bulloch’s installations Z Point and Horizontal Technicolour, and Hybrid Song Box.4, and his music appears in two installations by Doug Aitken. Grubbs’s sound installation “Between a Raven and a Writing Desk” was included in the 1999 group exhibition “Elysian Fields” at the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs has also contributed music to the Red Krayola’s soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto’s film Japan in Paris in LA as well as to Augusto Contento's film Strade Trasparenti, Braden King and Laura Moya’s film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, and John Boskovich’s film North. Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the P.B.S. television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley’s film The Book of Life, and Doug Aitken’s film The Diamond Sea. Grubbs composed music for Karl Bruckmaier’s radio adaptation of Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, which was named “Hoerbuch des Jahres 2007” (Audio Book of the Year) by Hessischer Rundfunk.
From 1997-99, David Grubbs was a part-time instructor in the Liberal Arts and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor of Radio and Sound Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and director of Brooklyn College’s graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. His criticism has appeared in Conjunctions, Bookforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Purple, and from 1999-2007 he regularly contributed music criticism to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
David participated as drummer 23 in the Boredoms 77 Boadrum performance which occurred on July 7th, 2007 at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, New York.
Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs.
Canadian band Nadja played at the well-known Roadburn festival recently. I was not able to see them there, but fortunately founder Aidan Baker found some time to answer a few questions, while on the road between shows in eastern Canada. We were curious what it was like to work with a real drummer instead of a drumcomputer, and how to describe Nadja’s music the best.
You recently released a new album, ‘Desire In Uneasiness’, the first to be recorded with a live drummer. Is this a unique project, or will Nadja be a trio from now on? This was a unique project, yes, but that doesn’t mean we might not be a trio at some point…
What made you decide to work with a drummer for this record? We wanted to try something different, something with a more organic feel that’s difficult to capture with electronic drums.
You worked with Jakob Thiesen on this record. I read that the two of you have collaborated before in Whisper Room. Still, I think not many people will know who he is, can you tell us a bit about him? I have performed with Jakob many times, both as a duo and with our trio Whisper Room – we have a collaborative record recently released on Waterscape Records called ‘A Bout de Souffle’. He has played drums with a few other groups, as well as recording more electronic/techno-based music under his own name. (Aidan at this point refers to Jakob's page from Discogs, which may give some more info on his work.
Does this mean that you will now do Nadja-shows with him? Probably not, but it’s always a possibility.
It seems that using a drum computer has not prevented you from making music that has a very improvised feel. It does make it a bit harder to just try things in the studio. Can you tell us how a Nadja recording session used to be, and if it was different with a real drummer? When we recorded with Jakob, we improvised/jammed and then took the recordings and edited and re-worked them, essentially building the songs that ended up on the album from the improvised raw material. Other albums have been recorded similarly, although we generally start with a very basic drumtrack and chord progression and then improvise over top of that, adding layers and textures until the song is ‘finished’.
Along with close contemporaries Earth and Boris, Sunn O))) have become flag bearers for the doom-metal avant-garde, pushing the genre to new experimental boundaries with each full-length album. While they may have just lovingly mimicked Earth’s early drones with their first set of releases, Sunn O))) quickly evolved into a innovative force of their own right, pushing out heady, slow-as-molasses jams of impenetrable darkness. The chilling spoken word intro of White 1 or the pseudo-black metal wraiths on Black One demonstrated the cloaked duo’s capacity for creating exciting and terrifying masterpieces that were as unique as they were heavy.
Dømkirke carries on with the proud tradition, bringing the distinguished drone masters and their special guests to an ancient Danish cathedral where their compositions could be given a full atmospheric treatment. From what I understand, this was recorded live, giving the album raw power and urgency - a strange word to use given the band’s snail-like pace. The majority of this album moves away from the groaning and drawn-out riffs of the past, opting instead for dense, dark ambient pieces. That being said, the album is still bass-laden and unbelievably heavy, its just more focused on atmospheric drones rather than lumbering guitar work. Vocal contributions from black metal artist Attila Csihar are spine-chilling, as his dark, operatic chants echo like the rites of some ritualistic cult-figure. The later half of the album has him more restrained, offering distant and indistinguishable shrieks and rasps to hover over the searing drones.
Yo La Tengo is an American indie rock band based in Hoboken, New Jersey. With more than 15 albums released since 1984, they have demonstrated unusual longevity for the indie-rock scene. They are frequently regarded as one of the definitive indie rock groups of the 1990s. Though Yo La Tengo has achieved limited mainstream success, the band has become a critical favorite with a devoted fan base.
The band's name comes from a baseball anecdote.
During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into the 160-pound Chacón, who spoke only Spanish.
Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" which is "I have it" in Spanish. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by 200-pound (90.7 kilograms) left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo! as a way to avoid outfield collisions.
After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the heck is a Yellow Tango?".
The band wanted a name that sounded foreign in order to avoid any connotations in English. Kaplan is also a devoted baseball fan. However, it still irks the band when they are asked the origin of the name. The band once performed a cover of the Mets theme song "Meet the Mets" during a benefit appearance on radio station WFMU's pledge drive. A track on I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is called "The Story of Yo La Tango" in apparent reference to an all-too-frequent misspelling of the band's name.
Fantasma Parastasie sees the pairing of Aidan Baker, of the Ambient Doom band Nadja, and Tim Hecker, two of Canada’s brightest musicians in the world of abstract electronic music.
Tim Hecker has been enjoying the rewards of a stellar career and discography, devoid of filler, due to his incredibly high quality control. His most recent full-length, Harmony in Ultra Violet, was viewed as a major release in the genre of experimental electronic music. Aidan Baker, on the other hand, works under very different circumstances, releasing material both as a solo artist and as a member of the duo Nadja. His prolificacy is on par with that of Merzbow and the late Muslimgauze. Thankfully, Aidan Baker is one of those musicians with the ability to record and write new music quickly and without sacrificing the quality of his art. Anyone familiar with both Aidan Baker and Tim Hecker is more than likely familiar with Alien8 Recordings as the two musicians have collectively released seven records for our label thus far. While Baker has collaborated with the likes of John Duncan, Black Boned Angel and Fear Falls Burning, among others, this marks the first collaboration to be released by Hecker.
This release, divided in eight movements, blends together to form a fluid example of a collaboration that works. Unlike those collaborations where artists throw some sound files back and forth via the internet, this release is the fruit of various real-time recording and mixing sessions the two artists worked on at Tim Hecker’s Montreal studio. The pieces on the record blend seamlessly into one another creating a deeper listening experience, as is the case on a number of Tim Hecker’s solo outings. While Baker and Hecker share a penchant for creating a powerful blend of ambient noise, “Fantasma Parastasie” finds the more dissonant elements tempered by an emphasis on ambience and even occasional melody.
This release is available on CD in a digipak packaging. A 500 copy, limited edition on white vinyl is also available. Both items can be pre-ordered in order to reserve copies.
You proposed to raise this disc, the wait I end, now it can enjoy, do not forget to comment!.
"Larkin Grimm is a force of nature, a self-made woman with an elemental voice from somewhere under the earth. Depending on her mood, she moans like a woman-in-full, wails like a banshee, or coos like a crazed little girl. Born 26 years ago in Memphis, Tennessee, to hippie devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS, raised by multiple “parents in the commune environment of the cult until age six, Grimm spent the remainder of her youth in the Appalachian mountains of Georgia after the cult disbanded. With five siblings and challenged economic circumstances, she won a full scholarship to Yale to study art. During her time at the Ivy League university, she also traveled in Thailand, Guatemala, and spent a few months hitchhiking and living by herself in a tent in Alaska. After temporarily dropping out of school to hang out for a couple years with eco warriors, vagabonds, and sexual deviants in Olympia, Washington, Grimm returned to Yale, where she was a member of Dirty Projectors for a while. Upon graduation, she moved to Providence, where she was an active participant in the city’s noise scene and made a few albums of improv/free-form songs for Secret Eye Records. Grimm books her own tours, travels light by herself, and lives in a tent during the warmer months. She has no permanent address and doesn’t want one. Grimm’s taste for music comes from her old-time fiddler and singer father and her folksinger mother. She naturally developed into an absolutely gifted singer, fingerpicker, and multi-instrumentalist. She’s shared bills with Devendra Banhart,Spires That In The Sunset Rise, Espers, Brightblack Morning Light, Entrance, Viking Moses, The Microphones, and Old Time Relijun. Parplar was co-produced by Michael Gira and was recorded at Old Soul Studio in Catskill, NY, and Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn, and mixed at Trout Recording. Grimm truly rises to the occasion on the album, which features absolutely stellar vocal performances of songs that are soulful, whimsical, sensual, and bizarre. The production is as varied and unpredictable as Grimm herself. The list of guest musicians includes Young God’s new luminaries Fire on Fire, members of Boston’s Beat Circus, and Old Time Relijun, as well as various revolving members of Angels of Light."
With his third full album ‘III’, Bram Devens alias Ignatz, has once again surpassed himself.
In his usual brain-melting futuristic blues folk psych, he’s calling the ghosts of Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes and Robert Pete Williams, as seen by a adolescent Lou Reed.
‘III’ suggests a fictional, unclear and vague story about the deaths of musical genres. It’s breath cold, raw made of carbon and gas. The smell of a wet dog or a badly dried towel. The musical assiociations are reduced to a minimum, unless they contribute to the fictional line, where the tragic is enclosed in the crackling, atonal and repetitive melodies.
This album breathes a more sentimental atmosphere than it’s predecessors by Ignatz’ wailing voice, not unlike Skip James. A tormented soul that after the last song is over; liberates the listener from a personal journey and leaves him dazzled. ‘III’ projects the times of the Alaskan Klondike gold rush and the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog to the modern times, dominatd by technology. So, this album bears testimony to a sincere melancholy that popmusic these days hasn’t know in a while.
Ignatz forces us to look at the pure essence of his music: to translate raw emotion into sound and to reach an essential beauty.
Para distinguir la real naturaleza de los elementos que Wondrous Horse presenta en vías del trayecto recorrido dentro de las atmósferas llenas de implementos que se interponen en una danza sonora con la propiedad de traer consigo diversidad en los detalles impresos del unisono, folk de la tierra bajo el eclipse de sol, palabras de espíritu errante, ritmos y rituales minimalistas que evocan desafíos importantes de la conciencia sin prejuicios, y, paralelos los pies del usuario a los del congelador en torno al perfecto ciclo orgánico residido, se alejan por diferentes estados de vigilia bajo el efecto narcótico que representa la voz mágica invitándolo a frenar su galope y disfrutar del etéreo dilatado de imágenes de su bosque.
Welcome one and all to the world of Wondrous Horse! Cavallo Meraviglisio is the debut offering of the transatlantic (Italy/U.S.) duo of Vanessa Rossetto (Pulga, The Mighty Acts of God, etc.) and Salvatore Borrelli ((etre) & Harps of Fuchsia Kalmia). These two musicians continue to evolve in fascinating ways, and the sounds to be found on Cavallo Meravigliso may come as a surprise to some, which makes it all the more exciting to hear.
An avant folk tour de force combining elements of electroacoustic music, glitch and many other experimental forms, Cavallo Meraviglisio gallops upon the scene assured and ready. Performing with an arsenal of instrumentation at the ready (violin, viola, balalaika, theremin, guitar, dulcetina, concertina, autoharp, bells, xylophone, voice, baritone guitar, tablas, darbukas, turkish saz, xylophone, esraj, dulcimer, resonant ukulele, celtic "droned" harp, banjo, kalimba, shruti box, irish bouzouki, lap steel guitar, toys, & drum machine since you asked) the duo have crafted a recording that successfully combines the myriad of influences of its creators into an organic and unique whole.
It takes a wondrous horse such as this to take the intelligent listener on a trip through such a unique and appealing sonic journey, so hop on and ride away today!
Special Guest on “Questi Orizzonti Scomparsi”: Valerio Cosi
Cover Imagethis is an album about love. everyone has known love, and everyone has known loss. love is not just about warm fuzzy feelings, although that would be the part people say they like the best. and in any span of time, love changes and means different things to different people.
i never thought this would be an album. we started these recordings the same weekend i started I Hate People. it was a dark time, and when the tapes were taken off the reels i really thought that was the end of them. they were just going to sit and rot away somewhere.
but between christmas and new year of 2007, carl pulled them out and decided to finish them. he became obsessed with them somehow, i suppose in much the same way i had become obbsessed with finishing my own album earlier in the year. he worked every night for weeks, and as i wandered around the house i heard those songs everytime they played. and some of them made me cry, everytime. they sounded sad to me, because they were started in such a sad time. carl kept talking about wanting to have a new record out for 2008, and i told him only if it was named Songs For The Broken Hearted. he said fine, he just wanted it done.
so in early 2008 he gave me a cdr with what he felt were finished tracks, and asked me to write words for them. i had no ideas, i just kept crying when they were on. it really did not seem important to me to get them done because they only reminded me of things..........and then, one night, i started writing. i wrote words for 4 or 5 songs that night, and started singing the next evening. and we did rough mixes that i listened to for a week or so, and then i pulled out my journals, the gang of them that i had been filling since the fall of 2007, and i picked a few pieces that seemed like they would go with the music. i rerecorded some of the tracks with the new words, and resang some vocals i thought could be better. and the songs went from being all sad to being a reflection of how love works. how we are affected - by ourselves and others. how love makes you swoon and lonliness makes you cry. how when you love someone in this world you love them no matter where they are, and the connections you feel to and with them. love can make you blind, both when things are good and when they are not, and how do you react to being blind? what choices do you make and how do they change the world around you............
To purchase any past or present Greg Weeks or related titles please venture to Greg's Language of Stone label site: www.languageofstone.com
For European booking please contact: Isla at Toutpartout (isla@toutpartout.be)
Returning visitors may have noticed the profile makeover (har har). My new pic is the cover panel from my forthcoming record "The Hive." The record will find release in Europe on Wichita in late October (with a month long support tour in November) and will become available here in North America in February on Language of Stone.
Joining me on tour in November will be Festival, who, along with Wooly Mar, will make up my touring band. Excitement abounds!
Please take a moment to check out the online residence of the record label I run, Language of Stone. If you like my stuff there's a very strong chance you will like a lot of the artists I release. I should also mention that all items in my back catalog are available for purchase there: www.languageofstone.com
All prior band/artist information is now irrelevent. You need only know this:
1. Stones give and receive energy. 2. The great Giza pyramid was really a power plant. 3. Liver stones are occluding your bile ducts. 4. Greg Weeks is also an Esper, and a Grass, and a The Valerie Project, and a La Secta.
Artist: Jackie O Motherfucker Album: Freedomland Label: Very Friendly Review date: Oct. 9, 2008
Freedomland documents a series of live performances by the summer 2006 incarnation of Jackie O Motherfucker, an outfit centered around guitarist and turntablist Tom Greenwood, but with a rotating cast of supporting members. This version of JOMF is a particularly incendiary one, jettisoning the gentler folkier experiments of the Theo Angell/Samara Lubielski years, and focusing instead on a noisy, freely improvised clatter and storm.
The impetus for the shift is likely Inca Ore’s Eve Salens, who also sang with JOMF on 2006’s Valley of Fire. She is an extraordinarily volatile presence here, caterwauling and moaning and free-associating through a minefield of explosive sounds. Utterly unconstrained, she has a speaking-in-tongues quality that encourages everyone else in the band to greater levels of cacophony. Consider for instance, the relatively accessible opening track "Devotion" where she chants "You know devotion," over and over at escalating volumes. As she approaches catharsis, the drummer, Danny Sasaki, follows right along with her, his pounding coalescing into an almost continuous barrage of pounding. The guitars, too, erupt into jagged masses of discord, underlining the chaotic crescendo. The lyrics seem almost random. They are delivered in a flat sing-song with odd syllables emphasized. And yet, the excitement is palpable.
released september 8, 2008 as an installment in the oscillation III series. sold only as a part of the set.
gucci rapidshare download is the magik markers at their most intense and subversive. ready to rock your ass with more than just guitar and drums, the markers are coming at you this time around with violins, manipulated dumpster-dived hip hop tapes, synths, joshua burkett on organ, ben chasny on acoustic guitar and all sorts of other fun. despite all of these other diverse elements, the old-style guitar/drum freak out "the clement, the concealing" is the single most shredding moment in the band's complete catalog. grab a six pack and enjoy.
Travellers Two is a full length recording from the duo of Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Sharron Kraus. Togerther Kraus & Burke create an ethereal record of dark-folk magic. Tara Burke and Sharron Kraus were due to travel to Finland together for a week but missed the flight, so instead they decided to spend the week recording together and Travellers Two is the result. The time was spent out in the fields, visiting burial mounds, and then coming back to Sharron's home studio to work. They had played previously together and done some recording but this is the first time an album was conceived.
Fursaxa is Tara Burke. Formerly a member of the Silbreeze band UN, Tara started her Fursaxa project in 1999 after UN disbanded. After being a long time resident of Philadelphia, Tara decided to leave the "city of brotherly love" for the touring life. So from April 2005-April 2006 she toured extensively throughout the UK, the USA, and Europe with friends and fellow musicians Jack Rose, Sharron Kraus, Alexander Tucker, Christina Carter, Marcia Bassett, and the Spires that in the Sunset rise, to name a few. For her live performances she uses mostly looped vocals, flutes, and percussion, a casio keyboard, guitar, and mandolin, in an attempt to transport her audience into the ethereal realms. On her forthcoming album Alone in the Dark Wood she employs a myriad of instruments such as mandolin, guitar, violin, banjo, balalaika, organ, bells,, flute, percussion, and voice. This album was recorded and mixed in Finland and Pennsylvania. Tara has recently been collaborating with several other musicians. Espers member Helena Espvall and Tara have a duo called Anahita, and in 2006 released Arcana en Cantos on the Deserted Village label from Ireland. They are currently working on their second release. Currently, Fursaxa is playing and recording her music in the rural hills of Pennsylvania.
Sharron Kraus is a singer/musician/songwriter who creates music rooted in the folk traditions of England and Appalachia. Her work is characterized by soil-rich vocals, haunting banjo, fine acoustic guitar and visionary wordcraft. Her songs are populated by a carnival array of fatally charismatic characters, telling tales of enslavement, perversion, incest, obsession, love and death. Sharron’s live performances are stark, compelling, and delicate. As with her music, her performance continues the tradition of the balladeer. She is like the roving storyteller, bringing tales of terror, sadness and joy to a stranger’s hearth on a dark and stormy night.
Sharron’s debut album Beautiful Twisted was released by Australian psych label Camera Obscura in 2002 and received rave reviews around the world. It was listed in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Critics’ Top Albums of 2002. After touring with US psychedelic folk band The Iditarod, she collaborated with them on an album of wintry songs and soundscapes entitled Yuletide and released by avant/experimental label Elsie and Jack in 2003
Sharron’s second solo album, Songs of Love and Loss, was recorded at home in Oxford and at Dungeon Studios in the Cotswolds. The album features Jane Griffiths on fiddle and viola, Jon Fletcher on harmonica and occasional guitar, banjo and vocals, Colin Fletcher on bass, as well as BBC Folk Award-winning fiddler Jon Boden and Grammy-nominated early music violinist Giles Lewin. The album was finished in Providence and mixed with Jeffrey Alexander (The Iditarod, Black Forest/Black Sea). Songs of Love and Loss is a natural follow-up to Beautiful Twisted, in places darker and more discordant, in others gentler and sweeter.
Other recent and ongoing collaborations include The Black Dove, an album written and recorded with Californian folk songsmith Christian Kiefer; Tau Emerald, a duo with Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Leaves From Off the Tree, an album of traditional songs recorded with Meg Baird and Helena Espvall released on Bo’ Weavil Recordings.
Sharron has been featured in The Wire, Dirty Linen, New Folk Sounds, Arthur Magazine, Ptolemaic Terrascope and Broken Face. She has been interviewed on BBC Radio 3 for ‘A Place Called England’ discussing the future of English folk music and recorded sessions for BBC Radio Scotland, Freakzone on Radio 6, and independent radio stations across the US. Her fanbase includes veteran folkies Shirley Collins and Archie Fisher as well as indie figureheads Michael Gira, David Tibet and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore
A sprawling follow-up to 1999’s critical and commercially successful release Empty Bell Ringing In The Sky, Ayahuasca represents the most comprehensive survey of Pelt activities to date. Recorded over a period of more than two years at various live and studio sessions, the double CD shows the heavily-bearded trio broadcasting from some lesser-known and newly-discovered corners of the drone-omniverse. Most striking about the record is the inclusion of several traditional tunes, arranged for the group’s eclectic instrumentation. While the band has been performing some acoustic material for several years and let some sneak out on the limited edition For Michael Hannas CDR, Ayahuasca is the first release to fully explore this part of their repertoire. "The Cuckoo" and ‘Deep Sunny South" are traditional Appalachian numbers, played and sung with considerable skill and feeling. The sawing bowed acoustic guitar on "The Cuckoo" and the rolling banjo and Tibetan bowl accompaniment on "Deep Sunny South" draw a direct line between raw/folk music traditions and the deep, visceral drone music that Pelt have specialized in over the past several years. Combining the two styles neatly, "A Raga Called John" features Jack Rose’s very, very fine country-blues/Fahey-influenced fingerstyle guitar over a shifting backdrop of hurdy-gurdy and concertina, before giving way to tanpuras overrun by fretless banjo. Of course, on top of all of this easily comprehensible music there’s plenty of ear-cleansing ecstatic drone, from the two long flotation-inducing trios for bowed electrics and Esraj to the wall-shaking electric hurdy-gurdy mania of "Bear Head Apparition." Truly a record for our times, such as they are. 10 Tracks, 134 Minutes.
First new studio recordings from Pelt in 3 years finds them picking up where 2005’s Untitled CD left off – delivering massive slabs of heavy, all-acoustic drone action. “Waning Crescent” is an ominous workout for three large gongs, rich with overtones and subsonic rumble. “Fire Signs Along the Field” offers a slightly jarring quartet of spare string noise, with Nathan Bowles (Black Twigs, Spiral Joy Band) sitting in on double bass. “Cast Out to Deep Waters” is an immense 30 minute epic that fits into the archetypical classics in the Pelt canon, in the vein of “Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky” and Untitled’s “I.” The all too brief “Crown of Comets” closes the CD with the chiming, overlapping ring of bells recorded in Virginia’s Falls Ridge caves. In card folio.
released march 3, 2008 as an installment in the oscillation III series. sold only as a part of the set.
over the course of the thirty-six minute one for merz, thurston moore (sonic youth, et al) and andrew macgregor (gown, the bastard wing) present the listener with just that - a dense and heady brew of squall and fury. the duo gets down and really gets dirty. seriously, little more is needed by way of description. recorded live by andrew kesin on january 19, 2007 at the issue project room in brooklyn.
Rhys Chatham (born September 19, 1952, New York City) is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions. He has lived in France since 1987.
Early Years
Chatham began his musical career as a piano tuner for avant-garde pioneers La Monte Young and Glenn Gould. He soon studied under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and minimalist icon Tony Conrad; Chatham and Conrad played together in an early ensemble. In 1971, while still in his teens, Chatham became the first music director at the experimental art space The Kitchen in lower Manhattan. His early works, such as Two Gongs (1971) owed a significant debt to Young and other minimalists.
His concert productions included experimenters Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and early alternative rockers such as Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, John Lurie, and Fred Frith. He has worked closely with visual artist/musician Robert Longo, particularly in the 1980s, and on an experimental opera called XS: The Opera Opus (1984) with the visual artist Joseph Nechvatal.
Compositions from the late 1970s and early 1980s
By 1977, Chatham's music was heavily influenced by punk rock, having seen an early Ramones concert. He was particularly intrigued by and influential upon the group of artists music critics would label No Wave in 1978. That year, he began performing Guitar Trio around downtown Manhattan with an ensemble that included Branca, as well as Nina Canal of Ut. Some of this work parallels multi tracked and unison tuned guitar directions developed by Lou Reed and Chuck Hammer. During this period, he wrote several works for large guitar ensembles, including Drastic Classicism, a collaboration with dancer Karole Armitage. Drastic Classicism was first released in 1982 on the compilation New Music from Antarctica, put together by Kit Fitzgerald, John Sanborn and Peter Laurence Gordon. It was also included on the 1987 album that also included his 1982 composition Die Donnergötter (German for "The Thundergods").
Members of the New York City noise rock band Band of Susans began their careers in Chatham's ensembles; they later performed a cover of Chatham's "Guitar Trio" on their 1991 album, The Word And The Flesh. (This parallels the way that members of fellow NYC noise rockers Sonic Youth began their careers in Branca's ensembles; Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth did play with Chatham as well.)
Chatham began playing trumpet in 1983, and his more recent works explore improvisatory trumpet solos; these are performed by Chatham himself, employing much of the same amplification and effects that he acquired with the guitar, over synthesized dance rhythms by the composer Martin Wheeler. His 1990s recordings in this style saw release on Ninja Tune Records as the compilation Neon.
Recent activity
In 2002, he enjoyed a resurgence following the release of a limited-edition 3 CD retrospective box set on the record label Table of the Elements, An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: Selected Works 1971-1989, complete with 130-page booklet. The An Angel Moves Too Fast To See part of the title comes from Chatham's 1989 composition for 100 guitars. He has been since touring with his 100-guitar orchestra in Europe.
In 2005, he was commissioned by the city of Paris, in his adopted homeland, to write a composition for 400 electric guitars entitled A Crimson Grail, as part of the Nuit Blanche Festival. Approximately 10,000 people were present at the performance, and 100,000 more watched it on live television. A CD of excerpts from this concert was released in January 2007 by Table Of The Elements.
Rhys Chatham is currently touring the original 30 minute version of Guitar Trio in the USA and Europe, renamed G3 because the instrumentation has been increased to between six and ten electric guitars, electric bass and drums. In February 2007 he completed a twelve-city tour called the Guitar Trio (G3) Is My Life North America Tour, which was accompanied by the original film by Robert Longo that was projected behind the performance, entitled Pictures for Music (1979). The sets consisted of local musicians from each city of the performances, including members of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Husker Du, Brokeback, Lichens, Town & Country, Die Kreuzen, Bird Show and others. A three-CD box set of these performances was released by Table of the Elements in March 2008.
Chatham has continued to tour the original version of Guitar Trio in Europe throughout 2007 and 2008, including performances at:
* Festival Desgressions - 7 March 2007, Barcelona, Spain * L'Ecole Régionale de Beaux Arts - 25, 26 April 2007, Valence, France * Kosmische Club - 10 August 2007, Oslo, Norway * ZXZW Independent Culture Festival - 22, 23 September, Tilburg, the Netherlands * Festival Soy - 29 October 2007, Nantes, France * Galleria Toledo - 26 March 2008, Naples, Italy
Rhys Chatham made his first American presentation of a composition for a one-hundred guitar orchestra in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on May 23, 2008, with an orchestra comprised of local students and teachers, as well as many professional guitarists. This performance was the premiere of a new composition entitled Les 100 Guitares: G100.
Author, activist, painter and sound artist Masami Akita had been at the foreground of experimental music for over 25 years. Inspired by psycedelic rock, free jazz, early electronic composition as well the physical arts, especial Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, Masami Akita has created a musical language all his own.
Dolphin Sonar is Merzbow's full length protest album against the annual brutal slaughtering of some 2,500 dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture Japan. This is an angry album full of beats, blasts and broken glass. Clattering smashes are pursued by by pulsing analog whirls like the heart of a dolphin being chased through the bloodied waters of Taiji. Filtered blasts of pummel and sound slaughter. Another Merzbow classic with the finest cover art money can buy by Jenny Akita. Liner notes from Captain Paul Watson.