Dissonant Plane

AMBIENT/DRONE:

 

Deceh LP  (Important Records)  $21  - acoustic/electronic drone, screenprinted insert, ltd 400

 

Eleh  ”Homage To The Sine Wave”  LP  (Taiga)  $22  - minimal drone electronics, numbered edition of 500

 

FM3  ”Buddha Machine II - Lime”  Soundbox  (FM3)  $24  - new loops, pitch control, better speaker, lime case

 

Radigue, Eliane  ”Triptych”  CD  (Important Records)  $14  - awesome archival minimalism from France

 

Radigue, Eliane  ”Vice Versa, Etc…”  2 x CD  (Important Records)  $16  - awesome archival minimalism from France, 2 discs

 

 

 

CLASSICAL:

Brown, Earle  ”Folio and Four Systems”  CD  (Tzadik)  $15  - early avant-garde & graphic scores, friend of John Cage

 

Gibson, Jon  ”Criss X Cross”  CD  (Tzadik)  $15  - solo flute & saxophone, worked with La Monte, Riley, etc

 

Stockhausen, Karlheinz  ”Spiral I & II, Pole, Wach, Japan, Zykus, Tierkries”  2 x CD  (EMI Classics)  $14  - reissue of amazing 2 LP box of experimental pieces

 

 

 

EXPERIMENTAL:

Airway  ”Live at LACE”  LP  (Harbinger Sound)  $25  - 1st vinyl reissue of early (1978) influential wall of noise

 

Conrad, Tony & Olson, Tovah  ”Let There Be Music”  LP  (Tovinator)  $13  - ltd 200, instantly sold out from the label, one side only

 

De Martinville, Edouard-Leon Scott  ”Au Clair de la Lune”  7″  (Parlortone)  $8  - 1st experiment in recording sound from 1860!!!

 

H.N.A.S.  ”Im Schaten der Möhre”  CD  (Streamline)  $14  - finely crafted German weirdness, their best album

 

Starving Weirdos  ”Father Guru”  CD  (Azul Discografica)  $14  - long trancey tracks

 

Winderen, Jana  ”Noisiest Guys on the Planet”  C40  (Ash International)  $7  - field recordings of underwater crustaceans, ltd 250

 

 

 

JAZZ/IMPROV:

Supersilent  ”7″  DVD  (Rune Grammofon)  $23  - stellar DVD video of a live concert

 

 

 

ROCK:

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The  ”Gorilla”  CD  (EMI)  $12  - humorous English music w/Neil Innes, Vivian Stanshall

 

Fushitsusha 2 x CD  (P.S.F. Records)  $38  - heavy rock w/Seijiro Murayama, Yasushi Ozawa, 2 CD

 

Neung Phak  ”Fucking USA”  7”  (Abduction)  $8  - great cover of Korean anti-American rock tune, ltd 300

 

Sic Alps  ”A Long Way Around to a Shortcut”  2 x LP  (Drag City)  $20  - lo-fi garage noise rock

 

Six Organs of Admittance / Azul  ”Split”  LP  (P.S.F. Records)  $21  - meditative & folky, ltd 800, already sold out from label

 

 

SOUNDTRACK:

 

Seazer, J.A.  ”Den’en Ni Shisu”  CD  (Showboat / Sky Station)  $28  - for Shuji Terayama film w/members of Tenjo Sajiki

 

 

WORLD:

 

Souleyman, Omar  ”Dabke 2020: Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria”  CD  (Sublime Frequencies)  $14  - fantastic Arabic pop music that really moves

 

Various  ”String of Pearls”  LP  (Mississippi Records)  $14  - cool collection of rare 78s from around the world

 

Over the weekend, Jesse Paul Miller played what he estimates as only his second solo performance.  For this he mixed together field recordings and played them back through 6 speakers surrounding the audience.  It started incredibly delicate and slowly built into a mass of sounds.  I recognized several things as being from Asia as I’ve heard these wonderful self produced CDRs of his recordings from there.  The latest one is “Asia Radio Environments“, a fairly self descriptive title.  However in addition to picking up frequencies in Asian countries, Jesse has recorded the environment around him as he was exploring the shortwave dial.  So the unstable signals are paired with bird singing, traffic and other ambient noises heard in Java, Bali, Lombok, Myanmar, Thailand and Japan.  The results are suprisingly calm.  However, I think the most meditative title he has done is the popular “Asia Archive 2008 Volume 2: Muslim Call to Prayer, Java, Indonesia” which we finally got restock of.  Both discs are quite limited and come in hand numbered editions.

Did you know there is an experimental music scene in Malaysia?  It’s pretty small still, but there are two labels that are putting out things on CD fairly regularly.  The most active is Herbal International run by Goh Lee Kwang, but the Xing-Wu label has also put several titles as well.  Both labels seem really keen to release European artists at the moment, especially ones from France.  In the most recent batch from Herbal are a double CD by Jean-Luc Guionnet, a collaborative disc by Eric La Casa and Cédric Peyronnet, and a reissue of the second Beequeen album.  Beequeen are a Dutch duo and create really nice ambient textures with minimal organic rhythms and “Time Waits for No One” is one of their better early works.  Cédric Peyronnet is better known as toy.bizarre and like his collaborator Eric La Casa is known for working field recordings into lovely compositions.  Their duet together is entitled “La Creuse” and finds them mapping a particular area in central France.  Eric La Casa was previously in a trio called Afflux, and one of the other members of this group was Jean-Luc Guionnet.  On his double CD “Non-Organic Bias” he presents three long works.  They focus on the organ which he plays in a very experimental way exploiting lone tones and silences with great dynamic effect.  These works would have sounded at home in Deutsche Grammophon’s Avant-Garde series of LPs.  Quite a different facet of Jean-Luc’s work is heard on the CD “Le Bruit Du Toit” where he plays saxophone.  This album released by Xing-Wu is a duet with original Fushitsusha drummer Seijiro Murayama.  Recorded at a temple in Japan, the two improvisations reveal a delicate attention to timbre and close listening to each other.  The third member of Afflux. Eric Cordier, is represented on another Xing-Wu disc called “Dispositif: Canal Saint Martin“.  Recorded in collaboration with Emmanuel Mieville, this disc takes another approach to field recordings as it is a real time composition made by placing 30 microphones around the Paris city hall and manipulating them via laptop triggered ’sonic objects’.  Although not French, Michael Northam and Seijiro Murayama met in France and Switzerland and slowly developed the album “Moriendo Renascor“.  A meeting of acousmatic composter and free improviser has resulted in a finely detailed meditation on small sounds and drones.  But that is not all from Xing-Wu as we also got the one release they have done featuring only Malaysian musicians.  “Shàng” presents the three artists who I believe to be behind the label. Each presents a very different work.  Tham Kar Mun is very minimal with sudden outbursts of sound and Yandsen presents solo improvised acoustic guitar.  However for me, the best track here is the 26 minute “Funeral” by Yeoh Yin Pin.  Based on a recording of a Chinese Taoist funeral ceremony, the sounds here are just magical and reason enough to own this disc.

We’ve rounded out our selection of privately published CDRs by Jesse Paul Miller.  Actually one of the three titles we just got is a DVD-R titled “Ambient Thailand and Laos” which he describes as “static one-perspective videos (”pillow shot” style) made in 19 locations thailand and laos january / february 2005“.  Beautiful scenes of South East Asia and what better way to compliment that than with “Luk Thung & Molam LP Archive Vol. 1“?  A selection of tracks from Thai vinyl picked up on his travels, this CDR is a fantastic collection of pop music unknown to western ears.  What makes it even better is the cover collage featuring many album covers in miniature.  This disc sounds great and keeps all the vinyl noise intact.  And if you like vinyl noise, definitely check out “Taemgip Mahkram and Eilrahc Rekrap“.  This is a slightly older JPM title packaged in a fantastic sleeve that apes the classic Folkway LP design.  Here the sounds are thick with scratches and pops making the backwards music sound even more ancient.  As before, these are all numbered editions of either 30 or 40 copies, so don’t hestitate to snap these up.  The previous batch certainly found its fan and has people excited about these discs (which is why we are sold out of several earlier titles).