New Releases

2023 Batch #3

salad
Riverside Ishiyama

Embracing the impermanency of the world and its ever-fluctuating dynamics, salad offers an intimate portrait of life and the sounds that animate it. Riverside Ishiyama opens a window into a typical Japanese apartment, rich with the activities of daily life and the delicate interactions between a new mother and child. The tinkering and whirring of these subtle, incidental sounds commingle with birdsong and the bustling city outside — altogether engrossing the listener in a calm and joyful atmosphere where each mesmerizing moment is a celebration of life and an affirmation that everything is precisely as it should be.

Niko-Matti Ahti
Looking For A Ruler

A strange and alluring admixture of guitar and sine tones, electronics, and field recordings. The sounds have a crystal-like clarity that allows for the perception of their depths and distances. Its episodic form is structured by a compositional spine — with its irregular vertebrae both cohering its shape and allowing it flexibility. As its title suggests, Looking For A Ruler is involved in the construction of space, the stitching together of a world wherein perspective is always a composite: of the concrete materiality of sound and its abstraction, of the ‘real’ acoustic space and its fictional elaboration — these are arranged, assembled, and held in a tight, suspenseful dialogue.

Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy
New Rudiment Candidates For Snare Drum

With a microscopic focus on the snare drum, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy extracts and manipulates its sound in a variety of tunings whilst maintaining a precision and simplicity of method and form. This exercise is a common one for the artist, in which he limits both the instruments used and the techniques with which its sounds are processed — in this case using only reverb and hard EQ-ing to engineer the final outcome. Even with these self-imposed restrictions, there is a playfulness and freedom that emerges from its textured layering of atmospheric tones and lively, aperiodic percussion.

Aki Onda
Transmissions From The Radio Midnight

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This project, entitled Transmissions from The Radio Midnight, started around 2006, when I acquired a Sony TCM F59 — an FM/AM radio and cassette recorder combined in a slim, handheld body. Since then, whenever I went on a trip, I would throw it into my suitcase and take it around with me. No matter which country I was in, upon returning to the hotel room I made a habit of listening to the radio into the late hours of the night. As soon as I would snuggle into bed, I would begin tuning the radio in search of a program that I liked.

If I concentrated intently on my fingers controlling the knob, I could sometimes catch two or three frequencies at once and hear the overlap of different languages. Otherwise I would scan through frequencies and jump around programs to hear the juxtaposition of different languages, such as Spanish, Swedish, French, Polish, Arabic, Korean, among others. There was no greater joy than the moment in which I would begin to hear these languages, which were foreign to me, not as words but as sound and texture. Was I enjoying text-sound compositions with alien words? Perhaps it was the abstract fusing of these lingual sounds. It was, at the very least, something akin to sound poetry.

I would often fall asleep while doing this — and so, just as often, the radio would continue playing in my dreams. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to the high-pitched beep of a test tone bouncing off the walls of the hotel room. On other occasions I would awaken in the mornings to some unknown program, or, if the tuning was off, simply static noise.

For this album, I selected some of my favorite segments from the recordings made in ten-or-so countries over the span of roughly a decade, beginning in 2008. All of the fragments are presented just as they were captured. Since frequency behavior is often unpredictable, and since the act of catching waves was done manually, the recordings capture all sorts of incidental sounds, including various kinds of static noise and radio interference.

The radio is like an ocean of languages. It continuously projects a million chatterings happening simultaneously all over the world. This album captures and presents a tiny drop of this ocean, while the ocean itself flows onward — enormous, endless, infinite — for as long as the medium itself lasts. Isn’t that amazing?

Aki Onda September 20, 2022

Available Digitally and on Limited Edition Vinyl

Eventless Plot
Distance Between Us

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Eventless Plot joins forces with a duo of clarinets for the aptly titled Distance Between Us, an extended composition that gives sensual expression to the nature of distance and its implied correlate, closeness – reflecting and blurring the two across multiple levels both apparent on the music's surface and hidden beneath it.

As with previous releases, the ensemble forgoes straightforward narrative forms in favor of a process they call 'semi-composition,' which involves a pre-determined assemblage of basic materials: tones, rhythms, melodic fragments, harmonies, textures. Musicians use these materials to guide their decisions whilst remaining free to play according to their own musical sensibilities, independently emerging and receding, spontaneously converging and diverging. The result is a kaleidoscopic music of slowly yet constantly shifting patterns, harmonies, and textures, a crystalline whole that, rather than presenting that which undergoes change, is the very expression of change itself.

Eventless Plot – Piano, Prepared piano, Inside Piano, Tapes, Electronics, Modular synth
Chris Cundy – Bass clarinet
Margarita Kapagiannidou – Clarinet

Eventless Plot is
Vasilis Liolios
Aris Giatas
Yiannis Tsirikoglou

Available Digitally and on Limited Edition Vinyl

John McCowen
Models of Duration

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The latest from the uncompromising John McCowen is a split release between Dinzu Artefacts and Astral Spirits. Models of Duration follows the same trajectory as McCowen's other amazing solo releases - Solo Contra (International Anthem, 2017), 4 Chairs in 3 Dimensons (Astral Spirits, 2018), Mundanas I - V (Editions Wandelweiser, 2018) but is also a whole world beyond those. McCowen continues to focus on extended possibilities of the clarinet family as well as acoustic phenomena (as with all his previous releases, there is no amplification or electronically generated sounds here) and it all shines through more dramatically than ever on Models of Duration. "Duration I" & "Duration II" bookend the record with similarly sustained and rhythmic drones that prepare us for what is to come & also bring us back into the real world at the end of the record. "Foggd" and "Hoskin" both traverse new levels of intensity that McCowen hasn't hit before. Just when you get settled into any of the four tracks on the album and think you know what's coming next, McCowen subtly shifts tones and sounds enough to surprise, while still maintaining a steady through line.While Models of Duration is technically a solo release, you will notice that Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Master Musicians of Bukkake, Eyvind Kang, Oren Ambarchi, Earth, Anna Von Hausswolff, Six Organs of Admittance, Marissa Nadler, Boris, etc) is credited and also plays a major role on the record. The overall arc of the album is in large part due to Dunn's deft recording and mixing. "Hoskin" should win an award for most intense clarinet recording ever made. Every time I listen the walls of my house shake and I couldn't be happier. Rather than imposing his sound onto the album, Dunn helps bring out the aural magic in McCowen's playing and compositions, a true collaborator in every sense.Models of Duration also marks McCowen's first vinyl release, a co-release between Dinzu Artefacts and Astral Spirits. The physical & aural space that this record takes up while listening is truly stunning, an acoustic phenomena all on its own. While not a particularly easy listen, the album is also not entirely harsh either, an enveloping world that I don't want to leave when the record ends.

John McCowen – contrabass clarinet / compositions
Randall Dunn – engineer / mixing

Available Digitally and on Limited Edition Vinyl