New Releases

2024 Batch #2

Henry Fraser
Breath Line

Henry Fraser bores into the sound of the double bass to explore the endless patterns of its otherwise hidden contours. The instrument acquires its own dynamic landscape, its own body, and its own mode of perception – opening a space of acute, granular perceptivity in which presumed boundaries are blurred: between center and periphery, sonic and tactile, instrumentalist and instrument, performer and listener.

Marco Baldini
Fuochi

Featuring the 1885 pipe organ of Chiesa di San Martina a Maiano and using musical materials derived from Vincenzo Galilei's Fronimo (1581), these pieces articulate the evocative possibilities of sustained tones and low tessituras. The protracted durations of these skeletal structures foreground their lush and often unexpected harmonic progressions, each moment revealing a world of subtle mystery and drama.

Lea Bertucci
Hold Music

Hold Music is a pair of expansive long-form loop pieces for alto saxophone and electronics, intended to be listened to on infinite repeat. Entrancing and prismatic, constantly spiraling, this is a music that adapts to any listening situation – equally well-suited as accompaniment to daily activities as it is rewarding to the concentrated listen.

2024 Batch #1

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Billy Gomberg
Nanahari Edit

The undulating waves and patterns of electronic sound are layered with field recordings that capture the incidental textures of daily life – together ushering in a mesmerizing sound world: elegiac, yet playful, and utterly sensuous. This world blossoms within the blurred space connecting interior and exterior life, wherein each sound recasts the other and each entanglement suggests hidden dimensions of experience.

Michelle Lou & Stefan Maier
Live at UCSD

Lou's constantly shifting cloud of spectral densities and angular textures are juxtaposed by Maier's throbbing drones and pointillistic interjections. Unremitting and inexorable, constantly transforming sound passes through multiple states, reaching thresholds of intensity only to change phase yet again. In this live recording, Lou and Maier explore the material excess of sound, endlessly proliferating, in a state of unruly becoming.

a0n0
Exploders_We

A wild and beautiful journey into the ecstatic regions of noise. Unfettered distortion ceaselessly billows and unfurls, harmonized and melodized in all sorts of unexpected ways. The momentum is undeniably forward in every direction, while the jarring suspensions that momentarily intervene to restrict the sound's movement serve ultimately to unleash its sublime energy all the more fiercely.

Chantal Michelle
ℎ− 2− ℎ− − 2 ℎ−

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Chantal Michelle's latest work is an immersive composition across four movements, originally presented as a multi-channel installation and reworked for stereo. As with her previous release on Dinzu, Michelle exquisitely captures the raw, elemental processes of the natural world – here evoking the layered, grainy textures of geological formations. The track's titles both denote these geological processes and describe the composition's sonic behaviors and trajectories, conceptualized as a metaphor for the breakdown of love.

Michelle is joined by Joanna Mattrey (viola) and Lea Bertucci (alto saxophone), whose instruments chart melodic paths across these textures. These melodic figurations do not function as structural markers in the piece, nor do they merely elaborate the underlying texture; instead, they offer an alternate perspective of its dimensions: emerging as a kind of after-image of the seemingly static object, or the object's memory of its own dynamic state of becoming.

ℎ− 2− ℎ− − 2 ℎ− is a standout accomplishment in Chantal Michelle’s ever-growing oeuvre.

Chantal Michelle – composition, feedback, synthesis
Joanna Mattrey – viola
Lea Bertucci – alto saxophone

Available Digitally and on Limited Edition Vinyl

2023 Batch #3

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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