Browse by Label: INFRACTION

Artist:	ZAMMUTO
Title:	Solutiore of Stareau: Disc One
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INFX 002CD

"Arising from a mammoth triple CDR released by Nick Willscher (aka Zammuto) a few years back as a private pressing, Infraction brings to light disc one of the Solutiore of Stareau trilogy (following the Apt. B records release of disc three entitled, simply, Willscher). This disc one is a quiet atmospheric minimal soundscape. Distant radio waves floating in the night, warm drones rising and falling, punctured by a faint yet insistent pulsing rhythm. Deep listening in which surface variation is so subtle -- getting lost in the recording for hours is almost inevitable IF YOU give it the time. Time well spent."

Artist:	POTTER, COLIN
Title:	See
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INFX 005CD

"Originally released as a 2 track cassette on the ICR label in 1990, See is now seeing a digitally remastered re-issue. One of the original 2 tracks has been remixed and a new additional track, an epic 24 minute meditative ambient piece entitled 'Drift' recorded in 2002 has been added. Despite the 12 year gap in the respective recordings, the new track fits perfectly with the floating stasis of the originals. This completes the trio of pieces that are described as 'music for hibernation'. Colin has long been a collaborator/engineer with Nurse With Wound and Current 93 as well as working in the collectives Monos, Ora & Kiln with Darren Tate, Andrew Chalk, Lol Coxhill, Daisuke Suzuki and many others."

Artist:	LILES, ANDREW
Title:	All Closed Doors
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INFX 006CD

"With a title such as 'Largactil and Dilaudin for the Soul' this newest release from British composer Andrew Liles should give an indication of the eccentricities from where this recording is coming from. One track of stark resonating piano followed by the slow warming of the orchestra that draws you in. Once there, it tip toes, echoes and dissolves with each track re-emerging more fractured than the next. Intricacies of creaks, dull thuds, traditional instrumentation and then subtle ambient drones. All Closed Doors could be the aural equivalent of living in a disused cupboard; dusty and empty -- dark and damp. Perhaps the definitive song on the album, 'What Never Will Be' is a bizarre ghostly version of the 'que sera sera'."

Artist:	BEEQUEEN
Title:	Music For the Head Ballett
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	INFX 009CD

"Always a lonesome recording with it's distant organ drones quietly amassed, Music for the Head Ballet was first bestowed upon us in 1996. The now defunct Isomorphic records had the privilege of issuing these 3 pieces of lulling resonating ambience. Music for the Head Ballet has had an elusive history. There is little information about the music listed anywhere. The reviews are scarce, and those few that do make a mention are consistent in their praise of this alluring work. The original 936 numbered copies seem to be carefully tucked away on coveted shelves as it is rarely seen making an appearance in any market platform. Even the names of the tracks support it's ambiguous nature ('Days that never were', 'White feathers on a dish, used to erect the pyramids' and 'These foolish things'). Now after so many years of myth making, this gorgeous work has been made available again by Infraction. This reissue features new artwork as well as a previously unreleased 13 minute additional track from the original sessions. It is quite possibly the most blissful track Beequeen have committed to disc."

Artist:	ULTRA MILKMAIDS & AIDAN BAKER
Title:	At Home With...
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INFX 010CD

"Years ago, when I first played Global Communication's 76:14, there was an undeniable warmth exuding from the speakers, the same warmth exists here in the initial moments of At Home With... -- the first collaboration from France's Ultra Milkmaids and the Canadian guitarist, Aidan Baker. Initial looks are deceiving however, and a sinewy metallic undercurrent dives and ascends through a pastoral framework. The vision clouds, becoming opaque, echoing metallic insects swirling about and a mellotron-led choir is buried in the distance somewhere. By the third and final track, the outlook has cleared substantially. The environment has taken the forefront, the sounds of a sleeping city one moment, church bells on a bright morning the next with Baker and the Ultra Milkmaids providing the perfect ambient accompaniment of slowly revolving drones. A refined and definitive collaborative statement from two of the more prolific artists recording in the realms of textural experimental ambient today."

Artist:	LILES, ANDREW
Title:	New York Doll
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	2CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	INFX 013CD

"New York Doll is (in part) constructed from field recordings made in Sweden, the Czech Republic, France, USA and the UK. It is a transatlantic recording of parallel universes. Boston MA, USA versus Boston, Lincolnshire, UK. Sounds have been cross-fertilized, genetically modified and decay between locations and events. New York Doll is full of tiny details, nuances and waves of sound constructed from many places and sound sources. Anagrams of time and space co-exist in the music. An impossibly complicated matrix has been constructed for the listener to interpret and unravel. Over 98 minutes spanning 2 CDs of strange and subtle ambience, calming yet uneasy arias interspersed with unexpected clicks and hollow thuds. Voices ask questions and there are no answers. Pretty golden loops cascade into a jumble of drones and geometric acoustic patterns of unfathomable glory that creek, bend, then shatter like falling crystal chandeliers. The fragments scatter and disappear into oblivion. This is a recording that is numerologically correct and anagrammatically active."

Artist:	ZIMIAMVIAN NIGHT
Title:	Zimiamvian Night 2
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	INFX 014CD

"Mike Bennett's guitar-based ambient drone is draped across sounds created on the other side of the world. Using New Zealander Christopher Orczy's harmonium works from his October release as a basis, Bennett recreates an entirely new majestic work. The result is a chilly, nearly mournful depiction of the sound of northern lights as they ascend and fall in the night sky. Bennett previously released his debut, Zimiamvian Night 1 on Infraction Records in 2005. It was a dark cavernous foray into Zoviet-style old-school ambient with tape loops and guitar-based drone. This new work is a leap forward in texture and atmosphere two years in the making."

Artist:	INOUE, TETSU
Title:	World Receiver
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	INFX 015CD

"Where to begin? World Receiver is quite possibly the one seminal disc that defines what ambient music is. It is the modern version (although recorded in 1996) of Brian Eno's On Land. In the middle of 1996, Inoue put together a recording combining atmospheric ambient and soundscapes evoking distant lands, faraway places. Nothing though particularly new to the followers of Inoue's work or in the field of ambient at that time. What separated World Receiver from Inoue's history and from the rest of the pack, was the seamless blending of environmental recordings literally from all over the world. The resulting collage was extremely detailed and precise without suffering from the weight of hundreds of hours of work and editing. It is a subtle texture from Inoue acting as a filter to what is intended to be receptions of signals from across the globe through one 'world receiver' radio. This is the audio document of the memory of paths travelled, sights observed, voices heard -- arbitrarily collected and purposefully assembled to a magnificent end. Originally issued by Instinct records in 1996, World Receiver has been out of print for many years. It is held in the highest regard by fans of ambient and Inoue worldwide. Often cited as his best work ever. This is an edition of 800 copies with a 6 panel full-color digipak."

Artist:	KILN
Title:	Thermals
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INFX 017CD

"Thermals debuted in the Spring of 2001 to a lucky lot of 100 people. Hand-stamped CD-Rs, homemade artwork housed an incredible set of micro-symphonic musics. Over the course of 7 years of collecting odd loopstrata rescued from quarter-inch tape obscurity, the three meticulous members of Kiln went about the daunting task of re-compiling, remastering and renovating what is now the 2005 Infraction Records edition of Thermals in its full-pressed glorious beauty. Elemental and immersive environments of Gaussian tone and color. There are rewards for the deep listener -- each of these sonic carousels expanding slowly becoming 'space-tuning' tonics whose lilting beauty is sensed rather than heard."

Artist:	MILIEU
Title:	Beyond the Sea Lies the Stars
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	INFX 018CD

"Mining a provenance of sounds from a distant & disbanded orchestra Milieu reassembles then quietly broadcasts the collected notes into a wide expanse. It is his first full ambient offering to be heard from a library of many hours of sound experimentation in drone, ambient and lush found sound litanies. Beyond the Sea is shrouded in distant fog...there are lights that seem to appear briefly and then are calmly eclipsed. There is a fascination in this nebulous balance of sonorous melodies from decades ago, almost hopeful, yet an undercurrent of a somber theme that is draped over the entire composition. This is American composer Milieu's first proper release -- following two limited edition releases for the Belgian label U-Cover. Influences include The Caretaker's Haunted Ballroom and from William Basinski's Disintegration Loops series."

Artist:	BEAUTUMN
Title:	Northing
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INFX 020CD

"This is a beautiful yet serious record. It is ambience, but not 'simply' ambient. These are cinematic tracks begging for a narrative, often invoking the skeletons of stories with sounds of footsteps, rain, winds, waves, fire and animal life (birds?) alongside metals and the odd machine. The sound is almost always a bit grand and roomy, as if reverbing off of the sky and thickly layered with varied-pitch tones and drones which often become so much a part of the soundscape that they become the foundation of its lushness, sometimes building tension, sometimes delivering an other-worldy, floating quality. As I listen to some of these tracks, I am reminded of times in my childhood during weather warnings when I stared at a dark sky, both menacing and terribly compelling, watching it roil too close to the ground where I stood."

Artist:	PACIONE, ADAM
Title:	From Stills to Motion
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	INFX 023CD

"An age of virtual audio saturation, of pre-articulated sound. Expressivity, once an array of possible voices, is ever more probabilized. Originality, once primary criterion, is cast from the platform, problematized. Wondering, late in modernity's day, what does it take to make a noise that matters? A keen-eared recontextualizer, an alchemist who can make sound, found or unfound, to walk its own way, outside the ready-made parade. Adam Pacione is one such new recruit to a group of like-minded musicians, kindred spirits Brian Grainger (Milieu), Mike Bennett (Zimiamvian Night), and Kiln, who have brought the ferment from their sound stills to the Infraction table. That label is now streaming a vital strain of new backwoods ambient, this latest from deep in the heart of (Ft. Worth) Texas -- experimental, but harmonically-inclined, apparently lo-tech, but substantially audiocratic. Pacione's distinction lies in drawing the vectors of several lines of musical enquiry into a trajectory which leads to a suggestive affective place. Echoes of the enviro-drone clan, low-lying labels like and/OAR, Twenty Hertz -- old familiars of Infraction, the silhouettes of whose kinfolk -- Keith Berry, Paul Bradley -- are heard remotely. Pacione starts from base material, conventional instruments, mainly guitars, the odd analog synth and sample, but no tone is left unturned. Like a tenderized but still chewy analog to recent Kranky fuzz-blur harmonizations, his source-sounds quietly exult in altered states -- compressed, granularized, weathered, distressed... in a word (Pacione's) 'grexed.' Grex comes from cross-breeding -- environment traits spun with the string-steel of source, further fleshing out, the familiar contour lent unfamiliar edge. A delicate and intricate weave results -- a warp to the weft, dissonance offset by harmony, consonance subverted by pitch-bend. Basinski may have modeled the suggestivities of disintegration, mate Milieu pointed the emotive caché in sepia-stained sonorities, and Boards brothers the heart-swoop from modulating detune."

Artist:	NORTHERN
Title:	Drawn
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INFX 024CD

"Northern's debut offering, another in Infraction's sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience, are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes, and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It's the New Quiet. The album opens with 'Coasting' in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil (Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf. the later "Pacific"). The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358, Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating -- at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scatter and a cushion for repose."

Artist:	BETHELL, CRAIG
Title:	A Day Full of You, A Night Tired of Me
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INFX 026CD

"A Day Full Of You, A Night Tired Of Me is the debut album by ex-Locust vocalist Craig Bethell. The album displays a plaintive songwriting style that unashamedly croons its way through a set of eleven varied songs influenced as much by avant-pop baritones Scott Walker and David Sylvian as it is by a troubled and melancholic Chet Baker. Bethell's vocals are late night deliveries, a haunting idiom of the post-modern torch song. Mark Van Hoen (Locust, Mojave 3, Sing Sing) lends production duties and evokes an atmosphere of Low-era Bowie, (as on the instrumental overture of 'December'), employs a careful use of Rhodes piano & subtle strings ('Bad Blood'), as well as vintage synthesizer, distant harp motifs and brushed drums ('Finding The Light' & 'History Repeats Itself'). London-based songwriter/singer Craig Bethell has sporadically written, recorded and performed his songs since 1983. His working life has largely been devoted to magazine publishing. Through demand from different quarters (die-hard Locust fans, new fans via MySpace, etc.), Craig was encouraged to revisit the best of hitherto unreleased material from past sessions with Van Hoen. These works were revised, re-recorded, remixed and revamped, along with some completely new material, to make up A Day Full Of You, A Night Tired Of Me, an album many years in the making."

Artist:	CELER
Title:	Discourses of the Withered
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INFX 028CD

"Celer is a husband (Will) and wife (Danielle) duo from California that use a variety of strings as the basis for their sound. Cello, viola, violin are mixed in with field recordings, choir, live Theremin and then tape spliced and re-assembled in varying lengths to create a loop base. Those sounds are then sampled, layered and processed. The result is a shimmering orchestra. Periods of silence between the notes only enhance the sound. Though at times very haunting, it's brightly hazy ambient. Initially Discourses was to be 1 full-length CD with a bonus CDR (The Everything and the Nothing) to accompany the first 100 copies. When Celer presented the bonus material, with field recordings mixed in obtained by Danielle over several months in India, the quality of the material was so high that it was suggested and agreed to instead be a concurrent release of two full-length discs."

Artist:	ALOOF PROOF
Title:	Piano Text
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INFX 030CD

"There is no ambient record greater than Aloof Proof's Piano Text. I'm not the type of person given to grand, insupportable claims; this is simply a statement of fact. The album has equals, but no betters, and it is a tragedy that so few listeners have had the chance to hear this album in its entirety, let alone own a copy for themselves. It is the kind of album that becomes essential after just the first listen. Since it was quietly released in 1994 -- a time, remember, dominated by the ambient techno boom of such artists as the Orb and Future Sound of London -- it has achieved a kind of cult status among fans of the genre. This is largely due to the edited versions of the album's two tracks that appeared on Asphodel's sprawling drone compilations, opening the world of Aloof Proof to thousands of eager listeners in the mid-'90s. The overall sound of 'The Ghost Ship' and 'The Last Leaf' is simple to describe -- the tones of a piano are stretched to the horizon line; long, lingering sounds, the fluttering threads of them in the wind, drifting like subtle perfumes, a dream language culled from a very familiar instrument. In its way, it is also a kind of Mandelbrot image -- the briefest segments of the tracks can be listened to (like Eno's Neroli or Thursday Afternoon) to get an accurate idea of the whole. However, the magic of Piano Text is that, when taken as a duo of suites, the larger forms of the piece are revealed to be a classical composition of the utmost drama, suspense, nuance. It is, indeed, the music of the inexplicable dream worlds we all travel to during sleep. This is an album that must be listened to -- no words can adequately describe how spellbinding the music is, how staggeringly elegant it is." --B. Bieniowski

Artist:	PARKS
Title:	Umber
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INFX 031CD

"The story of Russian composer Parks' Umber CD has spanned approximately 12 years. Originally conceived in the heyday of the mid-'90s ambient sound' (1996 to be exact), Umber suffered from minimal distribution and several label collapses. Sound familiar to another great Russian artist (hint: Beautumn)? Superb ambient with environmental interludes, cinematic minor key passages. Think early Vangelis at his strongest, or a Tarkovsky soundtrack. Reworked and re-arranged in 2007 with a new tracklisting. Umber is released in an edition of 300 copies in a digipak."

Artist:	CELER
Title:	The Everything and the Nothing
Label:	INFRACTION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INFX 036CD

Previous Page Index of Labels Next Page