Browse by Label: INTRANSITIVE

Artist:	VA
Title:	Variious
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	2CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	INT 013CD

"Intransitive is very proud to present twenty-one new works of contemporary electro-acoustic and electronic music by our favorite artists. Sound by: Taylor Deupree (US), John Watermann (Austr.), Justin Bennett (Neth.), Michael Prime (UK), Kevin Drumm (US), Toshiya Tsunoda (Japan), Howard Stelzer and Brendan Murray (US), Roel Meelkop (Neth.), Jerome Noetinger (France), Pimmon (Austr.), *0 (Japan), Jos Smolders (Neth.), Klas Augustsson (Sweden), Martin Tetreault (Canada), John Hudak (US), the Brutum Fulmen (US), Marc Behrens (Germany), Richard Chartier (US), Voice Crack (Switz.), Brume (France), Jason Lescalleet (US). Text by: Achim Wollschied. Numbered edition of 1000 in slim double-jewelcase. Package design by Richard Chartier."

Artist:	MARCHETTI, LIONEL
Title:	Knud Un Nom De Serpent (Le Cercle Des Entrailles)
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 014CD

"Back by popular demand! Lionel Marchetti's classic album of harrowing tape music from 1999, Knud un Nom de Serpent (Le Cercle des Entrailles), was published by Intransitive in 1999, quickly sold out, and remains the most requested title to be resurrected from our back catalog. We're thrilled to make Knud available again, now with a striking new cover design and an appreciative essay by Bhob Rainey (nmperign, The BSC). The gripping drama of Knud un Nom de Serpent illustrates Marchetti's idea of popular music as Shamanic ritual, a gateway to ecstatic altered states. Armed with fierce wit and a razor blade, he smashes together sounds from all over the world into a hallucinatory cyclone of Jamaican reggae, French chanson, American avant-garde vocalists, Thai pop songs, nature recordings, spoken text and more. The result is a chilling work of furious, obliquely narrative tape-collage and tense, frightening scenes. As Marchetti explained to The Wire magazine, 'I've always been interested in the idea of the medicine man. Someone who by sheer force of imagination transports you into another world, part artist, part healer. Maybe that's what a composer is.'"

Artist:	STELZER & JASON TALBOT, HOWARD
Title:	Songs
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 021CD

"Songs contains eight concise pieces of electro-acoustic music created from cassette tapes and a single turntable. Since the duo's inception on 1999, they have worked toward developing a unified, improvisatory sonic language by approaching their machines in a decidedly instrumental manner. Though the music is informed by both free improvisation and musique concrete, it does not fit comfortably into either category. Stelzer elicits percussive blurts from his cassette tapes, manually applying pressure to the motors and gears of the tape decks. Talbot amplifies various parts of his turntable, exploring the body of the machine with such objects as paper clips and balloons. Their music takes the form of energetic, tightly-focused pieces which may, perhaps, resemble songs."

Artist:	MEELKOP, ROEL
Title:	5 (Ambiences)
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 024CD

"The music of 5 (Ambiences) deals with ways of approaching and conceptualizing ambient sound, of abstracting sounds from the world until they become much more than documentary observations. The music plays with some referential material (are they field recordings? digitally generated? does it matter?), a very wide dynamic range (to encourage active listening), evocative and even dramatic structures but also forbiddingly impersonal distance. It toys with the notion of 'ambient music' (as New Age wallpaper) by using ambiences to create deeply involving compositions which change as one changes one's listening focus. This music is open to any interpretation, or no interpretation at all. This is Meelkop's second CD on Intransitive. He is also a member of Kapotte Muziek, Goem, THU20, and the Audio.nl label. Previous albums have appeared on Mego, trente oiseaux, Staalplaat, 12k, Raster-Noton, and CMR."

Artist:	KAPOTTE MUZIEK & LETHE
Title:	Tsurumai
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 025CD

"Recorded in the industrial city of Nagoya, Japan, Tsurumai is an expansive album of rough electro-acoustic music. Starting from a few small clicks, the music steadily grows outward, uneasily shifting and expanding. Rude bumps interrupt narcotic drones, the telltale human hands of improvisation disappear into a mysterious group sound, acoustic and digital elements blur, vision fails, and time stops...Frans de Waard began his Kapotte Muziek (literally 'broken music') project in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1984, and went on to found the Korm Plastics label. In Nagoya, KM met up with Kuwyama Kiyoharu, aka Lethe, an omnivorous multi-instrumentalist whose work typically takes advantage of some acoustic peculiarity of the space in which it is recorded."

Artist:	NMPERIGN/JASON LESCALLEET
Title:	Love Me Two Times
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	2CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	INT 026CD

"The highly anticipated double-CD epic by Jason Lescalleet (tape loops) and nmperign (Bhob Rainey - soprano sax, and Greg Kelley - trumpet). The result of six years of live and studio collaboration, LM2X is by far the most ambitious and uncompromising statement yet by this formidable trio. The album begins as a more-or-less straight documentary-style recording of group improvisation, but don't get too comfortable... over the course of the next two hours, the ground steadily shifts, the bottom drops out, and any expectations a listener may have had going in are thoroughly trampled. Fans will find the usual ingredients here: crusty old reel-to-reel tape decks, cheap keyboards, amplified and acoustic horns...but rude tape splices, violent humor, and confusingly degraded fidelity push the music far from safe territory. The visceral drama of LM2X does not neatly spell out its intentions, nor does it signal exactly what it has up its sleeve. It exists in its own universe, demands repeat listens and to be taken on its own terms."

Artist:	MURRAY, BRENDAN
Title:	Wonders Never Cease
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INT 027CD

"Four years in the making, the music of Brendan Murray's latest/greatest album of cinematic drone anthems, Wonders Never Cease, was honed during live concerts around New York and New England. Recorded in situ, each track was painstakingly (re)assembled and embellished back at Murray's studio. While it cannot accurately be called a 'live album,' the adrenaline thrill of live performance is palpable as soon as the opening howl charges out from the speakers. From the laminal scorch of the opening track, through an electric fizz storm and a breathy hymn for what sounds like harmonica and folding chairs (?), the eyes-wide-open bliss of Wonders is exhilarating. Soulful, melodic and intimate, this is electro-acoustic music as gloriously life-affirming and natural as a sunrise."

Artist:	SEHT & STELZER
Title:	Exactly What You Lost
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INT 028CD

"This first album of cross-hemisphere hum by Seht (the nom de musique of one Stephan Clover) and Howard Stelzer emerged organically via tapes shared through the post between New Zealand and Boston over the course of a year or so. Without any spoken agenda or external organizing concept from the start, the music willed itself into a darkly psychedelic, implacably melancholy haze. A quick scramble of caffeinated tape action kicks things off, then the album rapidly dissipates into a thick, black sleep of environmental debris and humid fog. Worn loops were played into various outdoor acoustic environments (playgrounds, front porches, tress, other prosaic spots), then fed back into low-tech machines for further harmonic decay. Shapes form in the shadows and slip away as the edges blur. After a few attempts to heave itself up onto its feet, Exactly What You Lost eventually huffs its last breath and dissolves in a cavern of industrial tics."

Artist:	NERVE NET NOISE
Title:	Dark Garden
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INT 029CD

"Dark Garden, the new album of thrillingly idiosyncratic analog buzz by Nerve Net Noise (aka homemade synth duo of Hiroshi Kumakiri and Tagomago) , is the perfect entry point for listeners new to their singular sonic world. This album of short, song-like synthesizer pieces might take its cues from manga, science fiction, early electronic music, and minimal techno, but as always, the Tokyo band resides firmly in their own inexplicable universe. Dark Garden assimilates fractured beats, stuttering pulses, naked static, and impatient drones into an album that's somehow both playfully alive and coldly menacing. In his liner notes, synth builder Kumakiri describes spirits that lurk in the shadows and watch people go about their lives, existing in a parallel world that bring to mind fairy tales and myth. Nerve Net Noise's music is similarly just out of reach, present in the natural world but not quite a part of it. For fans of Klaus Schultze, Jessica Rylan, Henri Pousseur, or Pan Sonic."

Artist:	STELZER, HOWARD
Title:	Bond Inlets
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INT 030CD

"Ten years after his debut CD, Stone Blind (Intransitive, 1997), Howard Stelzer presents Bond Inlets, his first widely available solo cassette-tape composition. Boston-based sound artist Stelzer was never happy with his first album, and threw away most of the pressing as soon as it returned from the factory. He took the occasion of his label's tenth anniversary to dissect the source sounds of that work and filter it through the lens of the interceding decade in order to build a piece that more accurately reflects what his intentions were then and what his aesthetic is today. Bond Inlets is subtly emotional work of foreground drone that beats its head against the plastic walls of cassette-tape technology, laying bare the physicality of the process of its creation. The dying motors of cassette players, tape-saturated percussion, and blown-out condenser mic wail are mixed with elements of new live improvisations and field recordings taken in his neighborhood to create oceans full of no-fidelity murk and evocative hiss. There is an implacable melancholy to Bond Inlets, with fragments of distant melodies that surface only to be subsumed again into the grime."

Artist:	MARCHETTI & SEIJIRO MURAYAMA, LIONEL
Title:	Hatali Atsalei (L'Echange des Yeux)
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	INT 031CD

"For his second album on Intransitive, Lionel Marchetti returns to his favorite subject: music as an essential element of ritual and ecstatic trance states. Unlike his Knud un Nom du Serpent CD, which offered a critique of avant-garde and popular music as an extension of the transcendental impulse, Hatali Atsalei is more literally an experience of ritual. Using percussion, wind instruments, field recordings of natural sounds, and most importantly the voice of collaborator Seijiro Murayama, Marchetti once again gives us a multi-leveled engagement with the elemental urge to converse with nature and to use sound as a means to achieve altered states of consciousness. Referencing narrative radio art, musique concrete and acoustic ecology, Hatali Atsalei is a fascinating work that reveals more layers with each listen."

Artist:	HAYNES, JIM
Title:	Sever
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 032CD

"It gives me great pleasure to present Sever, the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer Jim Haynes, whose singular music evades simple attempts to describe it. The process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied in Sever; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action. For me, Sever conjures images of oncoming storms, abandoned industrial sites, huge empty warehouses, creaking glass, ships rocking in a port, the middle of the ocean far from land. Sever is an engaging album of evocative, highly visual drone music made up of layers upon organic layers that are in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still. Jim Haynes has collaborated with Loren Chasse (as the duo Coelacanth), Keith Evans, Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) and irr.app.(ext.)."

Artist:	KOMMISSAR HJULER & MAMA BAR
Title:	Asylum Lunaticum
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 033CD

"Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, the music of Kommissar Hjuler & Mama B�r has been a well-kept secret for too long. Hjuler & B�r have self-published their dada-esque sound poetry experiments on small-edition lathe-cut LPs, tapes and CDRs for years, usually adorning them with elaborate junk sculptures and paintings. Intransitive is proud to collect their best recordings so far onto a single, widely available CD so that anyone can hear the music without making a major financial investment. The husband and wife duo uses deceptively simple means -- typically just their voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone -- to create astonishing suburban dramas that are somehow both sweetly charming and staggeringly psychotic, sometimes at the same time. Join Kommissar Hjuler and Mama B�r as they perform acts of banal heroics, like exploring the basement... taking their son for a bicycle ride... walking with a red shirt into a field of cattle... pondering reforms made to the Danish police system... all viewed through the unhinged lens. Kommissar Hjuler & Mama B�r are painters, sculptors, film-makers and musicians based in Flensberg, Germany, near the Danish border. Their artwork has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals around the world. They collaborated with like-minded artists such as Thurston Moore, Arnulf Meifert, John Weise, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Jan Iwers and Af Ursin, among many others." "Asylum Lunaticum is not just another name or title, it's an almost too harmless a description of the family Hjuler/Bar. Over decades, Kommisar Hjuler provided me with his sick but mind-blowing art. So rare their works are, it's truly time to dig 'em out and show the world! This CD shall do so." -- Rudolf Eb.er (R&G/Schimpfluch-Commune Int.)

Artist:	LETHE
Title:	Catastrophe Point #5
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 034CD

"Catastrophe Point #5 is the latest in Kuwayama Kiyoharu's signature series of compositions that explore the charged, mysterious atmosphere of disused industrial sites. For this album, Lethe turns his attention to an abandoned warehouse by a pier in his hometown of Nagoya, Japan, using objects discovered in situ to perform a ritual of sonic ressurection. He brings a dead space back to life, giving it a voice and allowing it to speak. Metal chains, sheet metal, broken machinery, and factory debris are bowed, struck, and dragged across the concrete floors of the massive hall, reverberating and responding as Kuwayama and his microphones scuttle across the desolate terrain. Growling cello and unstable horns underscore the torrents of percussive clatter. Catastrophe Point #5 is a haunting album of volatile, malevolent ambience. For fans of Christoph Heemann, Surface of the Earth, The New Blockaders, Z'ev, or Organum."

Artist:	NMPERIGN
Title:	Ommatidia
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 035CD

"nmperign are one of the most celebrated and influential bands in contemporary improvised music. Yet surprisingly, more than a decade after their debut, Greg Kelley (trumpet) and Bhob Rainey (soprano sax) have never recorded a studio album as an unaccompanied duo... until now! The music is spare and peerlessly inventive as always, but the mood remains light and joyful, with a subtle undercurrent of absurd humor. While improvised music can sometimes seem airless and precious, Ommatidia opens the window on a sunny afternoon... the album's gusts of breath, percussive splatter, and controlled explosions form six succinct pieces that feel alive and vital, while still speaking in nmperign's utterly unique sonic language. A perfect way in for newcomers and a revelation for long-time fans, Ommatidia is the essential nmperign. Previous nmperign albums have employed guest musicians -- notably close collaborator and tape loop saboteur Jason Lescalleet, but also luminaries such as Gunter Mueller, Axel Doerner, Andrea Neumann, and Burkhard Beins -- and subversive or dodgy recording techniques; their 2xLP on Siwa was recorded entirely to micro-cassette and cassette walkman, while an early CD on Selektion was edited from live mini-disc recordings. Intransitive is proud to present the nmperign album that fans have been waiting for: the core duo, beautifully recorded in an actual studio with excellent microphones. When not making nmperign music, Greg Kelley performs with the aggressively psychedelic noise unit Heathen Shame (along with Wayne Rogers & Kate Village of Major Stars), minimalist chamber group The Undr Quartet, and raucous rock band Life Partners. Rainey regularly tours with folk/pop duo Damon & Naomi and leads The BSC, an eight-piece electro-acoustic improvising ensemble. They live in Boston and New Orleans, respectively."

Artist:	FAILING LIGHTS
Title:	Failing Lights
Label:	INTRANSITIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	INT 036CD

"An evocative work of bleak electronic atmosphere and suffocating dread, Failing Lights is the intensely personal vision of Michigan (via Lexington, KY) artist Mike Connelly. While he has toured the world as 1/3 of legendary industrial/noise units Hair Police and Wolf Eyes, Connelly spends his days crafting a much different sound on his own. Under the Failing Lights flag, he has self-published a nearly uncountable number of cassettes and CD-Rs of rough drones, detuned improvised grit and unstable acoustics in tiny editions that quickly vanish into collector-land. Intransitive is proud to present the defining -- and first widely available -- Failing Lights statement, an album of sinewy horror with a fine-tuned beauty within its darkness. A single piece in five sections, failing lights begins with disquietingly barren negative space. As the album creeps forward, it steadily dispenses sheets of diffuse throat-scratch and skittering strings, culminating in a blast of molten organ. Not noise, ambient, improv, black metal, or anything else: this is Failing Lights."

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