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LP
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CELL 005LP
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Vinyl reissue of Black to Comm's 2009 album originally on Type Recordings. Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. In 2009, the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP was greeted with universal praise in the underground publications as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork. The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era. Includes printed inner full-color printed inner sleeve.
From the original Type one-sheet: "The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of 'songs' for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking ten-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with homemade gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."
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LP
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CELL 007LP
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Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023, he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. After releasing the critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 on the seminal Type label (Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yellow Swans), Richter chose De Stijl for this 2012 album. Earth is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost visual artists. After hearing Black To Comm's Alphabet 1968, Ho Tzu Nyen invited Richter to accompany the film at Berlin's Asian Film Festival, Unsound in Krakow and several other art biennials and music festivals around the world. Includes full color lyric sheet and poster.
From the original De Stijl one-sheet: "Richter's already formidable expressive power stretches over all of Earth. Reflecting the countless cyclical forces that make up, oh, more or less everything we know and are, the music on Earth is bracing, lovely, bustling and still, and at times bittersweet, a commingling of sensations and emotions that can't be neatly separated from one another. (Earth is complex, as you know.) Guests on Earth include David Aird, aka Vindicatrix, contributing startling vocal work; Renate Nikolaus on an array of instruments and noise devices; Rutger Zuydervelt (singing bowls); and Christopher Kline (singing saw). Earth is Black to Comm's seventh album and his debut for De Stijl, following the acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (on Type) and last year's vinyl-only collaboration with Mike Kelley of Destroy All Monsters (on the En/Of label)."
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2LP
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TYPE 120LP
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Hamburg's Marc Richter has been busy with his Black To Comm project since his last appearance under that name on Type, 2009's genre-bending and critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (TYPE 053CD). Aside from helming the prolific Dekorder imprint, he's put out a number of musical curios, including 2012's excellent film soundtrack EARTH. Now Richter is back with Alphabet 1968's proper follow-up, a self-titled double album pieced together from crumbling samples, vocal snippets, and an arsenal of noise generators and filters. Richter's material has always been characterized by an air of surrealism, but it's never been more obvious than on the pulsing, chattering opener "Human Gidrah" or in the delirious, fractured pop of "Hands." There are real songs hidden in here somewhere, but they're disintegrated by Richter's sound manipulation techniques and dissolved into soupy, extended drone marathons. The centerpiece is undoubtedly "Is Nowhere," which builds slowly over 20 minutes with rumbling organ sounds and buzzing filters, never losing the listener's attention for a second. Black To Comm is a deeper, more challenging record than its predecessor, but one which repays the patient listener. Richter's dusty, unique sound has never sounded so well-honed and pointed, and it's a patchwork of ideas and fragments that only improves over time. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Artwork by Andreas Diefenbach.
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CD
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DESTIJL 098CD
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"EARTH is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost artists. The visually arresting film has been live-soundtracked by a number of artists (including Oren Ambarchi) in several locales, and after Black to Comm, a.k.a. Marc Richter's accompaniment at Berlin's Asian Film Festival and the Unsound Festival in Krakow (both in 2010), he decided to commit it to record. In Marc's own words: 'Most of the music was composed under the influence of heavy pain killers while recovering from a broken leg. The music (like the film) is about slowness and decay, states of unconsciousness, sleeping and waking up, dying and being reborn. The film basically is a post-apocalyptic collage based on paintings by classical European painters (Caravaggio, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Gericault) -- the music tries to translate that concept employing similar collage-based sampling techniques using loops made from vintage vinyl and shellac records combined with acoustic and electronic instrumentation and voice.' Richter's already formidable expressive power stretches over all of EARTH. Reflecting the countless cyclical forces that make up, oh, more or less everything we know and are, the music on EARTH is bracing, lovely, bustling and still, and at times bittersweet, a commingling of sensations and emotions that can't be neatly separated from one another. (EARTHis complex, as you know.) Guests on EARTHinclude David Aird, a.k.a Vindicatrix (on the Mordant Music label), contributing startling vocal work; Renate Nikolaus on an array of instruments and noise devices; Rutger Zuydervelt (singing bowls); and Christopher Kline (singing saw). EARTH is Black to Comm's seventh album and his debut for De Stijl, following the acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (on Type) and last year's vinyl-only collaboration with Mike Kelley of Destroy All Monsters (on the En/Of label)."
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LP
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DESTIJL 098LP
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LP version, with mp3 download.
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CD
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TYPE 053CD
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This is the debut full-length for Marc Richter aka Black To Comm for the Type label. Richter is no newcomer to the experimental music scene. As the figurehead of the Hamburg-based Dekorder label, the musician and designer has brought countless oddities to the attention of rabid music fans in the last few years, but it is with his own compositions that he has made the biggest splash. Releasing for a plethora of labels including Digitalis, Trensmat, and of course, his own imprint, he has pioneered a new, organic drone sub-genre using tape loops, vintage organs and an inexhaustible swamp of found sounds. With this latest album however, it was Richter's intention to move away from the epic drones he had made his own and into something more "classic." The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of "songs" for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking 10-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection.
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