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2LP
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BKEDIT 018LP
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Many years in the works, CXVI is Akira Rabelais's supernatural album of collaborations, featuring the singular composer in rapt dialogue with a wish list of peers including Harold Budd, Ben Frost, Karen Vogt (Heligoland), Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), Kassel Jaeger (François Bonnet), and Stephan Mathieu. Unfurling a quietly breathtaking, dreamlike sequence of events, CXVI blooms in the wake of Boomkat Editions' first-time vinyl pressings of Akira's seminal classics, 2001's Eisoptrophobia (BKEDIT 017LP) and 2004's Spellewauerynsherde (BKEDIT 015LP), introduced his rarified work to myriad, keen new ears, while also reminding longer terms fans of his nonpareil genius and alchemical style of composition. Set to be received as Akira's magnum opus, CXVI finds the Hollywood-based composer challenging his usual working methods, pushing himself to refresh binds with long-term collaborators, and also coaxing the recorded debuts of his friend Mélanie Skribiane and filmmaker/photographer Bogdan D. Smith. The result of their time-lapsed endeavors is a record of divine subtlety and poignant patience, rendered with a mirage-like appeal. Opener "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds", beautifully segues from a prickly bouquet of keys and lovebite-distortion penned with Ben Frost to a reverberant, spine-freezing piano coda from Harold Budd, before "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds" smoke-ily gives way to the sylvan shadow play of the album's masterful centerpiece, "Star To Every Wandring Worth's Unknown", where Mélanie Skribiane reads from Max Ernst's La Femme 100 Têtes against an exquisite veil of strings and keys realized by Akira with the GRM's Kassel Jaeger. The third part of the album only becomes more sparse and isolationist, as Karen Vogt's plainsong gives way to the tremulous, icy timbres of Akira's processed guitar strokes, originally written for Cedrick Corliolis's Tokyo Platform soundtrack, before the final side of "If Error And Upon Me Proved" finds Akira pushing Geir Jenssen's synths into the red, emphasizing a romantic soreness that turns into crushing noise, before Bogdan Smith's whispered vocal melts into an ancient, arcane air inscribed to 78rpm vinyl by Stephan Mathieu and then sweetened, re-incorporated by Akira as the album's stunning closing passage. Riddled with bedeviling detail and utterly timeless in its scope, CXVI is a disorientating opus you'll want to undergo over and again. Photography by Bogdan D. Smith Mastered by Stephan Mathieu; Cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Gatefold sleeve.
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2LP
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BKEDIT 017LP
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Boomkat Editions presents a first vinyl edition of Akira Rabelais' sophomore album, Eisoptrophobia, a spellbinding, uniquely decayed rendering of solo piano pieces by Erik Satie and Bela Bartók. The 2001 release forms a poetic farewell to the 20th century and a bittersweet embrace of new technological possibility. It's required listening for lovers of The Caretaker's haunted ballroom elegies, Stephan Mathieu's electro-acoustic microphony, or indeed the original, classical pieces. First released in 2001 on CD by Ritornell, a sub-label of Mille Plateaux, Eisoptrophobia is an early iteration of Akira applying his Argeïphontes Lyre software to classical music, and opening a fascinating schism between the original object and his modern, subjective perspective in the process. This process would also generate rarified and haunting results on Akira's Spellewauerynsherde (BKEDIT 015LP, 2017). The original piano recordings of Satie and Bartók pieces were made at Wave Equation Studios in Hollywood, California, and subsequently transformed with Argeïphontes Lyre, Adobe After Effects, SoundHack, Peak, and Pro Tools with beautifully elusive results. The recognizable melodies here ring out in myriad new ways, sometimes fractured and indented by patinas of crackle that echo the original contours, while, at other times, they're smudged into mind-bending obfuscation or spectral, timbral things. They have the uncanny capacity to resemble exhumed artifacts, dug up after decades of decay, and riddled with potently psychedelic mycelium ready to spore on the listener's mind. In its unique process and disjointed effect, Eisoptrophobia is arguably an album without precedent, and one that never ceases to yield anything less than a deeply reflective, perhaps even transformative experience with keener ears. Lacquer cut at Dubplates + Mastering, Berlin. Photography by Jacqueline Roberts, design by Michael Worthington. Gatefold jacket.
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LP
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BKEDIT 015LP
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Boomkat Editions offers the first-ever vinyl edition of Spellwauerynsherde, a masterpiece from LA-based artist Akira Rabelais, originally released on CD by David Sylvian's Samadhisound label in 2004. It comprises a suite of seven medieval choral pieces which have been sublimated and recomposed via Rabelais's self-built Argeïphontes Lyre software. The results arguably stand as one of the 21st century's greatest musical enigmas and could be said to presage contemporary obsessions with processed vocals in a deeply uncanny manner, enduring to resonate with up-to-the-moment music as much as the record's distant roots in the seminal works of 12th century German mystic and composer Hildegard von Bingen, and the writings of John Milton, among others. Spellwauerynsherde has always been crying out for a vinyl issue and Rabelais has done the piece proud with this sensitive new version, allowing its seven parts to gently flow in sequence over both sides, with the added shroud of vinyl infidelity lending a beautifully subtle patina of detachment which perhaps only serves to heighten the paradoxical -- both temporal, spatial and timbral -- nature of the record's ethereal vestibules and elusive, illusory sonic specters. In remodeling these ancient works of art, Rabelais performs a sort of hypermodern animism on ostensibly dead musical material -- dead as in hardly anyone knows or plays them in the modern age -- imbuing them with a contemporary relevance through the process of his bespoke software (which is freely available to download) which serves to faithfully render, open-up new dimensions and plasmic aspects from work which is now nearly a millennia old -- so old you can't even call it classical music. Spellwauerynsherde has set a benchmark for experiments with ancient composition and computer music -- each immersion in this vinyl is akin to floating through the mists of time and will sends shivers down your spine just even thinking or writing about it, never mind listening. Spellwauerynsherde is one of the most magickal, perplexing, and strangely life-giving records that you'll ever hear. Photography by Jacqueline Roberts; Design by Michael Worthington. Lacquer cut at Dubplates & Mastering.
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CD
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SCHOOL 003CD
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"The birth of Akira Rabelais' Hollywood has its roots in the composer's lifelong interest in field recordings and in the desire to create a piece of work dedicated to Los Angeles: Texas-born Rabelais has used a Tascam recorder to capture almost four hours' worth of sounds on Hollywood Boulevard, between Betty Grable's and of Rod Serling's stars. These original recordings have been lightly edited, cut and mastered into a composition that encapsulates the sounds of casual chats, drunken tourists, peddlers, passing cars, music coming from surrounding shops. An extremely dynamic and always changing soundscape dedicated to 'the pleasure of being present.' Akira Rabelais, composer and software developer based in Los Angeles, has released records on Ritornell, Orthlorng Musork and Samadhisound. He has collaborated, among others, with Björk, David Sylvian, Harold Budd and Stephan Mathieu."
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3" CD
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FALLT 14.0022
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"What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in man's knowledge. Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment. In the Way of strategy, also, those who study as warriors think that whatever they cannot understand in their craft is the void. This is not the true void. To attain the Way of strategy as a warrior you must study fully other martial arts and not deviate even a little from the Way of the warrior. With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour. Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void. Until you realize the true Way, whether in Buddhism or in common sense, you may think that things are correct and in order. However, if we look at things objectively, from the viewpoint of laws of the world, we see various doctrines departing from the true Way. Know well this spirit, and with forthrightness as the foundation and the true spirit as the Way. Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness. Twelfth day of the fifth month, second year of Shoho (1645) -- Shinmen Musashi."
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