BLACK TRUFFLE - Forced Exposure

$29.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 11/26/2021

The trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi return to Black Truffle with their tenth release, recorded live in Tokyo in February, 2017. While many of the trio's recent works have seen them focusing primarily on their core guitar/bass/drums power trio format, on Each side has a depth of 5 seconds A polka dot pattern in horizontal array A flickering that moves vertically these three multi-instrumentalists strike into new territory, utilizing an almost entirely electronic set-up, with Haino on electronics, drum machine and suona (a Chinese double-reed horn), O'Rourke on synth, and Ambarchi on pedal steel and electronics. Dedicated to the memory of legendary Tokyo underground figure Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of PSF Records and the Modern Music shop and a long-term collaborator with Haino, the LP, (recorded the night Ikeezumi passed away), begins in a somber, meditative space of rippling, burbling electronics and distant jets of white noise. Though much of the "Introduction" that occupies the record's first side is spacious and at times almost hushed, the performance is full of unexpected twists and turns, momentary events, and fleeting impressions. The trio conjures up a free-flowing surge of sound in which individual contributions are often difficult to distinguish, calling up echoes of vintage live-electronic sizzle like It's Viaje or the cavernous expanse of David Behrman's Wave Train. The LP's second side opens in a similarly reflective realm, before Haino's suona enters, taking the music in a more austere, hieratic direction, as the reed's piercing tones are accompanied by O'Rourke's uneasy, sliding synth figures and Ambarchi's shimmering Leslie cabinet tones. On the side's second piece, Haino's signature hand-played drum machine takes center-stage, at first sounding out massive, isolated strikes, before eventually building to a tumbling, Milford Graves-esque wall of thunder. As O'Rourke's synth squelches and stutters and Ambarchi's heavily effected pedal steel somehow begins to sound like a kind of hellish blues harmonica, this passage offers up one of the most electrifying and bizarre moments in the trio's catalogue to date. Containing some of the most abstract music the trio have waxed since their very first collaboration over a decade ago, this new missive from underground experimental music's preeminent power trio shows them restless and risk-taking, clearly enjoying their remarkable improvisational chemistry while also continuing to push themselves into new directions. Gatefold sleeve with artwork and design by Lasse Marhaug; inner sleeve with live pics by Ujin Matsuo.

$29.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 11/26/2021

Black Truffle announce the latest offering from underground legend Richard Youngs. Hyperactive since the late 1980s, Youngs is widely celebrated for his remarkably extensive and varied body of recordings. His works range freely over a vast terrain, wandering from tender acoustic balladry to raging psychedelic noise and orchestral D-beat, always imbued with his distinctive, often mournful, melodic sensibility and irrepressible sense of joyous experimentation. Comprised of two side-long pieces, CXXI carried on the experiments with chance operations used to generate material on many of Youngs' recent releases. On "Tokyo Photograph", a slowly changing, randomly generated sequence of 121 minor chords played by sine waves and accented with a brushed snare hit on every change provides the harmonic foundation for Youngs' fragile yet impassioned vocal performance, shards of field recordings and electronics and Sophie Cooper's long, tape-echoed trombone notes. While the melancholic drift of the chords calls up prime Robert Wyatt sides like Old Rottenhat or Dondestan, only the most vestigial sense of song remains here, as Youngs arranges his minimal ingredients over a spacious fifteen-minute expanse that often drops to nothing more than the rich hum of sine waves. "The Unlearning" carries on directly from the first side, presenting another, more harmonically varied, sequence of randomly generated chords played by sine waves, distressed with tape echo flourishes and sparsely sprinkled with electronic touches. Like some of Youngs' most single-minded instrumental works in recent years, such as his recordings of foot-played guitar or his shakuhachi pieces, "The Unlearning" is deeply meditative but entirely remote from ambient or minimalist clichés. Named after the number of chord changes on the opening piece and (Chicago-style) the number of records Youngs has released, CXXI arrives in a striking monochrome sleeve featuring play-along chord charts for both pieces. Both rigorously conceptual and endearingly off-the-cuff, CXXI is classic Richard Youngs.

$29.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 11/26/2021

Black Truffle announce ViewFinder / Hide & Seek, a new release from acclaimed American experimental composer David Behrman, presenting recordings made in collaboration with Jon Gibson and Werner Durand between 1989 and 2020. Last heard from on Black Truffle as part of the collaborative art song/live electronics madness of She's More Wild (BT 059LP), these recordings find Behrman continuing the pioneering work in interactive electronics that have established him as one of the major living experimental composers. Side A presents excerpts from two live realizations of "Unforeseen Events" (1989), the fourth in a series of pieces focusing on the interactions between instrumental performers and responsive software. Like the classic earlier works in the series, On the Other Ocean (1977), Interspecies Smalltalk (1984) and Leapday Night (1986), "Unforeseen Events" is an "unfinished composition" in which a computer system listens for and responds to specific pitch cues from an instrumentalist. Performed by the composer on electronics and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone in Berlin in 1989, the first realization immediately ushers the listener into an environment of long soprano notes, lush, sustained synth harmonies, randomized percussive interjections and distantly burbling arpeggiated patterns. The 1999 realization recorded in New York with Jon Gibson on soprano shows how much room for the instrumentalist to affect the course of the music exists in Behrman's interactive pieces, in which, as he notes, "performers have options rather than instructions". Beginning in a roughly similar area to the version with Durand, this later recording eventually becomes substantially more active, as polyrhythmically layered arpeggios and percussive patterns respond to fast chromatic lines and dynamic phrases from the saxophone, moving Gibson in turn to respond with cycling figures and moments of extended technique that touch on the soprano languages pioneered by players like Steve Lacy and Evan Parker. On the B side, you are treated to a new collaborative work from Behrman and Werner Durand, building on the 2002 installation work "ViewFinder", in which a camera detecting physical motion triggered changes to electronic sound. The piece presented here is a long-distance studio construction, recorded by Behrman in the Hudson Valley and Durand in Berlin, offering up an expansive duet between Behrman's lush, gliding synth tones and the alien, untempered tones of Durand's invented and adapted wind instruments. Gatefold sleeve; art by Terri Hanlon; archival photographs and new liner notes from Behrman and Durand.

$29.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/8/2021

Black Truffle release Parampara Festival 13.3.1992, a stunning performance by Amelia Cuni captured live in Berlin almost thirty years ago. Milanese by birth and resident in Berlin for many years, Cuni lived in India for over a decade, studying the classical vocal style of dhrupad under masters of the form. Though perhaps known to many listeners primarily through her performances of the vocal music of John Cage and collaborations with Werner Durand and Terry Riley, she is recognized internationally as one of the great contemporary proponents of traditional dhrupad singing. These recordings document her performance at the 1992 Parampara Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a landmark event celebrating the global spread of Indian classical music, bringing together Indian teachers with their international students. Accompanied by Gianni Ricchizzi on vichitra vina (a plucked zither played with a glass ball slide) and her own tanpura, Cuni stretches out for a languorous side-long performance of the late night "Raag Bageshri", the limpid tones of her vocal improvisations illuminating the droning strings like flashes of the moon revealed by rushing clouds. Initially working patiently through a series of subtle dialogues between Cuni's melodic extemporizations and phrases in response from Richizzi's vichitra vina, the performance builds to a series of strikingly beautiful, virtuosic held notes from Cuni at the beginning of its second half, before picking up some brisker rhythmic articulation on the way to its conclusion. On "Devino Amor", Cuni presents her own composition, a setting of mystical texts by the 13th century Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, elaborated through various traditional raags. Like the words used for most dhrupad compositions, the text Cuni has selected from da Todi praises divine love, thus linking her otherwise unorthodox use of Italian text to the dhrupad tradition. The result is a performance of a yearning intensity that communicates across any language barrier. On the final performance, Cuni and Ricchizzi are joined by Helmut Waibl on the two-headed pakhawaj drum for a piece using a 14-beat rhythmic pattern that sets in motion a cycle of tension and release, metrical dissolution and resolution, possessing a subtle grandeur. Illustrated with archival images of the performance and accompanied by new liner notes from Peter Pannke and Lars-Christian Koch, Parampara Festival 13.3.1992 invites listeners to lose themselves in Amelia Cuni's unique approach to ancient tradition.

$32.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/1/2021

Following on from the acclaimed Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion LP (BT 028LP, 2017), Black Truffle present two major new instrumental works from legendary sound artist and experimental composer Annea Lockwood. Demonstrating the ever evolving and radically open nature of Lockwood's practice, these two recent works were developed in close collaboration with their performers. "Becoming Air" (2018), developed with and performed by trumpeter Nate Wooley, uses extended technique and electronics to interfere with Wooley's virtuosic control over his instrument, pushing him into areas of fluctuating pitch and timbral instability. Motivated by a desire for "the letting go of sound to be itself", "Becoming Air" unfolds as a series of texturally distinct moments separated by pauses, each fixing on a particular approach to the instrument (long tones, upper-register whistles, breathy wooshes) and maintaining it in an essentially static fashion, focusing our attention on subtle changes and variations. Dipping into near-inaudibility in the fragile high tones of its opening section, the piece dramatically increases in volume and intensity in its final third, climaxing with a passage of roaring distortion, where the interaction between feedback and trumpet pitches calls up the shuddering interference effects of Robert Ashley's Wolfman. "Into the Vanishing Point" (2019) is a collaborative work developed with New York piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, who have performed work by major contemporary composers such as Olivia Block, Catherine Lamb, and Klaus Lang. Carrying on the ecological and environmental concerns of some of Lockwood's previous works, "Into the Vanishing Point" was inspired by a devastating news article on the global collapse of insect populations. Discovering that the four members of Yarn/Wire had also read this text, Lockwood mapped out a loose structure for the piece that would allow the composer and four performers to explore their "feelings about what is happening ecologically". Working with a huge variety of instruments, objects and techniques of sound production, the resulting work is an alluringly lush, organically unfolding tissue of unorthodox textures and haunting tones. Though not intended to sonically represent ecological issues in any direct way, its unique sound world of rubbed piano strings, gently handled objects and chiming pitches often calls up natural images: of insects and frogs, wind rushing through trees, a bird's wings in flight. Presented in a stunning gatefold cover with liner notes by Lockwood, Wooley and Yarn/Wire, Becoming Air / Into the Vanishing Point is a testament to the generosity and experimentation that continue to characterize the work of this extraordinary artist, active for over fifty years.

$32.00 NOT IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran's classic Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, the cooperative label run by Curran, Roberto Laneri, and Giacinto Scelsi. Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers Dark Flowers) -- its title inspired by an intersection in Milan -- is the second in the series of four solo recordings Alvin Curran issued in the 1970s and early 1980s, preceded by Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden (1975), followed by The Works (1980) and Canti Illuminati (1982). Each of these solo works combines field recordings with performances on synthesizer, various acoustic instruments, and voice, arranged in languorously paced, dreamy sequences. Far from the bracing pointillism of much musique concrete, the elements encountered on the meandering course followed by Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri -- whether a frenetic piano improvisation, dense layers of Serge synthesizer and ocarina, or a monologue from Frederic Rzewski's five-year old son, Alexis -- often occupy the foreground of our attention for minutes at a time. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with "whole blocks of recorded time." The purring of a cat, toy piano, a child counting, plaintive synthesizer tones, the cacophony of exotic birds at the London Zoo -- each disappears into the next, until, on the LP's second side, a solo piano performance takes center stage, moving unexpectedly from percussive minimalist permutations to a halting rendition of "Georgia on My Mind". A subtle yet stunning work that more than forty years on still seems charged with possibility, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri arrives in a loving reproduction of the original sleeve, featuring Edith Schloss' beautiful cover painting, remastered audio and with new liner notes by Alvin Curran and Francis Plagne.

$31.50 IN STOCK

Black Truffle present Sylva Sylvarum, an epic new work from Ora Clementi, the collaborative project of crys cole and James Rushford. Primarily conceived and recorded over several months together in Melbourne, Sylva Sylvarum is a stunning step forward from the mumbled, creaking sound world of the duo's debut, Cover You Will Softer Me (PP 011LP, 2014). From the opening "Peach of Immortality", which takes an unpredictable journey from layers of chiming bells, vocal harmonies and lush synth pads to a desolate landscape of half-animal, half-digital wooshes and cries, it is immediately clear that cole and Rushford are working here with an entirely unique sound palette. Throughout the record's four sides, you hear a large array of carefully detailed synthesizer sounds (many of them recorded at the remarkable Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio), sparse drum machine hits, wind instruments and field recordings of animals, often with a twistedly late '80s/early '90s flavor that at various points calls up new age references, Robert Ashley's later operas or the thinned-out textures of early digital GRM. Threaded through this distinctive array of sounds are the two musicians' voices, sometimes singing, sometimes speaking through varying degrees of manipulation. A guiding thread through the pair's collaboration, beginning with their initial experiments with lip-readings, the presence of these two voices -- cole's crisp and sibilant, Rushford's rich and low -- reinforces the sense that the music is immersed in itself, less performed by two people than occurring between them. On Sylva Sylvarum, these voices first come to the forefront on the third piece, "Dialogue Between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea Captain", where in unison they intone fragments of a description of an imaginary space taken from a 17th century utopian text. The two voices resurface periodically thereafter, most stunningly in the unexpected turn into cushiony dream pop on "Magic Mountain". Like the album's title, these textual elements are drawn from various literary descriptions of utopias, a theme that also informed the pair's musical approachThe uncanny sweep of the album's fifteen pieces is expansive enough to take in stretches of crackling austerity, warped microtonal keyboard etudes and moments of stunning beauty, the latter most strikingly when cole and Rushford are joined by Callum G'Froerer on trumpet and Joe O'Connor on trombone for a series of dream-like moments moving from growling overtones to poignant lyricism. Mint green vinyl; gatefold sleeve. Artwork by Sabrina Ratté. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Berlin.

$31.00 IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Remko Scha's Guitar Mural 1 featuring The Machines, originally published as a rare cassette edition by Taal Beeld Geluid in 1982. A computational linguist by profession, Scha played an important role in the development of sound, installation, and digital art in the Netherlands from the late 1970s onward, co-founding the performance and exhibition space Het Appolohuis in Eindhoven in 1980. Alongside Paul Panhuysen and Jan Van Riet, Scha was a founding member of the radical improvisation group The Maciunas Ensemble, though he is best known for his work with mechanized electric guitars, documented on the legendary 1982 LP Machine Guitars. Guitar Mural 1 documents an installation of Scha's mechanical guitar ensemble The Machines held at a Groningen gallery space in 1982. Five electric guitars hang from the wall, their strings sounded by rotating rubber strings and a sabre saw controlled by a mechanical apparatus, as well as four ropes criss-crossing the five instruments on the wall. Once the mechanism was set up, Scha's only intervention was to vary the speed at which it operated. Where Machine Guitars presents short excerpts clearly distinguished by rhythmic and timbral variation, here we are confronted with four enormous side-long slabs of percussive string attack and the resulting clouds of harmonics. Variation is minimal across the duration of each side, making for a sculptural listening experience, as if you are patiently examining each facet of a static object. But significant variety exists between the four sides, each of which shows off a different facet of what The Machines were capable of. The first two excerpts feature open strings sounded at rapid tempos, dissolving the percussive attack into a continuous stream of sound reminiscent of Charlemagne Palestine's "strumming" technique. On the third side, the strings are partly muted and the tempo slightly lowered, resulting in layers of relentlessly chugging rhythm somewhere between an ensemble of hand drums and an early Velvet Underground bootleg. On the fourth side, havoc breaks loose in percussive waves of asynchronous repetition that bring Scha's sound world close to that of another pioneer experiment in musical mechanization, the Solar Music of Joe Jones. Guitar Mural 1 is an exhilarating document occupying a unique space between kinetic sculpture, hardcore minimalism and rock & roll. Deluxe gatefold sleeve accompanied by stunning visual documentation of the original installation, remastered audio and new liner notes from Alan Licht and Van Lagestein.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco is the first major solo release from Australian performer-composer Sam Dunscombe, now based in Berlin after residing for the past decade in San Diego and Tokyo. A virtuoso clarinetist who has performed in composed and improvised settings with artists such as Klaus Lang and Taku Sugimoto, their practice also embraces computer music, lo-fi electronics and field recordings, in addition to their long-term commitment to archiving, studying and performing the work of Romanian spectralist composer Horatiu Radulescu. The two side-long pieces presented on this LP began from a chance encounter in a specific geographic location (documented in the photographs that grace the record's sleeve). Exploring California's Mojave Desert with a friend, Dunscombe made the unlikely discovery of a tangle of quarter-inch tape snared on a cactus. The digitized version of this tape, variously edited and processed, as well as Dunscombe's own transcription and embellished performance of some of its material on Hammond organ, makes up one of the main ingredients of the LP's first side. The other is a field recording of the area outside the ghost town of Ludlow, where the tape was found, where haunted silence is punctuated by freight trains and clusters of explosions from gold mines and the local marine corps. Far from any kind of documentary approach, the resulting composition reaches back to the smeared atmospherics and overdriven tape crunch of Hands To, Small Cruel Party or Joe Colley, before the Hammond organ rises up to cast a spectral shimmer reminiscent of 1960s tape music classics like Arne Nordheim's "Warszawa". On "Desert Disco" (its title perhaps a clue to the content of the mysterious tape), Dunscombe zeroes in on a single fragment of the tape, accompanying it with analog synthesis to craft an immersive work based on a single chord. Throughout the course of this work, the monolithic opening sonority gradually splits apart, revealing an infinity of rhythmically phasing lines that swarm like a cloud of insects and patter like falling rain, placing Dunscombe's piece in a lineage of patient electronic exploration that includes landmarks like Costin Miereanu's Derives and the contemporary work of Jim O'Rourke. Limited edition vinyl with images by Sam Dunscombe and design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Berlin.

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Black Truffle offer up a rare serving of unheard works by legendary Swiss artist Anton Bruhin. Active as a visual artist, poet, and musician since the 1960s, Bruhin has created important work in forms as varied as concrete poetry and landscape painting, imbuing everything he does with wit, humility, and absurdist humor. A recognized master of the jew's harp (or Trümpi, as this ancient folk instrument is known in Swiss German), Bruhin's sound work also encompasses tape collage, sound poetry, and manipulated bird song. On Speech Poems/Fruity Music you are treated to 26 short pieces made between 2006 and 2008 using the audio software Fruity Loops. These pieces carry on Bruhin's long-running project of exploring the creative use and misuse of cheap, accessible technologies. In many of his analog works, Bruhin explored the possibilities of simple cassette equipment. He invented DIY approaches to layering sounds by using multiple tape machines, experimented with distortion and tape speed, or, in his classic Inout (1981) created a maniacally single-minded audio monument to the pause button. Like the computer pixel drawings the artist produced around the same time as these recordings, Speech Poems/Fruity Music extends this approach to consumer software, presenting two parallel sequences of works that make use of Fruity Loops' inbuilt synthetic instruments and its speech synthesis function. The instrumental works play like a twisted take on the aesthetics of 1980s video game soundtracks, using synthetic accordion and harpsichord sounds to realize jaunty little ditties that exploit their machine-realization by making use of improbable pitch-bends and humanly impossible tempos and articulations. Between these samples of Fruity Music, you are treated to the Speech Poems, a series of recitations by a lone computer-generated voice. Many of them are in fact songs, as the synthetic voice crudely and hilariously changes pitch as it moves through its fragmented syllables and odes to cream in coffee. Carrying on Bruhin's interest in the creative misuse of technology, many of the Speech Poems attempt to force Fruity Loops' voice synthesis, designed only to speak English, to speak German. By entering phonetic text into the program, Bruhin gets it to produce a passable German alphabet and a series of approximations to a proper pronunciation of his name. Hilarious while strangely austere, entertaining but bizarre, Speech Poems/Fruity Music is classic Anton Bruhin, arriving in a beautiful mosaic cover by the artist, with the text of the "abc für anglophone" on the back cover. Compiled by Marc Matter and Anton Bruhin. Mastered by Joe Talia.

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Real Real World is the first collaborative effort from Nantes-based Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie and Australian keyboardist/composer James Rushford. Primarily recorded in a fluid, spontaneous studio session in Nantes, with overdubs added later in Melbourne and Nantes, Real Real World presents five spacious, unhurried pieces that inhabit a unique sound world characterized by wheezing, half-voiced organ chords, chiming metal percussion, and eruptions of small sounds. Beginning with the eerily beautiful, shakuhachi-esque sound of Rushford performing on detuned portative organ, the opening title track is abruptly transformed by the entry of Guthrie's sizzling cymbals, deep gong strikes, and rustling hand percussion. On the epic "Lumbering", which occupies the majority of the record's first side, organ chords define a space in which a kaleidoscopic succession of amplified thuds, chiming bells, rustled and dragged objects, and abruptly silenced clusters advance and recede in an oneiric blur, eventually making way for a passage of Guthrie's virtuosic polyrhythms, itself unexpectedly overtaken by waves of melting fairground organ. The record reaches an energetic climax mid-way through the second side with the stunning "Slakes", where lugubrious chords in the organ's lowest register are joined by Guthrie's skittering rhythms, which somehow manage to call to mind both the most chaotic moments of Balinese Gamelan and the stochastic breakbeats of late-90s Autechre. On this piece, Guthrie and Rushford are joined by Melbourne saxophone maverick Scott McConnachie, who contributes an alto sax solo of burning precision, working with a single-minded palette of piercing long tones and wild intervallic leaps. Though it makes extensive use of overdubbing, Real Real World retains a strong sense of having been performed, rather than constructed: while at times the fleeting succession of events can recall electroacoustic music, its primarily acoustic nature and unhurried pace is also reminiscent of the music of AACM affiliates or Marion Brown's classic Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970). Immediately engaging while also hiding countless details in the folds of its polychrome fabric, Real Real World is a relaxed and joyous document of collaborative musical invention. Artwork by Patrizia Bach; Layout by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Berlin.

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Black Truffle announce Backfire of Joy, a previously unheard recording from Phew, John Duncan, and Kondo Tatsuo, documenting a concert at Tokyo's Hosei University in 1982. Though the fertile exchange of 'zines, tapes and records between the Japanese underground and the Los Angeles Free Music Society meant the artists were familiar with each other's work, this performance (occurring on Duncan's first visit to Japan) was their first meeting and only performance as a trio. Duncan is heard on his signature shortwave radio set-up, while Kondo performs on synth, tape loops and echo-drenched piano, providing a spacious backdrop for Phew's astonishing performance of spontaneous, free-associative song moving between Japanese and English. A testament to the unhinged exploration of the 1980s experimental underground, the trio careen wildly between crashing percussive tape loops, deluges of shortwave noise, insistent piano figures and playful synth melodies. On the B side, you are treated to a remarkable ten-minute sequence moving organically from spaced-out synth and radio textures to a stunning finale of improvised balladry centered on piano and voice, unexpectedly broken up by electronic interjections. Beautifully recorded in crunchy vintage fidelity, Backfire of Joy arrives accompanied by archival photographs and newly authored liner notes from all three participants. Vinyl only; comes with printed inner sleeves.

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Black Truffle announce the first vinyl reissue of Rafael Toral's Aeriola Frequency, originally released by Perdition Plastics in 1998. Toral made his name in the world of mid-90s experimental electronics with two releases, Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) and Wave Field (1995), both now recognized as classics and reissued on vinyl by Drag City, which saw him exploring the potential of electric guitar and pedals to immerse the listener in seemingly endless waves of sustained tones. On Wave Field, inspired by the striking resonance effects he experienced during a Buzzcocks gig with bad acoustics, he achieved a synthesis -- often imitated but never bettered -- of rock guitar, ambient, and the acoustic exploration of Alvin Lucier, a kind of "liquid, abstract flux of rock sound". On Aeriola Frequency, Toral continued the explorations of Wave Field but dropped the guitar, creating a series of extended pieces using only a simple feedback loop designed to work with pure electronic resonance. The result is far more delicate than Wave Field, a steady but unstable flow of filtered tones that continually reorder themselves into new forms. On both the LP's sides, the tones, like growing plants, imperceptibly shift from drifting freely in ambient space to weaving strangely natural melodic patterns, as the loops unfold and the resonance gently outlines recurring rhythmic shapes. The overall effect is strikingly organic, as David Toop noted in the liner notes included in the original release (and reprinted in this reissue): "A crystal garden, the sound grows in reeds and streams, blown like spider web strands, glittering and invisible, pulsing with translucent colour, bubbling and imploding, fraying and powdering." A classic of the non-academic approach to electronics that flourished in the 1990s -- and a big influence at the time on Black Truffle head honcho Oren Ambarchi -- Aeriola Frequency ushers listeners into an endlessly fascinating world of gliding tones and shifting details that they might never want to leave. Recorded at Noise Precision, Portugal, December 1997 and April 1998. Remastered by Rafael Toral in 2020. Images taken from Air Pass, a video by Rafael Toral. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

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Black Truffle present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring. Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from rooftop to church, from stasis to flares of momentary romanticism. Peaks considers summits as being both above and below, reframing the idea of apex from a more intimate perspective. Hamann considers how our domestic and personal geographies might form their own apogees, meridians, or nadirs. Assembled in 2019 while an artist in residence in Krems, Austria, Peaks begins with Hamann's more familiar cello but soon unravels into resonant electronic interiors; Southern California nightscapes heard through windows, San Francisco bathroom fans, snatches of recordings of friends, hand organs, and engines. "signal/Centinela" draws primarily on recordings from Hamann's time living in San Diego, and carries with it a certain sense of nostalgia in the sense of homesickness, longing, and displacement of distance and time. Side B is composed from recordings gathered on a different continent, Europe, weaving piano with recordings of sleep, breath, church organ, and the act of climbing. "under/over" emerges as it recedes, overlapping moments of arrival to create another kind of "spire" in the sense of spir (breath). Peaks, with its omission of any recordings from Hamann's home of Australia, hints at how the very construction of home itself, might be restless, untethered, changeable, and malleable. On Peaks, Hamann interrogates tropes of ambient concrète musics, intentionally pivoting formally around material which teeters on the edge of cliché. This exploration asks whether familiar frames of harmony, field recordings and narrative trajectories can excavate new territories, or be ruptured. Peaks untangles a very personal sense of tension between beauty and shame in experimental music: treating lushness and harmony as possessing potentially muscular musical properties that might wrestle with or construct senses of belonging and home. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Photos by Judith Hamann. Mixed and mastered by Alan F Jones.

$27.50 IN STOCK

2021 restock. Black Truffle present Meith, a new composition in two parts from prolific composer/theorist François Bonnet. Usually operating under his Kassel Jaeger moniker, Bonnet is a major figure in contemporary electronics and electro-acoustic music, collaborating with artists such as Lucy Railton, Jim O'Rourke, and Stephen O'Malley, and releasing his work on labels including Editions Mego, Senufo, and Shelter Press. Always meticulously detailed yet immediately affecting, Bonnet's work situates itself at a very personal intersection between the traditions of academic electronic and electroacoustic music, and a more shadowy, underground group of approaches to experimental sound: kosmische musik, the tape murk of the 1980s underground, the haunted ambience of Christoph Heemann & Co. Meith immediately welcomes you into its densely layered sound world of electronic tones, positive organ, and unidentifiable field-recorded textures. Almost static yet constantly in flux, it deliberately opens itself up to repeated and varied listening: from a distance, its many voices cohere into a monolithic plane of sound, while closer inspection reveals myriad details and momentary events. Like a drop of ink spreading through water, harmonic material present in one voice gradually fans out into the whole arrangement, creating fleeting moments of unity amid the constantly shifting waves of tone and texture. Far from the austerity of some contemporary electro-acoustic music, Meith affects the listener as overwhelming organic; its individual layers are unstable and at times near-chaotic, imbued with life. Though it can appear almost formless, the piece undergoes major shifts throughout its duration, from the austere dissonance of the opening moments to the surging harmonies that appear midway through the second side before the piece gradually dissolves into a spectral glimmer.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce Ashioto, the first international solo release from Japanese drummer-percussionist-composer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Active for over a decade, Yamamoto has performed and recorded extensively with artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, and Akira Sakata, as well as participating in innumerable improvised and ad hoc groups. Ashioto presents two wide-ranging pieces that combine Yamamoto's percussion work with piano, field recordings, electronics, and contributions from guest musicians Daisuke Fujiwara and Eiko Ishibashi. Beginning with a passage of chiming metal percussion, the first side slowly builds into a rolling, open groove reminiscent of Yamamoto's work on Eiko Ishibashi's acclaimed Drag City LP, The Dreams My Bones Dream (2018). Spacious piano and synth notes, along with Ishibashi's spare melodic figures on processed flute, hover above this propulsive rhythmic foundation, the whole effect adding up to a more abstract take on the area explored on Rainer Brüninghaus's ECM classic Freigeweht (1981). The LP's second side opens up a cavernous space filled with ominous electronics and shimmering metallic percussion, which organically transitions into a passage of rumbling piano chords and mysterious concrète sound. Later in the piece, Daisuke Fujiawara's saxophone enters, playing melancholic melodic fragments that are looped and layered, creating a seasick swaying effect familiar to listeners of James Tenney's works with tape delay systems. Beginning as delicate bass drum pulses, Yamamoto's accompanying percussion eventually builds the piece into a raging torrent of free-improv splatter, processed sax and fizzing electronics. Though grounded in instrumental performance, Ashioto is very much a studio construction, making inventive use of electro-acoustic principles in its editing and mixing. Together with its sister Ashiato -- a different take on the same "script" released simultaneously on Japanese label Newhere -- Ashioto demonstrates to an international audience for the first time the true breadth and ambition of Yamamoto's work. Mastered by Jim O'Rourke. Cover photos by Kuniyoshi Taikou. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

$27.50 IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce Undercurrent, the new LP from the long-running Milanese duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Following on from high-profile releases on Boomkat Editions and Shelter Press ((SHELTER 080LP, 2017) in the last few years, the eight untitled pieces making up Undercurrent continue the pair's hypnotic and disorientating practice of improvisation based on tape loops. Often sitting halfway between electro-acoustic technique and beat-based production, the music of Bellows obliquely recalls aspects of hip-hop, dub, and techno while skewing their rhythmic foundations. While consistent with the distinctive language the duo has developed over the last decade, Undercurrent moves away from the explicit references made to club music in their recent releases. It presents a suite of pieces that are markedly more minimal, at times reminiscent in their haunted introspection of the legendary Tolerance records on Vanity Records. The pieces here often dwell for minutes at a time on single repeating tones, reverberating like distant bells in desolate landscapes of looped tape hiss. Where previous releases were primarily based on samples, Undercurrent uses recordings of the duo playing various instruments (guitar, drums, synthesizer) cut into tape loops and then used as the bases for song-length tracks, each of which establishes a central repeating motif while also opening up on close listening to reveal multitudes of improvised detail and subtle shifts in tone, texture, and tempo. Beginning with the mournful sliding tones and obscured fragments of field recordings on the opening track, the album moves from lush synth pads to super-minimal pings and haunted drone. On "6" and "7", spacious, hanging guitar figures give the music an elegiac quality recalling the work of Dean Roberts and Ielasi's own earlier guitar-based music (such as the classic Gesine (HAPNA 021CD), released on Häpna in 2005). The record subtly builds to its final track, which works the barest of elements -- a slowed-tone loop of steel drums, a distant whistle, beeping electronics -- into a piece somehow imbued with a quiet grandeur, a fitting conclusion to a record that, like all of the duo's work, is both sonically exploratory and immediately accessible.

$26.50 NOT IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce a new solo album by Eiko Ishibashi, her first for the label, following on from the duo recording Ichida alongside bassist Darin Gray (BT 039LP, 2018). Hyakki Yagyō (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) was produced for the "Japan Supernatural" exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney focusing on ghost stories and folklore from the Edo period onwards. As with The Dream My Bones Dream (Drag City, 2018), the album is a response to troubling questions about Japanese history, and the influence of the past upon the present, but finds Ishibashi shifting further away from her earlier piano-led songwriting and showing a deepening interest in electronics and audio collaging. The two side-long parts of Hyakki Yagyō feature layered synthesizers, acoustic instrumentation, recited verse, and field recordings, at times densely mixed but always with a subtle interplay of changing elements. The influence of European and American forerunners as diverse as Alvin Curran, David Behrman, and Strafe Für Rebellion can be traced, yet at the same time Ishibashi evokes the flute and string sounds associated with Japanese storytelling, and draws directly on the subversive literary tradition of Kyoka ("mad poetry") with a verse by the 15th-century poet Ikkyū Sōjun repeated throughout the album. Revisiting what has gone before, re-thinking what is possible musically, as a way of articulating what else might be possible in the future. As Ishibashi's liner notes make clear, the album reflects an attention to persistent dangers, myths and evasions in Japanese culture -- as well as the lurking uncertainties that might threaten positive change. This would seem to be manifested in the emerging melodies soon met by dissonance, erratic collisions, and near silence, as well as the eerie manipulation of the double-tracked vocals. Ishibashi's underlying concerns ring true more widely of course. Hyakki Yagyō is a work of multiplicities, and mystery, a landscape where nothing is as it seems at first, and everything is vulnerable to sudden violent interruptions. The album was produced with regular collaborators Jim O'Rourke (double bass) and Joe Talia (percussion), and features dancer and choreographer Ryuichi Fujimura performing Ikkyū's satirical tanka. O'Rourke's immersive mix creates a three-dimensional effect, with Ishibashi's various sound sources enmeshing and interacting in captivating ways. White vinyl; inner sleeve featuring artist portrait and liner notes from Eiko Ishibashi. Cover and label design by Shuhei Abe. Back cover design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke.

$31.00 IN STOCK

Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve; includes download code with the two additional pieces on the double-CD version. Black Truffle's documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier's works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross recorded by two core members of the Ever Present Orchestra, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, for whom it was composed (BT 033LP, 2017). Through the use of e-bows, the guitars take on a role akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier's works since the early 1980s, but with added harmonic richness. Like much of Lucier's instrumental music, the pieces recorded here focus on acoustic phenomena, especially beating patterns, produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches. The work presented here is some of the richest and most inviting that Lucier has composed. Though all of the pieces clearly belong to the same continuing exploration of the behavior of sound in physical space and make use of related compositional devices, each takes on a strikingly different character. "Titled Arc", for the full ensemble of four guitars, four saxophones, four violins, piano, and bowed glockenspiel inhabits a world of sliding, uneasy tones, punctuated by a single piano note. Where "Double Helix", for four guitars, rests on a pillow of warm, low hum, EPO-5, for two guitars, saxophone, violin, and glockenspiel possess a limpid, crystalline quality. Accompanying the four new compositions are two adaptations of existing pieces for radically different instrumentation, demonstrating Lucier's excitement about the new possibilities suggested by this dedicated ensemble. Works for the Ever Present Orchestra is an essential document of the current state of Lucier's continuing exploration, as well as offering a seductive entry-point for anyone who might yet be unacquainted with his singular body of work. Cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier.

$19.50 LOW STOCK LEVEL

Black Truffle's documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier's works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross recorded by two core members of the Ever Present Orchestra, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, for whom it was composed (BT 033LP, 2017). Through the use of e-bows, the guitars take on a role akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier's works since the early 1980s, but with added harmonic richness. Like much of Lucier's instrumental music, the pieces recorded here focus on acoustic phenomena, especially beating patterns, produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches. The work presented here is some of the richest and most inviting that Lucier has composed. Though all of the pieces clearly belong to the same continuing exploration of the behavior of sound in physical space and make use of related compositional devices, each takes on a strikingly different character. "Titled Arc", for the full ensemble of four guitars, four saxophones, four violins, piano, and bowed glockenspiel inhabits a world of sliding, uneasy tones, punctuated by a single piano note. Where "Double Helix", for four guitars, rests on a pillow of warm, low hum, EPO-5, for two guitars, saxophone, violin, and glockenspiel possess a limpid, crystalline quality. Accompanying the four new compositions are two adaptations of existing pieces for radically different instrumentation, demonstrating Lucier's excitement about the new possibilities suggested by this dedicated ensemble. Works for the Ever Present Orchestra is an essential document of the current state of Lucier's continuing exploration, as well as offering a seductive entry-point for anyone who might yet be unacquainted with his singular body of work. Cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier. Double-CD release comes in four-panel digipak with a 16-page booklet with live photos. Disc two of the double-CD version release includes the bonus Adaptions for the Ever Present Orchestra featuring two pieces ("Two Circles" and "Braid"), not included on the vinyl version.

$25.50 LOW STOCK LEVEL

Sold out, but epress in 2021. Black Truffle announce Genetic, the first release outside Indonesia from contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat. Alit is a major force in contemporary Indonesian music, presenting his work extensively throughout Asia, Europe, and North America and collaborating with renowned ensembles such as Bang On A Can and Ensemble Modern. Involved in the composition and performance of works for Gamelan ensemble since he was a teenager, in 2007 he founded Gamelan Salukat, a 25-member ensemble that perform on instruments specially built to Alit's designs, using a unique 11-note scale. The single composition that unfurls over the two sides of Genetic is an enchanting introduction to Alit's magical sound world. Beginning with a stately procession of isolated, hanging chords sounded on the ensemble's uniquely-tuned metallophones, the piece abruptly launches into a stunning passage of rhythmically complex call-and-response motifs, making striking use of abruptly muted chords -- one of many moments where the acoustic ensemble sounds uncannily electronic. The piece continues to alternate between spare investigations of resounding tones and sometimes frenetic ensemble interplay using unorthodox techniques, including a stunning moment around half-way when the entire Gamelan seems to transform itself into a single, gigantic zither. Later in the piece, drums and wind instruments enter, and the metallophones begin to play virtuosic, rapid-fire passages of fragmented scalar melody. As Alit explains in his liner notes, the music of Gamelan Salukat is grounded in the tradition of Balinese Gamelan; however, he approaches this tradition not as something static, but as a set of concepts and principles that can be used to create something radically new. For many listeners, Genetic will inhabit precisely this space between the familiar and the invigoratingly unheard, as it takes the stop-start dynamics, unison melodies, and much of the instrumentation familiar from traditional Balinese Gamelan and puts them in the service of rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral experimentation, crafting a work possessed by at once by mysterious grandeur and a joyous volatility.

$23.50 IN STOCK

Limited restock. Star Trap presents a selection of hitherto unreleased 1990s recordings from Arnold Dreyblatt and his Orchestra of Excited Strings. Following on from Black Truffle's wide-ranging archival Second Selection (2015), which presented a smorgasbord of unreleased material from between 1978 and 1989, Star Trap mines Dreyblatt's extensive archive of unheard recordings from the 1990s, uncovering six pieces performed by three different iterations of the Orchestra of Excited Strings. While Dreyblatt often performs in his ensembles on his signature Excited Strings Bass (a double bass strung with piano wire), here we find him in the composer's chair and behind the mixing desk, leading ensembles of modified percussion, string, and wind instruments. Four of the pieces make use of Dreyblatt's Dynamic Processing System (heard on a stunning pair of solo pieces for electric guitar featured on Second Selection), in which the opening and closing of digital noise gates are controlled by an external signal (in this case, a recording of faulty escalator). Rather than the relentless thudding rhythms of 1980s works like Nodal Excitations, the ensemble pieces here are closer to the propulsive, at times even funky rhythmic foundation of Dreyblatt's classic Animal Magnetism (Tzadik, 1995), but further enlivened by the unpredictable accents of the Dynamic Processing System. On "Escalator", a six-piece version of the Orchestra performs the notated stuttering rhythms and shifting accents of the gated escalator recordings, without the actual Dynamic Processing System being audible. On the remaining two pieces, composed for the tenth anniversary of the Orchestra of Excited Strings in Europe, Dreyblatt made use of algorithmic software to generate material. But far from austere exercises, these pieces are perhaps the most immediate of all, as the Orchestra exuberantly tears through a sequence of repeating rhythmic and melodic cells, dazzling the ear with the overtones generated by Dreyblatt's twenty-note microtonal scale. At times recalling aspects of the work of Peter Zummo or Arthur Russell's Instrumentals, but with a massive dose of sonic heft, this is music for both the mind and the body. Mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Includes liner notes by Arnold Dreyblatt.

$18.00 IN STOCK

Continuing Black Truffle's series of releases documenting the recent work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, String Noise presents three major works for violin solo and duo composed between 2004 and 2019. Lucier has developed his compositions in close collaboration with many instrumentalists over the years; the three works presented here are performed by the violinists for whom they were originally written, Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who together make up the innovative violin duo String Noise, and have premiered works by a plethora of major figures in contemporary music. The long-form compositions presented here continue Lucier's life-long exploration of acoustic phenomena, drawing on aspects of some of his most well-known compositions and extending them into new instrumentation. "Tapper" (2004) extends the experiments with echolocation -- gathering information about an environment by listening to the echoes of sounds produced within it -- that Lucier began with his classic 1969 work Vespers, where performers explore a space equipped with hand-held pulse oscillators. Here, the same principle is put into practice for solo violin, the body of which the performer taps repeatedly with the butt end of the bow while moving around the performance space. The result is a subtly shifting web of echoes and resonances produced by the reflection of the sharp tap off the surfaces of the room (in this case, the Drawing Center in New York). In "Love Song" (2016), two violinists are connected by a long wire stretched between the bridges of their instruments, causing the sounds played on one violin to also be heard through the other. As the two violinists play long tones using only the open E string, they move in a circular motion around the performance space, thus changing the tension of the wire, which creates a remarkable array of variations in pitch and timbre ranging from ghostly wavering pitches reminiscent of a singing saw to near-electronic tones. In "Halo" (2019), one or more violinists walk slowly through the performance space in a zig-zag pattern while sustaining long tones. As in "Tapper", the consistent sound production reveals the sonic properties of the environment. As the title of the piece suggests, the outcome is a shimmering halo of sound produced by the reflection of the violin's extended tones off the walls and ceiling of the performance space (in this case, Alvin's home). Deluxe four-panel digipak with liner notes by Alvin Lucier, live images and artist bios. Sleeve design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by Tom Hamilton.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Black Truffle announce the release of She's More Wild..., a collaborative project by David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon, and Anne Klingensmith recorded at Mills College in 1981. Previously known only to cognoscenti through an obscure self-released three-track 7", this is the first publication of the complete album, an outrageous confection that mixes art-song and theatrical monolog with live electronics. Starting life as a performance art piece described by the artists as "Western Performance Noir", the record centers on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious "Archetypal Unitized Seminar", a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers. Delivered by Friedman, Hanlon, Klingensmith, and special guest Maggi Payne in forms ranging from spoken monolog to country and western waltz, the texts are accompanied by instrumental and electronic contributions by Behrman and DeMarinis. Musically, She's More Wild... is truly unique, demonstrating these two pioneers of live-electronic performance adapting their signature processes to something approaching a "pop" format: you hear the gliding, frequency-sensitive electronics familiar from Behrman's classic On the Other Ocean and the mutant hacked Speak n' Spell heard on DeMarinis' Songs Without Throats (BT 041LP, 2019) propelled by drum machines and twisted into song forms. Perhaps comparable only to the David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert's contemporaneous Daytime Viewing in its interweaving of performance art tactics, high-tech electronics and pop sensibilities, She's More Wild... is an essential document, both immediately gratifying and ultimately thought provoking. Gatefold sleeve with various texts and archival images; sleeve design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplate & Mastering, Berlin.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Black Truffle present Realejo, the first vinyl release from Brazilian sound artist and composer Manuel Pessoa de Lima. Having composed works for diverse contexts including cinema, contemporary dance, theater, and television, Lima's live appearances often take the form of self-reflexive lecture performances that combine electro-acoustic sound, red light, video, and spoken text, moving unpredictably from the hilarious to the distressing. Realejo consists of two side-long pieces of highly idiosyncratic electro-acoustic collage, beginning with recordings Lima made of himself playing the organ in the Schloss Solitude Chapel in Stuttgart. Exploring the peculiarities of the instrument's mechanics, Lima made hours of recordings with the organ stops half-way open, moving from haunting gliding tones to oddly tuned fair-ground melodies reminiscent of the record's namesake realejo, a hand-cranked organ traditionally found in Brazil as the musical accompaniment to the work of fortune-telling parrots. To these organ sounds, Lima added recordings of a security guard made in São Paulo: "Just before coming to Stuttgart, I started making field recordings of a security guard in São Paulo. It's something pretty common in residential areas: they sit in a chair with a whistle, and use that to signal when people arrive, leave or pass by in the street. This particular security guard, Miguel Viana, works on the same street my parents live, and where I had my childhood, and he has worked there since I was a small child. He has watched the street at night, from 8PM to 6AM, every single day, except Sundays, for over 30 years." The poignant sounds of the security guard's whistles punctuate Lima's electro-acoustic environment, which also includes raw digital synthesis, recordings of his friends' infant child, audio lifted from YouTube, and, on the LP's second side, elements taken from an earlier work, "36 English to Portuguese Lessons". Finely chiseled from dozens of hours of source material into a detail-rich, mercurial structure, Realejo is alternately jarring and seductive, introducing listeners to a young composer with a powerfully individual voice.