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BT 060CD
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$19.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/17/2020
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.
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2LP
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BT 060LP
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$31.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/17/2020
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.
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BT 065LP
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$23.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/3/2020
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.
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BT 063LP
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$25.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/26/2020
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.
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BT 061CD
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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.
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BT 059LP
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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.
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BT 056LP
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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.
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BT 057CD
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Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie returns to Black Truffle with Nist-Nah. Like his previous solo record on the label, the abrasive hip-hop concrète of People Pleaser (BT 027LP, 2017), Nist-Nah finds Guthrie branching out in a new direction, this time in a suite of six percussion pieces primarily using the metallaphones, hand drums, and gongs of the Gamelan ensembles of Indonesia. The music presented here is grounded in Guthrie's travels in Indonesia and study of various forms of Gamelan music, from the stately suspended temporality of the courtly Javanese Gamelan Sekatan, to the delirious, thuggish repetition that accompanies the Javanese trance ritual Jathilan, to the shimmering acoustic glitch of contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat/ However, far from an exercise in exoticism, Nist-Nah develops out of Guthrie's extensive work with metal percussion in recent years (as heard, for example, on his 2015 LP for iDEAL, Sacrée Obsession), where gongs, singing bowls and cymbals are used to build up walls of hovering tones and sizzling details. Though Guthrie is broadening his palette to explore Gamelan instrumentation and pay tribute to his love of this sophisticated yet elemental percussion music, the pieces presented here are equally informed by Guthrie's interests in free jazz, electro-acoustic music, and diverse experimental music practices, exploring long tones, extended techniques, and non-metered pulse. Nist-Nah presents a variety of approaches across its six pieces, from the crisp, precise rhythmic complexity of the opening title track to the droning textures of "Catlike" and "Elders". On the epic closing "Kebogiro Glendeng", Guthrie offers an extended, layered rendition of a Javanese piece belonging to a repertoire primarily used for warmups, beginner's groups and children first learning Gamelan, elegantly gesturing to his own amateur status while using the piece's insistently repeated melody as an extended exploration of the hypnotic effects of repetition, falling in and out of time with himself to create woozy, narcotic effects until the piece eventually dissolves into a wavering fog. Images by Sylvie Meunier. Recorded in 2019 by Lucas Pizzini. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Tokyo. Cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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BT 057LP
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LP version. Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie returns to Black Truffle with Nist-Nah. Like his previous solo record on the label, the abrasive hip-hop concrète of People Pleaser (BT 027LP, 2017), Nist-Nah finds Guthrie branching out in a new direction, this time in a suite of six percussion pieces primarily using the metallaphones, hand drums, and gongs of the Gamelan ensembles of Indonesia. The music presented here is grounded in Guthrie's travels in Indonesia and study of various forms of Gamelan music, from the stately suspended temporality of the courtly Javanese Gamelan Sekatan, to the delirious, thuggish repetition that accompanies the Javanese trance ritual Jathilan, to the shimmering acoustic glitch of contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat/ However, far from an exercise in exoticism, Nist-Nah develops out of Guthrie's extensive work with metal percussion in recent years (as heard, for example, on his 2015 LP for iDEAL, Sacrée Obsession), where gongs, singing bowls and cymbals are used to build up walls of hovering tones and sizzling details. Though Guthrie is broadening his palette to explore Gamelan instrumentation and pay tribute to his love of this sophisticated yet elemental percussion music, the pieces presented here are equally informed by Guthrie's interests in free jazz, electro-acoustic music, and diverse experimental music practices, exploring long tones, extended techniques, and non-metered pulse. Nist-Nah presents a variety of approaches across its six pieces, from the crisp, precise rhythmic complexity of the opening title track to the droning textures of "Catlike" and "Elders". On the epic closing "Kebogiro Glendeng", Guthrie offers an extended, layered rendition of a Javanese piece belonging to a repertoire primarily used for warmups, beginner's groups and children first learning Gamelan, elegantly gesturing to his own amateur status while using the piece's insistently repeated melody as an extended exploration of the hypnotic effects of repetition, falling in and out of time with himself to create woozy, narcotic effects until the piece eventually dissolves into a wavering fog. Images by Sylvie Meunier. Recorded in 2019 by Lucas Pizzini. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Tokyo. Cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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BT 055LP
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7.5 on Pitchfork. Black Truffle release Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O'Rourke, offering up two side-long realizations of Ferrari's tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo's SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O'Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean Sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko parlor. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves, creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles; snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko parlor. "Tranquilles Impatiences" (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises d'Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari's piece layers Luc Ferrari's sounds into a dense new work that emphasizes the insistently pulsing rhythms of the source material. In this realization with O'Rourke, the piece becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape calls up Luc Ferrari's classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the swarming electronics bring to mind O'Rourke's Steamroom work or even the vast expanses of Roland Kayn. Deluxe gatefold sleeve with liner notes from Brunhild Ferrari. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke. Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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BT 054LP
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Black Truffle invite you to an evening of drunken revelry in the Batcave! After a chance meeting at a local supermarket in Poughkeepsie, New York, Joe McPhee and Graham Lambkin have performed together as a duo extensively in recent years, in addition to their joint work excavating some of the wildest tapes from McPhee's archive for Lambkin's now defunct Kye label. Live in the Batcave documents an evening the two friends spent together in the company of Joe's brother Charlie and Lambkin's son Oliver in November 2017 at Charlie's house in Poughkeepsie. The LP captures seven increasingly drunken snapshots of the four shooting the breeze, playing flutes and whistles, drumming on anything at hand, and playing records. Edited together in Lambkin's distinctive style of lo-fi domestic tape collage, the multiple simultaneous cassette recordings of the shenanigans abruptly cut in and out and fall out of sync, creating disorientating, woozy echoes. Mics are bumped, stories are told, drinks are poured, text messages arrive, and AACM-esque flute jams are interrupted by violent bursts of laughter and wet-mouthed sound poetry. All the while, classic soul records play, initially in the background, but coming increasingly to the fore until the record culminates in a strangely moving free-associative singalong. Live in the Batcave is a truly unique document that exists somewhere between free jazz, audio verité, performance art, and everyday life. File next to your copy of Das Kümmerling Trio. Gatefold sleeve with extensive photographic documentation and liner notes from Joe McPhee. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
"Our music was born from the sounds of jazz, funk, soul, noise -- sounds with no other reason so exist, except because they did, sounds which occurred like putting one step in front of the other to see if the way was clear to take the next step. The plan was, there is no plan, just start at the beginning, end at the end and party like it's 1999" --Joe McPhee.
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BT 051LP
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Black Truffle present In Real Life, the latest in a flurry of releases from Berlin-based guitarist and composer Julia Reidy. Having drawn acclaim for solo performances on 12-string acoustic guitar that bridge microtonality, "American primitive" stylings, and classic minimalism, Reidy's recent releases have utilized an increasingly broad sonic palette, fleshing out guitar-based composition with electronics, field recordings, and -- most strikingly -- heavily auto-tuned vocals. On In Real Life, Reidy pushes one step further, crafting an epic LP-length suite that moves from abstracted song to lush electronics and explorations in contemporary musique concrete. Beginning with a passage of eerie electronics and creaking percussive interjections, Reidy's heavily auto-tuned voice quickly takes center stage. Surrounded by explosions of electric guitar and synthesized arpeggios, the auto-tuned voice delivers a melancholic ode, bringing together poetic images to reflect on the instability of experience and mutability of identity in a contemporary world saturated by digital technology. This concern with the unsettled relationship between the physical and digital is reflected musically by the constantly shifts in emphasis between Reidy's physically demanding guitar-picking and the various forms of synthesis deployed. Similarly, the dynamic imagery of cutting, shattering, and "racing streams" present in Reidy's lyrics also serves to characterize the structure of In Real Life, which ceaselessly shifts between distinct episodes. The song-based opening, long sequences of frenetic 12-string guitar shadowed and eventually overtaken by synth tones, passages of delicate chiming harmonics, electro-acoustic cut-ups -- each flows seamlessly into the next, often recurring throughout the record's duration, which lingers over interstitial moments between these episodes. Artwork by Suze Whaites; LP design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Tokyo. Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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BT 050LP
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Double LP version. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, abruptly cutting into an extended episode of Ambarchi's pummeling drums, O'Rourke's fuzzed-out six-string bass, and Haino's roaring guitar and electronics. Eventually settling into a hypnotic bass and drum groove over which Haino unleashes some almost Ray Russell-eque skittering atonal screech, these opening 13 minutes act as a potent reminder of the trio's power. Alongside showcasing the steady development of a unique language for the guitar-bass-drums power trio, the group's succession of releases over the last decade has demonstrated a constant experimentation with new instruments, which continues here with O'Rourke use of Hammond organ (played at the same time as his roaming, sometimes knotty basslines). On the album's second piece, the organ plays a key role, furnishing a harmonically rich shimmer over O'Rourke's angular six-string bass chords, Haino's distant, chirping electronics and Ambarchi's crisp cymbal work; arriving somewhere halfway between Albert Marcoeur and Terje Rypdal, this piece is undoubtedly a highlight in the trio's catalog so far. The second and third sides are slow-burning, multi-part epics that range from spacious reflection to furious tumult. Where the trio's previous double-LP set -- This Dazzling, Genuine "Difference" Now Where Shall It Go? (BT 030LP, 2017) -- was primarily instrumental in focus, here you find Haino's voice taking the spotlight on the expansive third side, intoning, wailing. and exhorting in Japanese and English over a backdrop that moves from hushed bass and organ atmospherics to rolling toms and cymbal crashes before arriving at an ecstatic finale of searing guitar, tumbling drums and reverb-saturated bass. The fourth side returns to the hypnotic grooves of the opening piece, fixing on a relentless riff and riding it into oblivion under Haino's roaming psychedelic soloing and jagged chordal slashes. Cover image by Traianos Pakioufakis; Live action pics by Ujin Matsuo. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. LP design by Lasse Marhaug; gatefold sleeve.
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BT 050CD
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Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, abruptly cutting into an extended episode of Ambarchi's pummeling drums, O'Rourke's fuzzed-out six-string bass, and Haino's roaring guitar and electronics. Eventually settling into a hypnotic bass and drum groove over which Haino unleashes some almost Ray Russell-eque skittering atonal screech, these opening 13 minutes act as a potent reminder of the trio's power. Alongside showcasing the steady development of a unique language for the guitar-bass-drums power trio, the group's succession of releases over the last decade has demonstrated a constant experimentation with new instruments, which continues here with O'Rourke use of Hammond organ (played at the same time as his roaming, sometimes knotty basslines). On the album's second piece, the organ plays a key role, furnishing a harmonically rich shimmer over O'Rourke's angular six-string bass chords, Haino's distant, chirping electronics and Ambarchi's crisp cymbal work; arriving somewhere halfway between Albert Marcoeur and Terje Rypdal, this piece is undoubtedly a highlight in the trio's catalog so far. The second and third sides are slow-burning, multi-part epics that range from spacious reflection to furious tumult. Where the trio's previous double-LP set -- This Dazzling, Genuine "Difference" Now Where Shall It Go? (BT 030LP, 2017) -- was primarily instrumental in focus, here you find Haino's voice taking the spotlight on the expansive third side, intoning, wailing. and exhorting in Japanese and English over a backdrop that moves from hushed bass and organ atmospherics to rolling toms and cymbal crashes before arriving at an ecstatic finale of searing guitar, tumbling drums and reverb-saturated bass. The fourth side returns to the hypnotic grooves of the opening piece, fixing on a relentless riff and riding it into oblivion under Haino's roaming psychedelic soloing and jagged chordal slashes. Cover image by Traianos Pakioufakis; Live action pics by Ujin Matsuo. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. LP design by Lasse Marhaug; gatefold sleeve.
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BT 053CD
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Black Truffle present Reservoir 1: Preservation, a gorgeous piece by American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies. Sarah's work explores a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. The Reservoirs are a series of three one-hour pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious human mind. Jung and Freud described the unconscious mind as a reservoir, a repository for memories that we don't readily need access to, yet are kept forever somewhere in our minds. Specifically, Freud believed that one function of the unconscious mind is to store traumatic memories, filed away so that we don't have to confront them every day. The conscious mind has no direct access to the unconscious, yet the unconscious is a constant yet mysterious presence in our lives. Reservoir 1: Preservation is scored for piano and three percussionists, performed by Phillip Bush and Meridian, the long-running experiment in percussion, improvisation, and interpersonal relationships that includes Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, and Greg Stuart. In Preservation the piano functions as a constant, pervasive, but almost subliminal murmur amid the percussion playing that cycles through a variety of timbral and gestural areas, including gentle droning, frenetic scraping, and bricks violently dropped into metal buckets. The percussion group never interacts with or responds to the piano, while the piano subtly absorbs aspects of the trio. Preservation was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jeff Francis at the University of South Carolina and performed by Meridian: Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, Greg Stuart (percussion), and Phillip Bush (piano). CD digipak with design by Lasse Marhaug; Cover photo from Abby Grace Drake's photo series, Shopping Carts of Southside Ithaca.
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LP
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BT 049LP
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Black Truffle announce the release of this genuine head-scratcher, the first collaboration between DJ/mixtape-compiler Kayo Makino and underground legend Tori Kudo. Originally created to be played between acts at the launch of Eiko Ishibashi's acclaimed The Dreams My Bones Dream (2018) and then reworked and refined for LP release, the two side-long pieces are sonic environments constructed by Makino for Kudo's piano to inhabit, or, as the LP's credits suggest, a "cinéma pour l'oreille" in which Kudo's piano plays the starring role. Beginning with a soothing field recording of crickets dramatically punctuated by smashing glass, the first side finds Kudo playing his way repeatedly through one of Satie's 1897 Pièces froides. Best known to many listeners for his role as leader of the ecstatically shambolic rock unit Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Kudo's performance of Satie's whimsical yet haunting melody is alternately halting and fluid, delighting in the hesitations of unstudied technique and the subtle variations between repeated attempts. While the combination of Kudo's piano and the background of crickets initially suggests a documentary approach to recording -- as if the you are simply hearing incidental sounds creeping through an open window -- things take an unexpected turn a few minutes in when Kudo's piano is suddenly doubled. Layering two separate attempts at the same piece of top of each other, Makino's unorthodox mixing blurs Satie's original into a fog of stumbling echoes that becomes increasingly dreamlike as the chirping crickets are overtaken by pattering rain, German dialogue and traffic sounds. The second side begins in a similarly inscrutable vein, with snatches of birds and film music providing a gentle backdrop for Kudo's improvisational variations on a chord progression that, as his performance builds over its twenty-minute duration, somehow begins to suggest the sadly swaggering grandeur of Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones. Makino accompanies and eventually overwhelms Kudo's piano with a bizarre layer of digitally processed voice and drums, stretched out into a disorienting haze before suddenly retreating to leave Kudo's piano accompanied only by a barking dog. Seemingly unrelated to anything else being produced in the world of contemporary music, this is a striking collaboration between two unique musical personalities that bridges the mundane and the surreal, opening up a dream-space both haunted and hospitable. Cover design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by Jim O'Rourke at Steamroom, Japan. Vinyl cut by Rashed Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2LP
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BT 048LP
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Repressed. Black Truffle present the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975. This is an expanded double-LP edition with over 40 minutes of additional contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley, and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems. Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones", four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analyzed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In "Chilean Drought", three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the beta, alpha, and theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, three constantly shifting vocal recordings are controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist. "Piano Etude I (Alpha)", the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands, two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average alpha amplitude increases. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom's "On Being Invisible", in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones" but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the "performer's active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge." Includes archival images and new notes from the composer. Gatefold sleeve design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by David Rosenboom from the original analog tape masters. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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BT 047LP
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Black Truffle announce the release of Australian composer-performer James Rushford's The Body's Night. Known to many through his collaborative works with Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Kassel Jaeger, Klaus Lang, Joe Talia, and many others, this LP is Rushford's first solo release in a decade and the very first he has composed, performed, and recorded entirely alone. Primarily recorded in Los Angeles in 2017, The Body's Night is a single electro-acoustic suite stretching over thirty minutes, utilizing field recordings, flutes, ocarina, microphones, organ, percussion, piano, tape, analog synthesizers, viola, and voice. True to its title, the record immediately ushers into a nocturnal, intimate, claustrophobic space where the hyper-amplified rustle of clothing and vocal mumbles are shadowed by uneasy synth tones, fluttering white noise and distant filigrees of ultra-high-pitched tones at the edges of aural perception. While the influence of contemporary composers such as Klaus Lang and Jakob Ullmann (both of whose music Rushford has performed extensively) makes itself felt in the music's attention to the liminal space between sounds, Rushford also draws on the bedroom synth explorations of '80s acts like Déficit Des Années Antérieures (DDAA) and the harmonies and production values of black metal, drawing a common thread between these influences in terms of their shared interest in atmosphere and deliberate retreat from perspicuity. Relief from this claustrophobic atmosphere comes through the episodic structure of the piece, where like an already dark shot fading to black, each sequence retreats from your ears before you can properly grasp it. Rushford uses classical electro-acoustic techniques and plays elegantly on the fundamental ambiguity of the acousmatic situation in which you can never be sure of the source of the sound you are hearing. But rather than a tribute to the masterworks of musique concrete, this is defiantly idiosyncratic and personal music. Meticulous in production values and exploratory in timbre, tonality and form, The Body's Night is a key work from one of the most singular young composers at work today. Stunning artwork by O.B. De Alessi. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered and cut at 45rpm for maximum fidelity by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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BT 046LP
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Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements present on most of her past releases to focus solely on her raw DIY electronics and possessed vocal stylings. Forming a perfect companion to 2017's well-received Voice Hardcore, a series of pieces composed of only her processed voice that saw Phew push her work into the most abstract terrain yet, Patience Soup finds the trio inhabiting an uneasy landscape of moans, howls, and smeared electronic sonorities. Presented in atmosphere-enhancing room fidelity, the set begins in crunching textural abstraction and Phew's vocal asides, set against a backdrop of Ambarchi's shimmering Leslie-cabinet guitar tones and O'Rourke's synthetic slivers. A testament to the risk-taking prowess of these three master improvisers, the performance moves organically from ecstatic crescendos powered by Phew's processed wails to moments of near-silence in which a translucent veil of lingering electronic tones is gently punctuated by O'Rourke's chiming piano chords. Constantly shifting, both harmonically and dynamically, Patience Soup is suffused throughout with a haunted energy and shows these three established figures continuing to venture out into uncharted territory. Presented in a deluxe sleeve with stunning images by Traianos Pakioufakis and an inner sleeve with live pics from Mike Kubeck. Design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2LP
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BT 041LP
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Black Truffle announces the release of Songs Without Throats, a collection of recordings from Paul DeMarinis. A key figure in the history of electronic music since the 1970s and collaborator with the likes of Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and David Tudor, DeMarinis is a pioneer in the development of gallery sound installation and digital music technologies. All tracks have been selected in collaboration with the artist, focusing on DeMarinis's exploration of synthesized voice and the digital analysis and manipulation of speech sounds, recorded during the late '70s up until 1995. Drawing together tracks dispersed on compilations along with a number of pieces previously unheard in any form, Songs Without Throats offers a mind-blowing, revelatory look into DeMarinis's alternately accessible and uncompromising production. Opening with a mesmerizing piece from 1978 pairing the voice and tamboura of Anne Klingensmith with letters spat out by a Speak n' Spell to the accompaniment of the randomized melodic patterns of DeMarinis's homebuilt electronic instrument "The Pygmy Gamelan", the record then dispenses with the live human voice in favor of its recorded and synthetic doubles. One can follow DeMarinis's restless probing of the possibilities of technology, from the hacked Speak n' Spell (which gives us the austere "Et Tu, Klaatu" (1979), another duet with Klingensmith, on bowed psaltery, in which the toy's synthetic voice is stretched into an alien song) through to the use of digital samples manipulated with home computer technology in the early 1990s (including a remarkable collage piece that weaves a rare recording of Stalin's voice and bird-like electronic twittering derived from its formant - glides into a rich tapestry of samples reflective of the dictator's musical life). In between is a rich sampling of DeMarinis's signature work with speech melodies -- usually unnoticed melodic inflections that lie within speech patterns -- which he analyses and translates into synthesized musical accompaniment. These pieces draw on a wide variety of sources, which range from the hilarious to the menacing, combining elements as seemingly unlikely as Beethoven's piano sonatas and the sounds of '80s synth-pop. The results are an extraordinary combination of the alien and the familiar. As DeMarinis himself characterizes his work with vocal synthesis, this is "a kind of signal that simultaneously carried and obscured meaning and ideation, even as it created a sound world totally alien in esthetic". Deluxe gatefold sleeve with archival images and liners by DeMarinis; design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin.
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BT 042LP
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Black Truffle present the first-ever vinyl reissue of Ruedi Häusermann's Galerie Randolph, a masterpiece of solo multi-tracking originally released on CD by Unit Records in 1995. Born in 1948 and residing in the medieval Swiss town of Lenzburg, and virtually unknown outside of the German-speaking world, Häusermann is a multi-instrumentalist and enormously prolific composer who works primarily in the medium of absurdist music-theater. A virtuoso wind player and free improviser who also composes for traditional classical instrumentation, his work is characterized by subtly surreal humor and the unlikely combination of extended technique and simple, at times almost child-like, melodic ideas. Named after his rehearsal room in Lenzburg, Galerie Randolph uses an enormous array of instruments to craft a work of singular compositional vision. Each of the twelve pieces begins from the same two elements: a woozy, sliding scatter of tones played on a home-made contraption stretching two guitar strings between the top of Häusermann's alto saxophone and an amplified cup, and a series of uneasy block chords sounded on accordion and reeds. On each piece these two elements (whose pitch gradually raises throughout the record) are complemented by entirely different material, all of it played by Häusermann. Ranging from layered flutes to one-finger piano melodies to unintelligible vocals to musique concrete interjections to free jazz saxophone explosions, these additional layers combine with the endlessly returning idée fixe of the foundational elements to create a truly dream-like listening experience, a gently deranged realm in which you lose all sense of linear time. Calling up the most unlikely combinations of possible predecessors -- Erik Satie, Gerry Mulligan, and Helmut Lachenmann perhaps -- Galerie Randolph ultimately defies comparison. Almost unknown except to a select group of cognoscenti such as Jim O'Rourke, yet destined to become a cult classic, Galerie Randolph is an instance of that most rare thing: music the likes of which you have never heard before. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with gorgeous archival images by the composer; Design by Stephen O'Malley; Edition of 500.
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CD
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BT 045CD
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The recently composed "Ricochet Lady" (2016) is the only work for solo acoustic glockenspiel by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Following in the manner of his pieces "I Am Sitting In A Room" and "Vespers", "Ricochet Lady" embodies Lucier's approach toward sound's individual function and mobility within space. This CD defines this approach through four realizations recorded in four dissimilar spaces, ranging from the standard to extraordinary: a university rehearsal hall with walls of drywall and glass, a chapel made of oak and stone, an empty forge and foundry warehouse for steel railway wheels, and a 36-meter tall dilapidated cement grain elevator. Never one to shy away from convention, Lucier intensifies each performance by instructing that the glockenspiel be placed against a wall or other reflective surface where the soloist systematically traverses the entire range of the instrument in rapid, repetitive patterns, actively disseminating the glockenspiel's sustain, clicks, and interferences throughout the space. In doing so, the glockenspiel maps the unique acoustical characters of each space as each space helps to compose the piece. Created in close collaboration with Trevor Saint, a rare (if not the only) specialist of experimental music for glockenspiel, Lucier has further enhanced the sophistication of this re-imagined instrument while maintaining his devotion to letting spaces speak. Presented in a stunning digipak with liner notes by Alvin Lucier and Trevor Saint. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Matt Sargent at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. (For an optimal listening experience it is recommended that these recordings be played at high volume).
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BT 044CD
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So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour-long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) was originally commissioned by Documenta 14 and first performed as part of Documenta in Athens in 2017. Two key, and formerly distinct, aspects of Lucier's practice come together in this piece: the exploration of interference patterns in closely tuned intervals, and the exploration of resonant chambers. From speakers mounted inside amphorae a constantly turning braid of beating sine waves trace the descent into the depths of hell, and then the doomed attempt to climb back into life. Singer Jessika Kenney and long-time Lucier collaborators Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis embody the three title characters in deeply focused performances that assert themselves against the process of the sweep, or become enfolded in it. The electronics were mixed in real time by programmer and equipment designer Tom Erbe. This record has all of the mind-bending acoustic effects expected from a Lucier piece, but also features a strong sense of narrative drama and flashes of raw emotion that are unexpected and deeply affecting. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by Doug Henderson at micro-moose, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe digipak with a booklet featuring the original poem and extensive notes by Lucier, Burr and Cathy Gere.
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2LP
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BT 040LP
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Black Truffle present the first reissue of a true underground masterpiece, Massimo Toniutti's Il Museo Selvatico ("The Wild Museum"), originally self-released on LP in 1991. Like his better-known brother Giancarlo -- whose classic 1985 Broken Flag LP La Mutazione was reissued by Black Truffle in 2015 (BT 014LP) -- Massimo Toniutti was active in the vibrant underground industrial/noise scene of the 1980s, contributing to releases on legendary labels such as Broken Flag and RRR and self-releasing a series of cassettes between 1984 and 1988. Existing in a private world apart from the noise and dark industrial tropes of many of his contemporaries, Toniutti's Il Museo Selvatico is an entirely singular work of domestic electro-acoustic exploration. Made up primarily of what Toniutti calls "small and rare noises" or sonic "knick-knacks" recorded between 1987 and 1990, the five pieces that make up the original LP usher us into a crepuscular space populated by mysterious traces of everyday life. Toniutti weaves a loose net of distant clanks, dull thuds, metallic resonance, and skittering percussive sounds, allowing the sounds to breathe against a backdrop of near-silent atmosphere. Although the haunted ambience recalls the work of contemporaries like Organum, Toniutti generally steers clear of long tones and drones, preferring to arrange brief, sometimes staccato sonic objects into patters of repeating figures and isolated events whose overall compositional shape remains somehow ungraspable. Although glimpses of recognizable location recordings and instrumental sounds can occasionally be made out, for most of the record the sources of the sounds you hear remain teasingly mysterious, an abstracted memory of everyday actions and atmospheres. I Museo Selvatico is accompanied here by an additional LP of material recorded at the same time, composed especially for this reissue into two side-long suites that inhabit the same haunted space as the original LP while occasionally making use of more maximal compositional strategies. Essential listening for fans of Organum, Nurse With Wound, Christoph Heemann, and the tradition of outsider musique concrete. Comes as a double-LP in a lavish gatefold with printed inner sleeves featuring archival images and notes. Remastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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4LP BOX/CD/Book
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BT 043LP
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Black Truffle together with Bernhard Rietbrock and ZHDK present Illuminated By the Moon, a stunning box set celebrating Alvin Lucier's 85th birthday celebrations which took place in Zurich, 2013. Alvin Lucier is one of most important figures in more than a half century of avant-garde and experimental sound practice; he has no equivalent. He is among America's most important composers, a towering pillar of intellect, creativity, and beauty realized through sound. His singular body of work is focused around acoustic phenomena and auditory perception includes, among others, the groundbreaking Bird And Person Dyning, 1980's Music On a Long Thin Wire (LCD 1011CD), and 1981's I Am Sitting In a Room (LCD 1013CD), each quietly shifting the understanding of what music could be with deceptively discrete gestures, laying their mark on history and the expectations of nearly everything to come, while radically expanding the field. It is such a life, defined by such striking accomplishment, which Illuminated By the Moon, celebrates across four LPs, a CD, and book. Recorded in October of 2016 at the Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Festival at the Zurich University of the Arts, the box gathers a remarkable range of performances of works from Lucier's life in music, from the iconic to the lesser known. It begins with wonderful stagings of "I Am Sitting In a Room" and "Music for Solo Performer" performed by the composer, before presenting the work "Charles Curtis" performed by the cellist for whom it was composed, and "Double Rainbow", a recent work, performed by the incredible Joan La Barbara. Over the course of the set's many discs, one encounters a range of works performed by Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley, Charles Curtis, and Gary Schmalzl, with further contributions by many others involved in Lucier's life and work. The collection, by offering an expanse of material otherwise unavailable in the composer's discography, opens a rare window into the breadth and range of territory which he has approached, as well as into the unique humor which has quietly bubbled through his entire career. It is a singular recording event, the likes of which are unlikely to be repeated. A worthy tribute to one of the last century's most important composers. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. 180 gram vinyl. Includes CD and 12x12", 120-page book with unseen images and various essays; Includes download code; Edition of 500.
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