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SAUNA 082CS
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Lee Ranaldo and Rob Menard have been friends and collaborators for years and this split cassette release on Important Records' Cassauna label amplifies their unique musical personalities and sonic compatibility. Both artists contributed over 30 minutes of music making this a pair of mini-albums on one tape. Ranaldo plays Farfisa, electric guitar, tres, marimba, bass and bells, taking the listener on a lyrical, hazy, ride full of life, time and echoing riff shimmer. Massive vibes from author, artist, Sonic Youth guitar slinger. Rob Menard (Ascension Sound), delivers a mini-album of washed out, minimal lo-fi astral guitar and feedback drones. Menard founded the 20 Guitar Circular Wall Of Angelic Sound and practices vibrational frequency healing.
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SAUNA 081CS
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Murals For Immersion is Kenneth James Gibson's sixth ambient outing under his given name, this time around collaborating with saxophonist Paul Carman who played and recorded with Frank Zappa in what Zappa called The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life. In late 2022, Gibson and Carman started getting together at Gibson's Idyllwild studio, laying down tons of saxophone sounds -- layers of drones, melody lines, and off kilter noises. Gibson processed, sculpted, and arranged these sounds into full-fledged pieces of music. Although the original idea was to make a 100% pure saxophone-based album, sub-heavy Moog Prodigy bass swells were added to fill out the lower end of the spectrum. From this process comes the aptly titled Murals For Immersion. Paul Carman is a legend in the California Jazz scene and a veteran of the 80's Frank Zappa Band. Rehearsing, touring, and recording with one of music's most influential groundbreakers inspired Carman to form his own ensembles and write his own original music. He has released six recordings over the past 35 years. Paul also played and recorded in bands such as ESP, Continuum, Quarteto Nuevo, and Dick Dale. Paul has a trio with bassist Marshall Hawkins (Miles Davis, Roberta Flack) and pianist Barnaby Finch (George Benson, Lee Ritnour). Currently floating between Idyllwild and Los Angeles, California, Kenneth James Gibson was born in Canada, but grew up in El Paso, Texas. Gibson founded the 1990s noise rock band Furry Things, which released most of its material on King Coffey's (of the Butthole Surfers) Trance Syndicate/Touch and Go Records imprint. Gibson has also released music that spans many genres under aliases such as Eight Frozen Modules, dubLoner, and Hiss & Buzz (with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto). He founded the electronic music record label Adjunct Audio in early 2005 with friend Konstantin Gabbro. Gibson, along with Brian McBride of Stars of the Lid, started the band Bell Gardens in 2009. The two explored the realms of Americana, chamber pop, folk, and psychedelic pop. The band released three albums on Southern Records, Rocket Girl, and their own Failed Better. In April 2016, Gibson released his first full-length ambient album under his given name titled The Evening Falls (KOMPPA 004CD) and returned for a second album in March of 2018 titled In The Fields Of Nothing (KOM 381LP). In 2022 he followed this up with two more albums, Groundskeeping and Ssih Mountain on his own Meadows Heavy Recorders.
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SAUNA 083CS
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Gabriele Gasparotti's second full length album, Tropismi, is a collection of mesmerizing compositions with masterful polyrhythmical textures and harmonies, strings, prepared piano, magnetic tape and field recordings. Gasparotti's unique style uses classical composition techniques such as counterpoint, canone inverso and serialism to create morphing expanding harmonies continuously. Tropismi features stunning cellotronics by Benedetta Dazzi, cellist and sound designer with which Gasparotti established an intense collaboration during the past years. The album has been recorded on a full analog reel-to-reel setup and mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk (Berlin). Says Gasparotti: "In my latest release I tried to seize the instant moment, the kairosor Greek kairological time: 'shooting' the instant with an on-the-fly recording of the performance on magnetic tape. While recording, I noticed that in several instances the compositions grew beyond the idea I had set out with: for example, some unforeseen elements started to emerge due to the interaction of the sound with the surrounding space. Though they were seemingly uninfluential, they made the compositional idea gradually slide into unexpected territories, arousing certain sensations in me that would suggest a particular atmosphere, image or state of mind -- a judgement that moved my way of manipulating the sound and at times suggesting even a possible title for a sonic idea that was meant to represent nothing but itself. This interaction between the sound and my mind reminded me of the biological phenomenon of tropism: 'The turning of an organism, or part of it, in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus.' So, in this work I expressly entitled Tropismi, I investigated those movements which appear to me as being the engine of existence and of expansion of the Universe." Gabriele Gasparotti is a composer based in Italy who specializes in electroacoustic music on analog gear. A classical trained pianist and violist, Gasparotti studied composition and electronic music with Riccardo Sinigaglia and Giuseppe Giuliano at the Conservatorio Verdiin Milan and the West Coast synthesis with Todd Barton.
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SAUNA 079CS
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The Generous Law, a new album by organist Jack Langdon and guitarist Anthony Vine, presents a glimpse of the inner voices and acoustical splendor of the Fisk Organ at Wellesley College, enlivened by the intuition of two improvisers. At the keyboards, Langdon crafts geometries of patiently braided lines and incisions, configuring the hues and shades of organ stops with an ear to the materiality of sound. Vine seizes on this, tuning his guitar to the organ and bringing his strings into alignment with the harmonics of the reeds and pipes, becoming an extension of the instrument, an organ stop of sorts. The guitar flows in and around Langdon's angular counterpoint, like the shimmer between the divots of a jigsaw puzzle, illuminating its matrix. The tonal design of the Fisk Organ brings these interactions into vibrant relief through its quarter-comma meantone tuning and 17th-century Danish and German stops -- giving organists access to sonorities only found in historic North European churches. Resurrecting a distant sonorous past echoes the design of Wellesley College's Houghton Chapel itself, a braiding of ecclesiastical motifs with no historical center, designed to impart a sense of old-world sacredness. Fisk's ahistorical mélange yielded something extraordinary, not a cheap replica or period imitation, but an instrument of sui generis chroma and expressivity. The musical idioverse of Langdon and Vine is defined less by interior imaginations, established style, and compositional formality, and more by the inexplicable pull of the organ, its guiding and grounding voice. In a letter to Ross Feld, Philip Guston speaks to this abstract, yet ubiquitous dynamic in artmaking with his notion of the "generous law," the namesake for this collection: "I think you are writing about the generous law that exists in art. A law which can never be given but only found anew each time in the making of the work. It is a law, too, which allows your forms (characters) to spin away, take off, as if they have their own lives to lead -- unexpected too -- as if you cannot completely control it all. I wonder why we seek this generous law as I call it. For we do not know how it governs -- and under what special conditions it comes into being. I don't think we are permitted to know other than temporarily. A disappearance act. The only problem is how to keep away from the minds that close in and itch (God knows why) to define it." This music is not driven by concept, process, or system, but by the wanderlust of sound, time, and listening.
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SAUNA 080CS
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Melbourne/Naarm-based musician and curator Rama Parwata, known for being the backbone drummer in bands such as Kilat, Whitehorse, and Rinuwat, releases his second major solo album titled Ceases on Cassauna/Important Records. Parwata's gripping new electro-acoustic work is a sonic exploration within the realms of post-free-jazz and experimental electronics. At its core, Ceases navigates the liminal spaces between rhythm and noise, structure and chaos. The album traverses a vast emotional and conceptual landscape, touching upon themes of impermanence, transformation, and the cyclical nature of existence. At the forefront of the album is Parwata's emotive compositional and performative approach, which serves as both anchor and catalyst for the album's journey. The percussion performance is cymbal heavy accompanied by deeply meditative drones and slow-moving melodies. The wash of sound touches on a spiritualism akin to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme Part 4: Psalm," albeit with a modern electronic vision á la Tim Hecker. With a keen sense of textural intricacy Parwata favors the emotional expression of electro-acoustic composition, weaving complex poly-textures that ebb and flow with hypnotic, prayer-like intensity. Each performative gesture creates a visceral immediacy that draws the listener deeper into the celestial, otherworldly sonic framework. The diverse array of electronic elements, meticulously crafted and seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the album are a testament of Parwata's capacity for acousmatic composition. From pulsating synthesizers to glitched-out samples, the electronic timbres in Ceases serve as both sonic embellishments and structural foundations, blurring the boundaries between organic and synthetic, acoustic and digital. Honing in on the electronics, a listener could be convinced they were hearing anything from spiritual-jazz, '90s rave, dungeon synth or doom. Through judicious composition, Parwata imbues each sound with a sense of transcendental allure and paints a soundworld that has a distinct "outerness." At times the narrative is pointedly bleak but over a few passages the sonic language often bends toward rejuvenation; finding respite in cadence. The title itself suggests a sense of cessation, of endings and beginnings intertwined -- a motif that reverberates throughout the album.
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SAUNA 078CS
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On Fluorescent Standard, guitarist Anthony Vine and clarinetist Gareth Davis present two luminous and serene worlds of harmonic sound. The duo entwine sustained tones, glowing with the resonant hues of their instruments, into enveloping and expansive atmospheres. Clarinet sonorities, swelling guitar chords, and tumbling elegiac piano fragments drift quietly through time in elusive cycles that subtly change and expand with each return. Every vibration is interconnected, aligned and fused attentively, causing the instruments to dissolve into themselves and emit residual vibratory energies, like fluorescence. What emerges is a music that invites quiet contemplation and rewards deep listening. While Vine and Davis met through the world of modern classical music, Fluorescent Standard finds itself in the realms of drone, ambient, and new age. The music is grounded in early minimalist aesthetics of composers like La Monte Young and Phill Niblock, but also shares the sensibilities of contemporary artists like Fennesz, Sarah Davachi, and Stars of the Lid.
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SAUNA 076CS
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Sucesiones is a compilation of studies written for 53 equal divisions of the octave (53 EDO). This tuning temperament was selected after analyzing the work of Mexican researcher and visionary Augusto Novaro, one of the microtonal and just intonation pioneer theorists. Novaro claims that 53 EDO is one of rich musical qualities, which has good approximations to the harmonic series. The use of simple textures such as sine waves was a conscious decision, this in order to maintain the focus on the relationship between the frequencies and the possibilities this tuning allows, that fluctuate from aggressive beat frequencies to pure intervals. These four compositions serve as an introduction and familiarization to the tuning. Recorded, mixed and mastered by José Orozco Mora in his studio (Mexico City), who has worked with different aspects of sound creation, such as composition, sound design, recording and production. His work mainly explores the fundamental aspects of the sonic spectrum, implementing alternate tunings and temperaments, exploring their harmonic content through the combination of frequencies, using both acoustic and electronic sources. These explorations had led Orozco to utilize different artistic mediums such as quadraphonic compositions, sound installations, and others. Orozco has released his work in labels such as Debacle Records (USA), Constellation Tatsu (USA), Hole Records (MEX). He has performed and presented his work in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, México, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, etc.
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SAUNA 075CS
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Atsuko Hatano is a contemporary classical viola player who works with electronics to add textures and layers to her sound. Located in Tokyo, Japan, she is a commanding instrumentalist and composer who constructs innovative compositions with strings and layered electronics. Working in isolation due to the Covid pandemic, Atsuko Hatano played violin, viola, synthesizer, and electronics to create these powerful, unique compositions. Insulated Paradise is an investigation into the social nature of humanity, an inward gaze during a time of isolation and a reaction to isolation itself. Ultimately, the solitude was a positive experience for Atsuko Hatano and Insulated Paradise was born. Cover art by Saskia Griepink is titled "Dew". Dew in the early morning. The symbolic transition from night to day. Refreshing life. Pure waterdrops reflecting light and colors. Silence before the noisy day begins.
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SAUNA 074CS
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Hopes & Theory is a collection of songs inspired by wild plants and intentional gardens. At its core this music is rooted in synthesis, autonomy, and purely tuned harmony. At its heart there is chaos, color, and evolution. Hopes & Theory was recorded on the island of North Haven, Maine and reflects the anarchy of serenity in a seemingly peaceful place. William Trevaskis is a composer and sound artist living and working in the Fox Islands of Maine who uses xenharmony to explore themes of chaos and nature. William's r&d marries modular synthesis with microtonality and live performance. Currently, he works using a combination of generative and live-performance systems to create a sonic landscape that calms and transfixes.
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SAUNA 070CS
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Mo H. Zareei (mHz) returns to Imprec/Cassauna with Proof Of Identity, an album of pulsating, pattern-based electronic pieces that evolve in ways reminiscent of Steve Reich's early work or Philip Glass's Music In 12 Parts. With Proof Of Identity, Zareei confronts issues surrounding identity and authorship in composition specifically when created by non-Western musicians. He simultaneously tackles orientalism and the normative take on identity politics.
mHz: "More than a decade ago, I made a piece of beat-based electronic music and titled it 'Middle Eastern IDM' for a course assignment. After listening to it in class, my professor asked what was Middle Eastern about it. It was only a year after I had left Iran to study in the US, and I didn't know that I could say 'I am. I made the piece'. So I went back and superimposed a sample of Egyptian protest chants on top of the piece, to make it 'sufficiently Middle Eastern'. What prejudiced conservatism and performative liberalism share is gatekeeping practices that box one in a preconceived state of otherness. While the former overtly regards that otherness as inferior, the latter exoticizes it through patronizing paternalism . . . When you look at who gets to decide if something's indigenous enough, you see how decolonization itself has been colonized. When you listen to this piece, I'm very happy for you to keep in mind that it was made by someone from Iran. But I might need to clarify that this piece has nothing to do with Sufism and the whirling dervishes, the interweaving patterns of the Persian carpet, the poetry of Rumi, or Islamic architecture. And if you hear those moments of 'non-western' sonorities, that is because I have constructed this piece from samples of a piece of Iranian traditional music -- an overplayed piece that was all over TV and radio while I was growing up Iran, one that I never found particularly inspiring or interesting. Here, I have tried to make it more interesting by completely taking it apart and reconstructing it through my personal compositional techniques, aesthetic preferences, and a wide range of musical influences. So in short, while this piece might not sound like your archetypical Iranian music, I assure you that it is Iranian enough."
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SAUNA 071CS
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Tabulatura is a 2008 indeterminate composition for sixteen pre-recorded guitar parts and computer with custom software. It is conceived as a system to generate different acoustic patterns. The Tabulatura 2 documents eight pieces recorded live at Palazzo Castagna, Città Sant'Angelo, Italy, in November 2020. The album was recorded on two-track, directly on hard drive, without DSP and overdubs. Emiliano Romanelli (b. 1979) is an Italian musician with a background in visual art. His work includes sound installation, live performance and composition. His recordings are published by Terziruolo, Cassauna, and Senufo Editions. Romanelli has been co-founder of the duo Tu m' (1998-2011).
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SAUNA 072CS
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2024 reprint. Francesco Gennari is trained as a classical pianist and he commits himself to sound exploration through modular synth practice as further evolution of his musical journey. Gennari's origins are with black-and-white keys, noise-punk bands, and DIY instrument building. This stunning debut, titled Frammenti, is the culmination of all of Gennari's interests. Through simple ideas developed with classical techniques like counterpoint and harmonic expansions, Francesco uses the modular setup as a virtual companion, allowing him to do what he wants while remaining open to what the machine whispers to him. Francesco's music charms with minimal rhythmic patterns, sonic manipulation, and lush ambient soundscapes comprised of short ideas full of variations. RIYL: Caterina Barbieri, Jessica Ekomane, Alessandro Cortini.
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SAUNA 073CS
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Shared System is Tony Rolando's 2021 entry into the Make Noise Shared System series of releases that included Richard Devine, Alessandro Cortini, Robert AA Lowe, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Surachai. Despite the limited instrumentation, this Shared System cassette is another collection of Tony Rolando's work that is familiar yet unique, catchy and is hard to stop listening to. Back in 2008, Tony Rolando was demonstrating modular synthesizers to anybody who would listen. A few folks were wildly curious -- most people asked, "How do you make music with that thing?" Tony's lonesome journey into the vacant landscape of analog electronic music was like being reborn. He wanted people to understand and experience riding these electrical currents of music for themselves. In order to do so, he needed to convince them that the seemingly primitive analog modular synthesizer was a musical instrument capable of amplifying an artist's unique voice. Around 2010, outside the Empty Bottle with the artist Surachai, he surmised that sending a singular, modular synthesizer to five artists to record two tracks live would highlight unique results-illustrating the capabilities of the modular synthesizer as an instrument and the artists' distinct voices. Here is the original text that accompanied the release of these five records from Richard Devine, Alessandro Cortini, Robert AA Lowe, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Surachai: "The Shared System series compiles the separate recordings of several artists utilizing the same electronic musical instrument, the Shared System. At times it feels as though electronic music has become an overly automated form driven by simplified genre specific apps and software. What happens when the signal path is not pre-defined or optimized for a popular result? The Shared System is a modular synthesizer developed by Make Noise. It has no pre-determined signal path, and is not designed for any particular musical destination. In limiting the artists to this one instrument, we hope the Shared System series of records will purely illustrate the intentions of the artists."
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SAUNA 068CS
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If Texturalis was a real word, it might have something to do with the density or porosity of organic compounds, In the case of Machinefabriek's Texturalis, the word fits the sounds on this album. Sounds indeed, not songs. Anyone familiar with Machinefabriek knows his interest in anything crackling, fizzling and buzzing. For Texturalis, Machinefabriek chose to work on just that; not to be bothered with creating elaborate compositions, but to focus on creating intriguing textures. This resulted in 18 two-minute vignettes. Each of these could be a glimpse of a continuous sound environment.
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SAUNA 065CS
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Alexandre Bazin's second album for Cassauna is a compelling minimal/experimental/electronic album consisting of one piece separated into several movements for the purpose of stronger narrative and aesthetic coherence. The album explores the concept of percussion and resonance through the spectrum of electronic frequencies and densities with a plunge into the sound. Percussion-Resonance makes use of a new alphabet, a simple vocabulary in order to create innovative and personal music, with a clear and emotional subject. Structured architectural sequences give way to the experimental. Different climaxes punctuate the work in order to keep grabbing the listener's attention. The record title tackles the theme of musique concrète developed by French composer Pierre Schaeffer as well a nod to Bernard Parmegiani's De Natura Sonorum. Alexandre Bazin is a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales better known as the GRM, for which he writes documentaries about music for Radio France. He is passionate about experimental music and more specifically the electronic music created by Bernard Parmegiani, Iannis Xenakis, Pan Sonic, Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Ryoji Ikeda.
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SAUNA 063CS
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Atsuko Hatano is a contemporary classical viola player who works with electronics to add textures and layers to her sound. Located in Tokyo, Japan, she is a commanding instrumentalist and composer who constructs innovative compositions with strings and layered electronics. Cells #2 was performed entirely by Atsuko Hatano who played violin, viola, cello, and contrabass. Her inspiration for the initial violin improvisations was imagining the increase and decay in the intensity of vibrations of particles transmitting sound. After nearly four years the album was mixed and mastered with the assistance of Jim O'Rourke. When not playing solo Atsuko is extremely active recording, collaborating and playing live with Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Mocky, and many more.
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SAUNA 069CS
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Brian Thummler's Ghost Birds combines piano improvisations and noise to create a uniquely compelling musical duality. These seven pieces, selected by John Brien, are inspired by a lifetime of experience, art and poetry as well as Cage, Merzbow, Satie, Sun Ra. Ghost Birds takes flight with experimental simplicity. The interaction of noise and piano, a synergy that also pushes and pulls, creates profound musical dimensions available to the attentive listener. Ghost Birds was recorded in a studio and on an enclosed porch where an old, noisy out of tune upright grand piano lives. Traffic sounds seep in and plant themselves in the recording while the human soul empties into the piano. Who is Brian Thummler? To quote the poet Lu Yu, he is "the old man who does as he pleases." Handmade, letterpressed O card slip sleeve.
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SAUNA 066CS
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Tony Rolando's debut release Old Cool Echoes is the kind of tape you flip over and play again and again. His second release, an LP for Important titled Breakin' Is A Memory, will be available in early 2022. A CD titled Shared System will follow. Imagine if you wished away your surroundings and found yourself in a synthetic landscape where the simplest three-color pattern animated an entire horizon. If you could suppress your memory enough to experience the new beauty of it, but not so much that you lost the pieces of yourself that make life worth living, this could be your soundtrack. For more than a decade, Tony Rolando has composed electricity into musical instruments at Make Noise. When he collaborated with Alessandro Cortini in 2019 to create the Strega instrument, the experience rekindled Tony's love of composing and recording music. On Old Cool Echoes, Tony follows mutating patterns and slow timbral gradients, allowing them to suggest composition as much as he does, occasionally exploring digital media catacombs and dabbling in the microtonal, all with minimal percussion interruption.
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SAUNA 067CS
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Every new St. Abdullah record is an attempt to present new ideas and To Live A La West is no exception. To Live A La West is simply moving, a collection of profound and spiritual tracks miraculously existing at the impossible intersection of free jazz and electro where mystery and clarity exist together. Neither complicated or complex but profound, St. Abdullah's new work is partially inspired by their love for Jon Hassell's compositions. Cassette comes in a first edition of 100.
Saint Abdullah on the release: "This album, like all of our albums, are rooted in our human stories. Personal stories, family stories. This one happens to focus on the chapter that began when we moved to Canada as kids, and left Iran for good. To live in the West doesn't necessarily mean to be Western. That is a choice. As kids, it felt a necessity to be like the western kids. To imitate their culture, choices, way of life. That's what was acceptable, even desirable -- a life lived with less tension was the motto. We were already different enough. It was never our parents who asked this of us. More the environment. There was a moment, after grade 6 graduation that our mother has on film (she has everything on film), where we're begging her to let us go to the dance that took place after the ceremonies. Our father was strictly a no, our mother was on the fence. In the end she won out, and we got to go. It was such a wild feeling, having only been in the west 3 years at that time. So maybe that's what this album is about, an imitation? But who we are imitating, I'm not sure anymore. No one directly, certainly, but a cannon perhaps. Imitate better than they can infiltrate. Faster than they take over our cultures, our lands, our youth, we take over theirs. Still reflecting..."
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SAUNA 060CS
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Musician and composer Sahba Sizdahkhani serves as a unique crossroad of East meets West. Influenced heavily by both 1960s spiritual free-jazz and Persian classical music, he channels the fire-energy and longing for connectivity these two stormy histories represent. At age 12, his self-proclaimed "aha moment" occurred while listening to the John Coltrane Quartet for the very first time. As the years passed, however, his ferocious love of jazz and improvisation would open pathways and pointers to his native roots of Persian classical music, and eventually, he would begin formal studies on the Iranian santur with master santur player Faraz Minooei. Sahba has completed two separate Bachelor of Arts degrees: one at Berklee College of Music, in Jazz Performance, and the other at The University of Maryland, in Art History & Archeology. He worked in Paris for several years in textile design but ultimately moved back to NYC to further pursue jazz drumming. He has composed film scores for Chelsea Winstanley (JoJo Rabbit), Whalerock Industries, maverick avant filmmaker Paul Clipson, as well as a live score performance for the Cinema 16 series in the legendary tunnel underneath the Manhattan Bridge. Additionally, Sahba has recently recorded with Michael Morley (Dead C) and currently has running musical collaborations with Derek Monypeny, Rob Magill, and Zachary James Watkins + Ross Peacock. He has shared live bills with a vastly diverse class of artists including Laraaji, C Spencer Yeh, Susan Alcorn, Henry Kaiser, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Sunwatchers, Wizard Apprentice, Talibam!, Plankton Wat, Peter Brötzmann, and Don Dietrich (Barbetomagus). He has performed at The White House, Park Avenue Armory, Kennedy Center for the Arts, Basilica Hudson's 24 Hour Drone Festival, WFMU live performance. Sahba's hazy, atmospheric solo performances with 104-string santour and drums have been described as "a dispatch from antiquity.
Ganj, which translates to "treasure" in Farsi, documents the magical first meeting between a musician and a new instrument. It is the first ever raw, unrefined recording of Sahba on solo santur as opposed to drum set. It was recorded in solitude during the Winter Solstice of 2019 without any prior training or study whatsoever on the mystical 102-stringed trapezoid dulcimer. The consequent emphasis due to lack of any technical skill, was pure sonics, overtones, resonances, and an homage to minimalist composers such as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and early Miles Davis. Days after completing this work, Sahba rushed to seek out formal studies of the Persian Classical Radif with his current teacher, Faraz Minooei.
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SAUNA 022CS
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2021 reprint. Norelco plastic case. Vertical is Caterina Barbieri's debut album and it was composed for vocals and Buchla 200 modular synthesizer. Vertical takes a meditative approach to primary waveforms and the polyrhythm of harmonics, stretching the boundaries between drone, minimalism and techno in multichannel systems. This minimalistic focus arises from the polyrhythmic and stratigraphic potential of voltage-controlled sequencers. Synthesis, drone and immersive listening are three fundamental conditions to enhance an advanced auditory art, not based on extrinsic links but solely built on the experience of the spectrum, able to develop our very limited ability of perceiving the vertical domain of music, involving us in a holistic way. Caterina Barbieri (1990) is a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music. Mostly interested in modular synthesis, three-dimensional spatialization and psychoacoustic aural sculpture, her music arises from a meditative approach to primary waveforms and the polyrhythm of harmonics. She received a degree in classical guitar and electro-acoustic music at the conservatory of Bologna, Italy (plus an exchange program at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden) with a thesis about time, space and spectrum in vertical music. She's currently attending a Bachelor in Literature and she's active as an audiovisual artist, acousmatic composer and guitarist. Her work has been commissioned and performed in festivals and venues of experimental music.
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SAUNA 062CS
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Tekanan is the full-length debut of Melbourne-based Indonesian-Australian drummer and sound artist, Rama Parwata. A thorough exploration of rhythmic capabilities and percussive improvisation under ever-shifting timbral and stylistic environments, Tekanan is Parwata's examination and documentation of his vast musical influences in electro-acoustic improvisation, Indonesian Gamelan music, free jazz, electronic music, R&B, and noise music, whilst still maintaining an entirely unique non-idiomatic musical voice. Tekanan sees Parwata experimenting with not only the drum kit, but additionally implementing no-input mixing boards, musique-concréte sampling techniques, junk percussion, electric guitar, and computer music production to create a relentlessly metamorphosing soundscape that abruptly, yet seamlessly oscillates between ethereal ambiances to turbulent barrages of rhythm and noise through five unique movements. Aptly named after the Indonesian word for pressure and stress, Tekanan was composed by Parwata with the intent of it being a listening experience which would pressure the listener to have no clear indication of the direction of the music and where it will ultimately settle, leading the listener on a sinuous, yet intriguing aural journey. This title additionally applies to the pressure of the challenging nature of the music, in a performative sense, which pushed Parwata to his physical and mental limits to perform and compose.
"As cliche or banal this might sound, I tried to make a record that was purposely made to be hard to put into a box. I didn't want to make a 'drumming' record or a noise record or anything of the type, but a record that just contained 'good' music (or what I constitute as being good). Many aspects of my musical life were injected into this release: gamelan music (the first music I was exposed to), noise, hip-hop, free-improvisation, Xenakis, jazz, electronic music. Ultimately this record is a homage to those musical influences." --Rama Parwata
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SAUNA 059CS
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It might be easy to assume that the distinctly focused compositional voice unveiled on Rose Bolton's The Lost Clock is the product of its creator's rigorous, almost hermetic dedication to her own particular aesthetic universe. A quick survey of Bolton's artistic career, however, reveals that her carefully sculpted approach to abstract electronica has been forged through a longstanding engagement with a wide range of intertwining creative activities. This album demonstrates both the Toronto-based composer's unique mastery of color and her gift for breathing a tactile, organic quality into synthetic landscapes. Bolton's distinctive sensibility is akin to that of a painter -- every hue has been carefully mixed so as to imbue its accompanying gesture with its own life and personality. This tangible dimensionality her electronic work assumes, however, can be traced back to the work Bolton has been doing since the 1990s. She has produced a large and varied catalogue of work that includes pieces for solo performers, chamber ensembles, orchestra, electronics, voice, and to accompany installations and films. Quasi-instrumental vitality isn't the only feature of The Lost Clock that reflects Bolton's diverse artistic practice. It can also be heard within the structural realm. Each of the collection's four tracks trace a patient unfolding and favor a certain roundness of timbre, even as finer details begin to fidget along the perimeter of the music. As with her writing for the concert hall, Bolton doesn't shy away from the evocative here, yet she doesn't pursue this poignancy through conventional, direct or quasi-narrative means. Her compositions lead the listener gradually through their impressionistic sonic scenery, but neither the path they take nor their ultimate destination are at all predictable. The ostensible gentleness each piece exudes dissolves as dissonances slowly insinuate themselves, obscure textures writhe just out of earshot, percussive lattice work materializes, or as the overall blend begins to exert a heavier weight. Her lucid-dream vision of form functions in tandem with her acute micro-level attentiveness to engender a vivid and elusive sound world that resists classification.
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SAUNA 061CS
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Composed and recorded at the edge of the Sahara, Jeff Burch searches here for an unfamiliar beauty in old timbres. As a child of migration, over the course of this new work he gracefully transfigures pre-mercantilist desert folk song and deep meditations of our early cities. With the strength and shape of eternity, hushed voices and yawning flutes ascend to radiant vibrations of levantine string and tamazgha percussion; coalescing in a seductive din that traces great arcs across oceans, continents and oral histories. For bağlama, electronics, organ, percussion, string, tape, ūd, vocals and woodwind. Additional percussion; Robert Smith (Rhyton), woodwind; Ela Stiles, mastered by Christopher Griffin (Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Elaine Radigue). Artwork by Baya Mahieddine. From Asia, the Sonoran Desert and the South Pacific, Burch currently resides in New York City. He has released with Important Records and co-founded The Spring Press, on which he released his recent LP, and another in duo with the late Tres Warren (Compound Eye, Messages, Psychic Ills). "A ghostly amalgam of clangorous cymbals and bells that unfurls with a measured cadence... placing him on the altar not that far from luminaries Tony Conrad, John Cale and La Monte Young." --Decoder "... An atmosphere and sonic palette that wouldn't be out of place on an epic of vintage European psychedelia." --Avant Music News "The vestigial spirits of Tony Conrad and Alice Coltrane seem to ooze from the music's percolating pores. Gonglike reverberations punctuate an endlessly roiling cauldron of strings, electronics, and percussion..." --Textura
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SAUNA 057CS
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Three introspective compositions full of contemplative, emotional ambiguity and time stopping focus. Side B contains the full program backwards. ELEH's Home Age series was composed and recorded over a period of five years and it reflects a search for color, form, connection, and growth. Recorded 2015-2019. Mixed March-May 2020. Cassette edition of 100.
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