SHELTER PRESS - Forced Exposure

$21.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 6/1/2018

Struggle Artist is the new album from Justin C. Meyers, the Minneapolis-based composer, artist, and head of the Sympathy Ltd. label. Meyers is a unique, underappreciated talent in contemporary electronic music. His greatest strengths are twofold: his compositions have a meticulous structural logic, revealing a hermetic and austere formalism; concurrently, his compositions have a deep, introspective narrativity grounded in his lived experience, evoked with a mature clarity. Together, they make Meyers one of the most interesting electronic musicians working with cutting-edge sonics today, unlocking their latent powers of metaphor and figuration. His previous album, 2016's Negative Space (1981-2014), deals with the onset of chronic illness and near-death experience. Its careful, anechoic meditations on the failing body are a resounding achievement, and the album remains a high watermark of acousmatic music in the 21st century. Struggle Artist portrays Meyers's expectations and disappointments arising from making art in his free time. Created initially during lunch breaks and in hospital waiting rooms, and finished after being laid off from his job, it catalogs the despondency of the precarious life. If Negative Space was about the fallible body, Struggle Artist is its violent collision with late capitalism. Meyers's formal language employs the barest of ingredients: scintillating digital synthesis, evacuated field recordings, impossibly crisp transients, and an elegiac harmonic sensibility. On Struggle Artist, he sets up scenarios that anticipate some musical event or flourish, only to renege on them with stark about-faces or resolutions into dissonance. Tracks like "Self Portrait" evoke the trauma of reconfiguring and rewriting one's own identity to (unsuccessfully) appease indifferent funding sources like grants and fellowships, which Meyers wryly calls "Granular Opportunities". Stability is not conceded until the stunning eponymous final sequence, that ambiguously signals either the willed discontinuation or reaffirmation of Meyers' musical career. The impression is not entirely bleak. Meyers's sound design is buoyant and luxurious with its clean edges and lush tonalities, such as in "Draw Distance" or the "Expectations" diptych. This is Meyers's most playful record, albeit always gesturing towards its melancholic narrative. This guarded, dark humor is alluded to in his sleeve art and track titles. In an environment where most record releases don't break even and the artist usually shoulders the financial burden, Struggle Artist explores what the psychological burdens are. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. 140 gram vinyl.

$25.00 IN STOCK

Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface is the title of an album derived from a series of wall drawings begun in 2014 by multi-disciplinary Paris-based artist Zin Taylor. Drawn in simple black-and-white, the large-scale pieces depict linear landscapes populated with rough-hewn objects: potted cacti, sculptural boulders, steaming stone baths. Upon completion of a particularly ambitious 90-meter panoramic wall drawing, experimental composers Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett were invited to interpret the work as a musical graphic score. The result was a forty-minute live performance in two parts, which was multi-track recorded and then mixed down into a ten-track album. Each piece and title corresponds to a specific section or object in the wall drawing. Vantzou, though based in Brussels, is best known for a string of enigmatic solo recordings for the American ambient imprint Kranky, while Bennett has explored electronic sound design in a variety of capacities, including in Brooklyn trio Forma. Working under their initials CV & JAB, they attempted to translate Taylor's elusive gestural lexicon into sound. The results are appropriately minimal, malleable, and mysterious. Opener "Cactus With Vent" sets the tone: insectoid murmurings and fractured crystalline tones seesaw in and out of focus, eventually disappearing within a wash of churning water. Each composition flows unbroken into the next, much like Taylor's continuous line, emphasizing fluidity, curvature, and connectivity. "Hot Tub" introduces a mesmerizing synthetic flute-like raga, pirouetting above muted jungle noises and a babbling brook. Subsequent songs skew softer and stranger, alternately meditative ("Large Suess Plant") and miasmic ("Tombstones"), remote vistas mapped with hieroglyphic frequencies. The recordings, like Taylor's nuanced mini-murals, exude a subtle but restless energy, rarely lingering too long in a fixed formation. The whooshing astral synthesizer of "Alfred Hitchcock Haze" dissolves invisibly into the smeared, somber séance of "Rock House With Door", which in turn evaporates amongst the menagerie of chattering printers, running water, and shepherd tone whispers of "String Of Objects With Planter". More so than in past projects, here Vantzou and Bennett mask their presence, allowing textures and tonalities to tangle or unspool with minimal intrusion. The effect is naturalistic, impersonal, and intriguing. Recorded live at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany on May 6th, 2017. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Includes a 180CM leporello reproducing the original 9000CM wall drawing. Clear purple vinyl; reverse board-printed inner and double-width spine jacket; Edition of 700.

$27.50 IN STOCK

Darren Almond's record All Things Pass, coproduced by MUDAM, Luxembourg's contemporary art museum, and the French publishing house Shelter Press, highlights the musical dimension of the artist's eponymous video installation, shot in 2012 in Rajasthan. All Things Pass, presented at Mudam within the framework of the exhibition Darren Almond, Timescape (11.02. -- 14.05.2017), has for central subject the Chand Baori, a stepwell built in the ninth century in Rajasthan. A meditation on the transient and cyclic nature of all things, this work is based on the combining of several sequences filmed at different times of the day and night, during rainy and sunny seasons, and on the occasion of an annual festival. It reflects the synchronicities which tie together celestial phenomena and terrestrial events, the links that exist between the different time scales, thus echoing the position that these notions hold in the conception of time in India. The four musical sequences, presented here in an autonomous way, activate the correspondences that exist between the cycles that regulate cosmic and human existence on different registers, visually and musically. As part of both the tradition of music in Northern India and an experimental approach, the musical response of the four musicians, the passages they perform between different rãgas, the rhythmic and melodic motifs they deploy in time, the contrasts and changes in rhythm with which they mark their improvisations, embody the temporal dimension, as well as the specific setup Almond employed during recording. Equipped with a shotgun microphone, he came close to the instruments, carrying out the aural equivalent of zooms and close-ups, which are reminiscent of the fragmentary way he visually approached the Chand Baori. There is sometimes fulgurant telescoping between microcosm and macrocosm, between the details of sounds and their links with the universe. The record is accompanied by a booklet which brings together an unpublished text written by the curator of the exhibition Timescape, Christophe Gallois, and images illustrating the work. The design was realized by the London based Studio Fernando Gutiérrez in order to create a unique artist object.

$15.50 IN STOCK

Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment -- acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity, and the human presence. For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves, and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession -- an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control, and interaction with the acoustic space. "Calligraphy" was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about ten second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. "Fortune Biscuit" is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of "biscuit" (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound. "Clepsydra" (meaning "water clock") features Sauvage's classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. Sauvage tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument. Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. All the tracks were live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. Recorded during night or very early in the morning, and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. CD version comes in a digipak; Edition of 1000.

$21.00 IN STOCK

LP version. Reverse board-printed inner and outer sleeve; Edition of 500. Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment -- acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity, and the human presence. For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves, and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession -- an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control, and interaction with the acoustic space. "Calligraphy" was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about ten second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. "Fortune Biscuit" is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of "biscuit" (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound. "Clepsydra" (meaning "water clock") features Sauvage's classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. Sauvage tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument. Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. All the tracks were live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. Recorded during night or very early in the morning, and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.

$19.50 IN STOCK

Since 2014, Shelter Press has been steadily releasing a multi-volume series of documents showcasing Gabriel Saloman's music for contemporary dance. Under the title of Movement Building, these albums have covered a wide breadth of themes and approaches, all of them coalescing around Saloman's darkly cinematic approach to contemporary guitar music. Known for his part in the seminal electronic-noise duo Yellow Swans (alongside Pete Swanson), Saloman has taken the sweeping drones and fried electricity of his former band and embedded them within an expanding palette of bowed strings, martial percussion, and resonant piano. Here, Shelter Press collect all three volumes of this vinyl-only series -- Movement Building Vol. I (SHELTER 051LP, 2014); Vol. II (SHELTER 063LP, 2015); and Vol. III (SHELTER 085LP, 2017) -- as a double-CD, featuring new artwork, previously unreleased tracks, a new digital master by Helmut Erler (Dubplates & Mastering), and an extensive essay on dance, politics, and the themes of each album written by Saloman. The first disc collects Movement Building Vol. I and Vol. II, the latter a sprawling 36-minute epic that had previously been separated into two discreet tracks for vinyl and is collected here as one continuous piece, moving through an extended set of drone and loping drum play before climaxing in the kind of glorious guitar chording associated with groups such as My Bloody Valentine, GSYBE, or Mono. Movement Building Vol. II explores various combinations of drum and drone, ASMR inducing high-end clatter and Saloman's infamous take on Miles Davis's classic "My Funny Valentine". The second disc collects Movement Building Vol. III, including two tracks not available on the vinyl version. On Vol. III, the emotive and disorienting bowed guitar, militant percussion, and searing guitar eruptions of earlier albums are joined by other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholy guitar melodies, and a patina of perfectly-placed harsh noise. Saloman's music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O'Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position overlapping "modern classical", "electronic music", and the more outer limits of "ambient metal". The recordings collected in Movement Building doesn't clarify as much as it expands Saloman's oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man's land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend. An absolutely necessary document for any fan of Saloman's work. Design by Bartolomé Sanson.

$21.00 IN STOCK

Shelter Press has present the third and final volume of Gabriel Saloman's Movement Building series. For fans of Saloman's post-Yellow Swans work -- an already dense catalog of darkly cinematic compositions mostly conceived as accompaniment to some of Vancouver's edgier contemporary dance companies -- Movement Building Vol. III is not only a much anticipated conclusion to this trilogy, it is the most fully realized album in years. Whereas Movement Building Vol. I (SHELTER 051LP, 2014) and Vol. II (SHELTER 063LP, 2015) acted primarily as documentation of time-based artworks, Movement Building Vol. III offers a more coherent and narratively rich album that will appeal to admirers of Soldier's Requiem (MIA 026CD/LP, 2013). Listeners will recognize the emotive bowed strings, militant percussion, and searing guitar eruptions that evoked memory and trauma in that previous album. Joining this pallet are other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholic appregiated melodies, and a patina of harsh noise. Added to this is a more 21st century approach to drums and bass, perhaps an effect of his collaborations with producer Michael Red in their dub ambient project Chambers. Saloman's music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O'Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position between "modern classical", "electronic music", and the more outer limits of metal. Movement Building Vol. III doesn't clarify as much as it expands Saloman's oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man's land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend -- contemporary, retro, or futurist. Movement Building Vol. III's themes are taken from the dance it was composed for, 2015's What Belongs To You, created by long-time collaborator Vanessa Goodman. That work sent its dancers through a physical journey exploring the needs of the body, for shelter, for love, and for self-actualization, roughly aligned to Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs". Though this record was recorded in 2015, Movement Building Vol. III could be the perfect album for the current era of civilizational near-collapse, whether at the hands of maniacal politicians, the slow burn of the Anthropocene, or the constant enclosure of the corporate-driven, social media enabled surveillance state. The collection of these works allows one to see clearly Saloman's techniques and approaches to a relatively limited number of instruments -- guitar, percussion, occasional piano, and tape.

$21.00 IN STOCK

Italian electro-acoustic composers Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti reconvene their unique Bellows collaborative project for their new album Strand on Shelter Press. Continuously drawing a hypnotic maze with albums on Boomkat Editions (BKEDIT 012LP, 2015), Entr'acte, and Ielasi's cult Senufo label, Bellows offers their first album on Shelter Press with Strand. Clocking right under 40 minutes, Strand is direct and disorienting. With eight tactile but distant untitled tracks, the album convokes a complex sound palette between acousmatic sound and fractal beats. Recorded in Milano at their very own Standard recording studio, Strand marks a shift in Bellows' previous recording process, bringing more music gear on the table: tapes, modular synthesizers, effects, and samples. Captured live over the course of four days of improvised sessions, the album floats between ghostly melodies, musique concrète, and analog electronics. Echoing with the artwork by Amsterdam-based artist Louis Reith, whose collages made of found black-and-white images are disrupted by bold geometric constructions, the album is disorienting and fascinating, seated right in between the challenging world of electro-acoustic and a more welcoming beat-oriented territory. Strand is a fascinating body of work, growing over time and revealing more of its complexity at every listen. Artwork by Louis Reith. Reverse board-printed inners and jacket; Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi; Cut at Dubplates & Mastering.

$27.50 IN STOCK

2018 repress. Double LP version. Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand follows the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), and her collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Comme Un Seul Narcisse (SHELTER 070LP, 2016). Composed over 2016 at EMS and at home in Brittany, Hand In Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist. Strident modular sounds tear apart minimal beats and drones; Fictional stories told by a voice slowly become reality. Hand In Hand is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening, in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be perceived: trivial, sensitive, and mysterious at the same time. "I'm Following You" is a bleached romantic ballad for Fender Rhodes that could be the ending title of a martian love story, whereas "Visnaga" praises the resources of a desert plant through asmr voices, field recordings, and evasive chords. "A House A Dance A Poem" is a feminist hymn composed as a pyramidal structure, referring, at the same time, to the A-frame houses, the yoga position of the triangle, the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and the feminine sex. In the closing song, "No Fear But Anticipation", Atkinson offers an open-hearted plea about the existentialist necessity of finding desire even when the times seem too dark to think about it. A telepathic and non-scholastic anthem for Don Delillo, Joan Didion, and Jean Paul Sartre. The final Buchla sounds that close the record seem to deliver an unspeakable message that only birds and aliens could transcript. The echo of the '80s sci-fi anxious aethetics resonates with today's transparency of digital sounds in the whole record. The cohabitation of simple midi textures and historical Serge and Buchla signals are convoked and confronted together by a voice. The human instrument appears here as the epicenter of the recordings, giving the other instruments a gravitational point. Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley, or Delia Derbyshire are the main influences of Atkinson in their own way of inviting fiction and abstraction as the essential materials of composition. For Hand In Hand, Félicia Atkinson used different sources for the lyrics and scores of her tracks: house plant instruction books, old issues of Desert Magazine, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and K. Dick's books, as well as her own poetry.

$15.50 IN STOCK

Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand follows the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), and her collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Comme Un Seul Narcisse (SHELTER 070LP, 2016). Composed over 2016 at EMS and at home in Brittany, Hand In Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist. Strident modular sounds tear apart minimal beats and drones; Fictional stories told by a voice slowly become reality. Hand In Hand is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening, in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be perceived: trivial, sensitive, and mysterious at the same time. "I'm Following You" is a bleached romantic ballad for Fender Rhodes that could be the ending title of a martian love story, whereas "Visnaga" praises the resources of a desert plant through asmr voices, field recordings, and evasive chords. "A House A Dance A Poem" is a feminist hymn composed as a pyramidal structure, referring, at the same time, to the A-frame houses, the yoga position of the triangle, the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and the feminine sex. In the closing song, "No Fear But Anticipation", Atkinson offers an open-hearted plea about the existentialist necessity of finding desire even when the times seem too dark to think about it. A telepathic and non-scholastic anthem for Don Delillo, Joan Didion, and Jean Paul Sartre. The final Buchla sounds that close the record seem to deliver an unspeakable message that only birds and aliens could transcript. The echo of the '80s sci-fi anxious aethetics resonates with today's transparency of digital sounds in the whole record. The cohabitation of simple midi textures and historical Serge and Buchla signals are convoked and confronted together by a voice. The human instrument appears here as the epicenter of the recordings, giving the other instruments a gravitational point. Joan La Barbara, Robert Ashley, or Delia Derbyshire are the main influences of Atkinson in their own way of inviting fiction and abstraction as the essential materials of composition. For Hand In Hand, Félicia Atkinson used different sources for the lyrics and scores of her tracks: house plant instruction books, old issues of Desert Magazine, architecture manuals, JG Ballard and K. Dick's books, as well as her own poetry.

$18.00 IN STOCK

Native Instrument is a Berlin based sound collaboration bringing together the field-recordings archive of Felicity Mangan and the abstract vocabulary of Stine Janvin Motland. Often referred to as insect techno, Native Instrument's music is constructed using electronic and vocal adaptations of wildlife audio recordings originating mainly from the Australian and North European fauna; mixing the natural rhythms of animal calls with digital effects and vocal imitations, Native Instrument enlightens a sonic ambiguity between rural nature, electronics, and the human voice. With their debut release Camo, Native Instrument presents their true artificial nature; sound collages moving between tropical ambience, club inspired bug beats, and amphibian trance. Over time, field recordings and human vocabulary become mixed up, indiscernible from one another - a sound illusion that ends in the creation of a new melodious wildlife genre. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed at Pallas. Artwork by Felicity Mangan and Stine Janvin Motland; Design by Bartolomé Sanson. 140 gram vinyl; Edition of 500.

$15.50 IN STOCK

Budapest-based composer Gábor Lázár debuts on Shelter Press with his second full-length album, Crisis Of Representation. Continuously defining his unique composition skills over the years, Gábor Lázár shared a first release with Russell Haswell for his now defunct imprint Last Foundation, quickly followed in 2014 with the album I.L.S. on Lorenzo Senni's Presto!? label and EP16 on Boomkat's The Death Of Rave label (RAVE 006LP), before collaborating in 2015 on a joint album with Mark Fell for the highly acclaimed The Neurobiology Of Moral Decision Making (RAVE 010LP), also released on The Death Of Rave. Crisis Of Representation is a collection of seven pieces. Years in the making, the record gathers tracks, as stated by Lázár, that were "mostly recorded in 2015, but some of the tracks were recorded as early as 2011; but they are all about the same idea. It's really important to me to be able to be focused over a long period of time." Titled Crisis Of Representation, the album is another step further into the direction of his abstract techno fragments. Instead of repeating beats, Gábor Lázár maintains linearity by using only one type of characteristic sound and a few composition techniques throughout the whole album. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering by Rashad Becker; Artwork by Zsófia Boda. CD version comes in a digipak; Includes additional track.

$21.00 IN STOCK

LP versions. 140 gram vinyl. Includes CD. Budapest-based composer Gábor Lázár debuts on Shelter Press with his second full-length album, Crisis Of Representation. Continuously defining his unique composition skills over the years, Gábor Lázár shared a first release with Russell Haswell for his now defunct imprint Last Foundation, quickly followed in 2014 with the album I.L.S. on Lorenzo Senni's Presto!? label and EP16 on Boomkat's The Death Of Rave label (RAVE 006LP), before collaborating in 2015 on a joint album with Mark Fell for the highly acclaimed The Neurobiology Of Moral Decision Making (RAVE 010LP), also released on The Death Of Rave. Crisis Of Representation is a collection of seven pieces. Years in the making, the record gathers tracks, as stated by Lázár, that were "mostly recorded in 2015, but some of the tracks were recorded as early as 2011; but they are all about the same idea. It's really important to me to be able to be focused over a long period of time." Titled Crisis Of Representation, the album is another step further into the direction of his abstract techno fragments. Instead of repeating beats, Gábor Lázár maintains linearity by using only one type of characteristic sound and a few composition techniques throughout the whole album. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering by Rashad Becker; Artwork by Zsófia Boda.

$21.00 IN STOCK

Ben Vida's Damaged Particulates LP represents the conclusion of one body of work, Damaged Particulates, and the beginnings of a new long form project titled Reducing The Tempo To Zero. The version of Damaged Particulates (2012-2016) included in this LP is the final iteration of a piece that Vida has been developing for close to four years. It first materialized as a number of individual synthesizer studies under the title "Damaged Parts". These studies became the source material for an early version of DPs, taking shape as a commissioned work for the Unsound Festival. For the commission the piece coalesced as a single, through-composed live sound installation that utilized tactile sub bass speakers which interfaced directly with the audiences bodies. In this form, Damaged Particulates was presented at festivals, galleries and museums including versions at Experimental Intermedia, New York, Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, Poland and Leap Gallery, Berlin. It has since been presented in live performance at Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna and Electrónica en Abril, Madrid and as a multichannel defusion at the Akousma Festival, Montreal. Reducing The Tempo To Zero (2016 - ???) is the first recorded dispatch of Vida's new long form composition. This excerpt demonstrates a short instrumental passage taken from a work that, in its full duration, clocks in at close to five hours. Live performances featuring a four member vocal ensemble have been presented at Lampo, Chicago and at The Kitchen, NYC. This mutable composition will be reconfigured once again in late 2016, this time scored for choir and electronics, to be staged in Italy and Belgium. Reducing The Tempo To Zero represents Vida's return to the durational drone based forms that he first experimented with in the mid-90s with his group Town And Country. In performance, RTTTZ continues his exploration of phonetic based text scores. This method of scoring was used in his project Slipping Control which debuted at Audio Visual Arts Gallery, NYC with an LP version was also released by Shelter Press in 2014 (SHELTER 038LP), and creates a continuous thread between his work as a composer and his developing career as an artist. Vida has expanded his compositional process into a number of mediums, acting to blur any delineation between disciplines and practices. 140 gram vinyl, uncoated sleeve & inner sleeve. Artwork by Katy Fischer. Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at D+M.

$18.00 IN STOCK

LP version. D/P/I (Alex Gray) is a musician, DJ and visual artist from USA; he has made music under the alias of Deep Magic and as a part of various Sun Araw Trios, Duos and Quartets. Now, most of the time, he plays drums, guitar, or saxophone at home for his other half & two cats. Here he presents Composer. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D+M.

"Composer is an album of rhythms that, once started, eventually completed themselves without much input from the composer. The character of a rhythm can develop very simply/unconsciously with just a slightly different part of the hand hitting a drum, or the wrist getting tired, causing trembling and stuttering that further magnifies the rhythmic stability of the pattern and/or player. With electronics, it's different physically, as you are not 'hitting' anything, but the link to the subconscious/unconscious, remains analogous. Every adjustment to a single sound/pattern can reveal complexities that were not apparent when the sound/pattern started. A natural flow begins, similar to the development of complex accents via 'human error' of using an ordinary djembe or conga: as the composer begins to be entranced by the sound/pattern, with a midi-mapped set of physical knobs, controlling complex processes/effects - each effect/process assumes its own character for that, almost quantum-like, layer of improvisation - layer by layer, until the simple layers of sound/patterns have naturally developed into compositions that reflect the seeming-instability, excitement, and sadness in time, here referred to as a fixed, unmoving element in the 'universe', that our human software is intrinsically dependent on to interpret these rhythms and the rest of the material world. This album was fun, exciting and unpredictable until the day it was 'finished'. I hope this album encourages people to think for themselves. This isn't a 'techno', 'experimental', 'abstract', 'dance', 'IDM', or any 'genre' of album. I hope you know what I mean. I hope that music hasn't lost the quality of inter-being 'beyond categorization'. I also hope that, to a small extent, this album can act as a beacon of creativity for future generations, who are currently being completely saturated by marketing content for products and media that will do nothing but confuse and distract them." -- Alex Gray, July 2016.

$15.50 IN STOCK

D/P/I (Alex Gray) is a musician, DJ and visual artist from USA; he has made music under the alias of Deep Magic and as a part of various Sun Araw Trios, Duos and Quartets. Now, most of the time, he plays drums, guitar, or saxophone at home for his other half & two cats. Here he presents Composer. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D+M.

"Composer is an album of rhythms that, once started, eventually completed themselves without much input from the composer. The character of a rhythm can develop very simply/unconsciously with just a slightly different part of the hand hitting a drum, or the wrist getting tired, causing trembling and stuttering that further magnifies the rhythmic stability of the pattern and/or player. With electronics, it's different physically, as you are not 'hitting' anything, but the link to the subconscious/unconscious, remains analogous. Every adjustment to a single sound/pattern can reveal complexities that were not apparent when the sound/pattern started. A natural flow begins, similar to the development of complex accents via 'human error' of using an ordinary djembe or conga: as the composer begins to be entranced by the sound/pattern, with a midi-mapped set of physical knobs, controlling complex processes/effects - each effect/process assumes its own character for that, almost quantum-like, layer of improvisation - layer by layer, until the simple layers of sound/patterns have naturally developed into compositions that reflect the seeming-instability, excitement, and sadness in time, here referred to as a fixed, unmoving element in the 'universe', that our human software is intrinsically dependent on to interpret these rhythms and the rest of the material world. This album was fun, exciting and unpredictable until the day it was 'finished'. I hope this album encourages people to think for themselves. This isn't a 'techno', 'experimental', 'abstract', 'dance', 'IDM', or any 'genre' of album. I hope you know what I mean. I hope that music hasn't lost the quality of inter-being 'beyond categorization'. I also hope that, to a small extent, this album can act as a beacon of creativity for future generations, who are currently being completely saturated by marketing content for products and media that will do nothing but confuse and distract them." -- Alex Gray, July 2016.

$21.00 IN STOCK

The View From Nowhere is a record of experimental electronic music that explores possible relationships between voice and modular synthesis. Composed and recorded by Matt Carlson at Worksound in Portland Oregon, the record develops and expands ideas discernible in his early solo works or as one-half of the duo Golden Retriever. Built with a clear unity of approach centered on the voice and text as elements in synthesis, the record flattens the distance between the vocal and the musical. The voice sounds synthesized, and the synthesized sounds seem to be speaking to you. The View From Nowhere takes Carlson's interest in the sounds of attempted communication into the realm of the textual. Although melody and a good dose of Matt's unusual sense of humor shape the record, another key emphasis in the composition is his specific approach to rhythm and sequencing. Rhythmic patterns are used but the music is somehow never fully on or off the grid. Carlson opts to use Nancarrow-esque overlapping meters and tempos to keep the music out of any kind of predictable patterns of electronic music. The View From Nowhere is thematically centered around ideas of confusion, panic, misunderstanding, and "bad faith" communication. It's interested in the process of how something moves from being an "abstract" sound into becoming a signifier of specific meaning, and the interstitial space in between. The felt attempt to communicate meaning lay behind the artwork as well, standing as a visual representation of the way the music approaches language. The text-based imagery strives to exist between sense and nonsense, the meaningful and the meaningless. Individual syntactical units "point" to one another but don't necessarily cohere into comprehensible statements. Relationality is implied and seems to emerge merely by placing signifiers against one another. Taking influence from text-sound composers such as Charles Amirkhanian, the early voice-synthesis work of Charles Dodge, and Robert Ashley's more speech-heavy work, The View From Nowhere might be Matt Carlson's most challenging and refined record to date. It's like being near a million tiny entities all trying to communicate with you simultaneously, or being in a crowded place hearing the rhythms and cadences of communication but not quite being able to parse it.

$21.00 NOT IN STOCK

French artist Félicia Atkinson teams up with New York-based experimentalist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma for Comme Un Seul Narcisse, their first collaborative effort. Recorded between NYC and the Alps, Comme Un Seul Narcisse is an epistolary conversation of postmodern times between Cantu-Ledesma and Atkinson, who -- strangely enough -- met just once in person, in San Francisco in 2009. But the record is also a detour. Though it follows Cantu-Ledesma's haunting A Year With 13 Moons (Mexican Summer, 2015) and Atkinson's most intimate effort to date, A Readymade Ceremony (SHELTER 055CD/LP, 2015), their combined music sounds like everything but these works, filling in the gaps between their solo outputs. What is it to wander? What is it to be -- as Baudelaire would put it -- a flâneur from one continent to another? From the subways of NYC to the crooked trails of the Alps, the two musicians exchanged fragments of sounds and melodies, composing and building a new landscape neither bucolic nor urban, just outside nomenclatures or the postcard images of site-specific recordings. Here there's no specific site but a construction built from heterogeneous elements brought together in a virtual ecosystem. What is it to wander . . . in a non-specific site? Is it a fragmentation? A sedimentation? The title of the album and its tracks are inherited from Susan Sontag's application of Baudelaire's flâneur to photography in On Photography (1977): a flâneur sees himself in the documents and media he uses and integrates them into his own perception, and the act of recording becomes again an act of feeling. Somewhere between some Fluxus collages and more contemporary musicality, this "neither/nor" music confronts abstraction with the impermanence of concrete materials, building something on its own, like a standing still ceramic or a pond. Comme Un Seul Narcisse is a record to live with -- or, as Jacques Rancière would put it, a partage du sensible ("distribution of the sensible") -- standing as it is, unresolved, but not as a simulacra. There's no image to watch here but the possibility of a shared a moment, inviting the listener to complete the experience. Mastered by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering. Photography by John Wiese after a piece by Félicia Atkinson. Design by Bartolomé Sanson. First edition of 550 copies.

$21.00 IN STOCK

"Bulbs is a band that I like so much that I started a record label to rep their work. I put out their Light Ships album in 2008 because I was so impressed with how futuristic their music was. They've remained active on their own terms since then, releasing a number of micro-editions of their music including a few incredible tapes (Sky Listening, Moon Episodes) and a few splits (a 12" with Mouthus (IMPREC 255LP) and a 7" with Wobbly). Generally Bulbs' music does not sound like the guitar/drum instrumentation would indicate. They have much more to do with Chain Reaction than The White Stripes, but with the benefit of live instrumentation and an adventurous edge, they end up much wilder, looser, more organic than anything coming out of Berlin. Color Attic is the second major work by Bulbs and finds the group exploring more oblique ambience, elliptical and granular guitar mashing up with loose, swinging synth drums, orbiting and colliding with each other. All experimentation aside, Color Attic remains lush, beautiful and melodic to the point that you might find yourself humming parts of 'Ladder Wing' while you're doing the dishes." --Pete Swanson, January 3, 2016

$21.00 IN STOCK

Lago is an LP recording created in dialogue with the photobook of the same title by American photographer Ron Jude, published by MACK (UK) in September 2015. The two compositions revisit the sites of Jude's initial photographs in and around the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert, and use site-specific field recordings and analog processing to craft an aural counterpoint to the photographs themselves and the photographic process. Contact microphones and hydrophones were used to gather sounds from flora, desert refuse, architectural ruins, and the Salton Sea itself to create an expanded study of the acoustic ecology of the area. The work weaves together location recordings and interviews to construct an acoustic portrait of the desert that is steeped in intimations of narrative dealing with loss, history, and a landscape haunted by a specter in darkness. Lago is an attempt to enter into the perceptual horizons of the desert while also engaging a past that shapes the encounter.

$21.00 IN STOCK

Gabriel Saloman presents the second volume in his Movement Building trilogy, continuing the release of original compositions commissioned for contemporary dance works. Following the enthusiastically received first installment -- Vol. 1's album-length The Disciplined Body (SHELTER 051LP, 2014) -- Saloman offers up five tracks that combine shimmering bowed guitars and reverberant acoustic percussion into a meditative and powerful break from anything he's produced before. Mobilizing the frequencies of contemporary electronic music (fine-tuned to speaker-rattling effect by Helmut Erler at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering), Movement Building Vol. 2 abandons the conventional instrumentation- and genre-motifs embraced by many of Saloman's peers in favor of a unique hybrid of avant-drone, psych-rock, and Japanese traditional music. In 2013 Saloman was commissioned by the Vancouver, Canada-based dance company 605 Collective to collaborate on the multimedia dance performance The Sensationalists (2015). An early inspiration for both The Sensationalists and the music collected in Movement Building Vol. 2 was Yasunari Kawabata's 1956 novel Snow Country; its tragic love affair became a thematic and contextual source for early phases of the project, and much of the music on this album is a result. Borrowing compositionally and tonally from Taiko drums and Gagaku (an ancient drone-based imperial court music), Saloman reproduced sounds originating in traditional Japanese drums, wind, and string instruments almost completely on guitar, ride cymbals, and snare drum. This influence is most explicit in the undulating rhythms that open the first side of Vol. 2 ("Contained Battle/Ascend") and the layered escalation of "Gagaku," a methodical combination of rhythm and drone that climbs to a peak of psych-tinged burning guitar lines. Concluding the album is a version of Miles Davis's classic ballad, "My Funny Valentine," an uncanny combination of original percussion and guitar, collaged together with what may be a live recording of Davis's "second great quintet" taken from YouTube, processed, and time-stretched on tape. Just as Saloman's previous output has combined cinematic atmospheres with guitar-driven climaxes that easily appeal to fans of neo-classical experimentalism and post-rock-informed drone, this record opens new compositional territory while maintaining a recognizable melancholy ambience. Exposure to the monolithic bass and open spaces of dub-influenced EDM has led Saloman in a different direction than many of his peers (including artists such as Cut Hands, Vatican Shadow, and former Yellow Swans bandmate Pete Swanson) and toward something that moves bodies and triggers their nerve endings, but with no concession to the dancefloor.

$40.50 IN STOCK

This double LP documents Stephen O'Malley's Eternelle Idole, his score for Paris-based choreographer Gisèle Vienne's artistic ice-skating piece of the same name. Comprising 47 minutes of music spread over three sides and enhanced by an elegant and chilling photoset by Estelle Hanania, the album features familiar O'Malley collaborators Steve Moore, Daniel O'Sullivan, Peter Rehberg, Jesse Sykes, Bill Herzog, and Randall Dunn. Recorded between Brest, France; Seattle; and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the score sees O'Malley taking several creative detours, utilizing modular synthesizers and programming as key elements for much of the composition. Eerie keyboard- and piano-phrases draw a white, monochrome stage for a young girl's stark and emotive elegy. Clavichord and guitars weave through the darkness, supported by Sykes's prophetic voice. Mirroring the score, Hanania's 16 photographs of the choreographic piece display the grace, sustain, geometry, telemetry, distance, and perfection of ice-skating, as well as possible falls and gloomy shadows. Metal against ice; tights and knots; spirals and scratches; shouts and winds -- field recordings mold a crispy atmosphere while instruments draw lakes, ice skating rings, cosmic belts, and a terrestrial cloud passage and eventual landing platform for a flying saucer. 160-gram white double LP with 16-page, 30 x 30-cm, saddle-stitched, full-color booklet in 350-gram sleeve with gloss varnish. Edition of 500.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Doppeldoppelgänger, a compilation of tracks by poets and sound artists selected by David le Simple and Vincent Romagny, was created on the occasion of the three-exhibition Doppelgänger cycle at the Centre Européen d'Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg, France, curated by Romagny. The double LP is a purely subjective compilation of sound works by artists (Félicia Atkinson, bruant&spangaro), sound from films by artists (David Lamelas), sound poetry and performances (John Giorno, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer & David Jourdan), works by cult composers (Benjamin Britten, Jean-François Pauvros, Gérard Pesson, Jean-Claude Vannier), legendary groups (Deux Filles), unclassifiables (Potima Zen Neumann, Joiejoiejoie), and specially-recorded reprises, including Aidons Antoine mixing Karl Holmqvist, Melissa Saint-Pierre reprising Colin McPhee, Anne Steffens and Don Niño performing Kurt Weill, and David le Simple mixing "Minh singt seine Sehnsucht." The album reflects the same concern that drove the exhibitions of the Doppelgänger cycle -- avoidance of thematic and formal constraints in pursuance of shifts in the concept of the "double" -- plus a grounding in literary texts, which are represented by quotations to be found on the sleeve. Gérard Pesson transcribes Brahms's Fourth Ballade from memory years after hearing the work (Nebenstück, 1998); Robert Rauschenberg reads, along with other artist friends of John Giorno, from the latter's Pornographic Poem (Raspberry/Pornographic Poem LP, The Intravenus Mind, 1967). 160-gram LP in gatefold sleeve with artwork by Karl Holmqvist and David Jourdan. Edition of 500.

$18.00 IN STOCK

"It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven --an imperial suite" (Poe, 1842). Alice Dourlen, who performs as Chicaloyoh, follows her 2013 debut LP, Folie Sacré (SHELTER 030LP), with Les Septs Salons, a condensed document of an 18-month non-stop globetrotting tour. Melding experimental and Eastern sounds with a strong theatrical aesthetic, Les Sept Salons is also the recording of a smooth transition between two languages, as Dourlen returns to French, her native tongue, on half of the record. Contemporary bridges are built here between psychedelic sounds and horror movie soundtracks, between some modern incarnations of Nico and Catherine Ribeiro. Built in two very distinctive parts, Les Sept Salons was recorded in summer 2014 in Dourlen's very own by-the-sea recording studio Chaudelande (Normandy). The first track, "The Sound of his Tenderness," recalls some of the deepest moments of women-in-horror, such as The Cremator (1969) or The Third Part of the Night (1971). Chicaloyoh's driven herself to a new galaxy of vocal explorations for a ten-minute opening track, and "The Sound of his Tenderness" is for sure the most epic and complex piece of music she's ever composed. "Jeune Fille" and "Prosternation Intérieure" -- the second and final movements, respectively -- form a twofold song. Their long-awaited lyrics in French, in the realm of French poet Joë Bousquet or painter Balthus, arrive alongside a new way of recording. Using the text as a crucial starting point in the composition process, Chicaloyoh finds a new world to dig in, of which this diptych sounds like a very promising first hint. The votive offering on the cover, a beautiful answer to Chicaloyoh's music, was made by the Paris-based photographer Camille Vivier, featuring one of her unique female forms in wax. Clocking in at just under 20 minutes, Les Septs Salons is the beautiful echo chamber from a timeless and very unique musician. One-sided LP pressed on 160-gram white vinyl and presented in PVC sleeve with PVC printed insert. Mastered by James Plotkin. Edition of 500 copies.

$15.50 IN STOCK

Félicia Atkinson (visual artist, writer, musician, graduate of École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris) presents A Readymade Ceremony, a concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts. In pursuit of a radical economic autonomy, she created A Readymade Ceremony entirely on her laptop using basic software. The album's first foundational element is a text collage of extracts from Atkinson's own 2014 book Improvising Sculpture As Delayed Fictions, French poet René Char's 1955 Recherche de la base et du sommet, and Georges Bataille's 1937 erotic prose piece Madame Edwarda, as well as found texts, mostly from the Italian magazine Mousse. Objects speaking, sculptures arguing: there is a surrealistic feeling in the dark whisperings that one hears responding to Madame Edwarda on "L'Oeil." The other foundational element is Atkinson's return to her early artistic influences, including The Martenot Method; such literary figures as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, and Jean Genet; Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet, Pierre Henry, Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Fluxus, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman; noise, punk, drone, folk, and electronic music; and the filmmakers Brian de Palma, Nicolas Roeg, and Dario Argento. There's something potentially frightening that happens here, reminiscent of a feeling she felt while listening to Henry's Apocalypse de Jean as a child; something both scary and beautiful; something uncanny, like Ruth White reciting Baudelaire... a readymade ceremony. Notes on each track: "'Against Archives': What can a French woman in her 30s answer to this mostly masculine core of references? 'L'Oeil': What about asking a sweater or an electronic device to speak? 'The book is the territory': It's all about nostalgia; how the shifting of time changes our vision of the past and the future, like an echo or a delay. 'Carve the concept and the artichoke': Is this a waiting room? the prologue of an inexistent play or an introduction for a possible delayed climax? 'Recherche de la base et du sommet': Translates to 'research of the base and the peak,' as a raw reading of René Char. 'There is always a lack in the accident. There is no accident in the expression... the poet is not made of wood. The mouth and the eye speak separately.'" The music can be related to the work of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Valerio Tricoli, Grouper, Geoff Mullen, Sachiko M, and Kassel Jaeger. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering. CD limited to 1000 copies.