Archon Satani – In Shelter Label: Dark Vinyl Records – DVLR 6 Format: CD, Album, Reissue Country: Germany Released: Apr 2005 Style: Dark Ambient, Experimental
Archon Satani. A dark ritual project, playing eerie and haunting industrial ambient music with a satanic background, obsessive percussions and frightening demonic voices. The original line-up consisted of Tomas Pettersson and Mikael Stavöstrand. They worked together from 1990 to 1993, then the former went on to form Ordo Equilibrio, while the latter continued under the name Archon Satani, as well as with his other project Inanna.
«Urknall» is a 7CD box set with all studio recordings of Valborg until 2015. As such, it contains the band’s first five albums «Glorification Of Pain» (2009), «Crown Of Sorrow» (2010), «Barbarian» (2011), «Nekrodepression» (2012) and «Romantik» (2015) as Digipak CDs with entirely new artworks as well as the early demos «Songs For A Year» (2002-2003) and «Radio Valborg» (2004-2006) as cardsleeve CDs. Besides the CDs, the robust slipcase box offers an exclusive, 64-page booklet. «Urknall» is limited to 500 numbered copies.
Phurpa – Ya Tog Rid Pa’i Gyer Label: Zoharum – ZOHAR 145-2 Format: 2 × CD, Album, Limited Edition Country: Poland Released: 03 Jul 2017 Style: Overtone Singing, Drone, Experimental
This double album is the successor to the previous release entitled “Chöd” from nearly a year ago. The new release shows how Phurpa constantly transforms itself through their own musical exploration as well as personal spiritual development. Apart from intensive concerts, its members are famous for their long meditation trainings/sessions. This constant movement, the exploration of various techniques and discovering new inspirations in eastern culture makes Phurpa musicians more and more eager to use traditional instruments in addition to their distinctive “rgyud-skad” singing, thus enriching the already familiar formula. By emphasizing the sacred and spiritual nature of their activity, they seek to enrich it in such a way that the listener can find the novum, bearing in mind that not only the aesthetic but very spiritual world of the ancient deities of the Bön tradition is particularly important. The title, referring to the magical quest for the universe, should set the direction for the interpretation, or be merely a pretext or an invitation to this mystical journey.
hibalba / Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-Khar – Yang Trol Lé Label: Nihilward Productions – NAUGHT27 Format: CD, Limited Edition Country: Ukraine Released: 05 Apr 2017 Style: Ambient, Dark Ambient, Experimental
«Yang Trol Lé» is merging the primordial energies of Shibalba / Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-khar into the physical manifestation of a limited digipack CD edition, featuring new artwork & three songs from each act, with a total play time of 50 minutes.
Tracklist:
1. Shibalba – Mantras of the Lotus-Eyed God 2. Shibalba ft. Of Earth And Sun – Anantashesha 3. Shibalba – Hymn To The Climbing Scarab 4. Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-Khar – Samantabhadra 5. Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-Khar – Shama 6. Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-Khar – Sangye Menla
Having its inspiration in tibetan spirituality & other ancient aesthetics, the union between Alone In The Hollow Garden & Nam-Khar offers a transcendent ritual experience for supporting the path to the natural liberation of the soul.
Alone In The Hollow Garden: chanting, throat singing, amplified strings, kantele, metal percussion, kangling, mey ney & pungi flutes, damaru, rol-mo, tibetan bells & gongs.
Diamanda Galás’ second album is sometimes referred to as Panoptikon (the composition on the A-side of the album). The album consists of two pieces: ‘Panoptikon’, which was inspired by Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast chronicled his experiences in the prison system, and ‘ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΑΙΜΑ ΤΩΝ ΔΟΛΟΦΟΝΗΜΕΝΩΝ ‘ (‘Song from the Blood of Those Murdered’), a work dedicated to the political prisoners who were tortured and executed during the 1967-74 Greek military junta. The album, originally released on the label Metalanguage (founded by Henry Kaiser and Larry Ochs in 1978), has long been out of print.
From original liner notes by Richard Zvonar (edited by Galás 2021):
PANOPTIKON is a cry of rage by a caged prisoner against his jailer, who is concealed from his victims by an impenetrable wall of technology. The title of the work derives from a design for a new kind of prison, proposed in 1843 by Jeremy Bentham. This edifice consisted of a central observation tower, ringed by multiple tiers of cells. Each prisoner could be kept under continual observation by his keepers, yet he would see neither them nor his fellow inmates. Such a polarization of power, manifested through architectural constraint and omnipresent surveillance, would leave an indelible mark upon the victim, even after release. In Galás’ piece, the architecture of the Panoptikon is a model for the architecture of the performance work. The observation tower is aurally present as a continuous pulse, placed behind the audience and in opposition to the performer/victim through whose ranting can be seen the progressive psychosis of one buried alive. The walls of his prison become increasingly monolithic as layer upon layer of sound is built up around him – each one a transformation of the sound of her voice.
SONG FROM THE BLOOD OF THOSE MURDERED (ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΑΙΜΑ ΤΩΝ ΔΟΛΟΦΟΝΗΜΕΝΩΝ) is as ancient as the hills of Greece. There is a tradition among the women of the Maniates, from whom Galás is descended, of spontaneous and ecstatic lament on the death of one of their people. This is especially associated with blood-feud among the villages, the tradition of vendetta. SONG FROM THE BLOOD OF THOSE MURDERED is dedicated to the victims of the Greek junta, those tortured and killed during the dictatorship of 1967-74. The power of the piece is drawn from the blood-soaked earth. It is channeled through the witch/shaman persona of Galás. As the piece progresses, one experiences the rage and grief of the victims’ kin, the invocation of the goddess, the swearing of vengeance and casting of the curse. Whereas the many voices of SONG FROM THE BLOOD OF THOSE MURDERED are raised with a common purpose, the single performer of PANOPTIKON is diffracted into a multiplicity of personalities, often in conflict with each other. The opposition between these characters, with their distinctive emotive states, modes of vocal production and manner of declamation is further underscored by the use of contrasting electronic signal processing and spatial distribution.
Side A recorded Feb., 1984 at 1750 Arch Studios, Berkeley, CA
Side B recorded Oct., 1981 by Ed Herrmann at KOPN, Columbia, Missouri, on the Ionizations Concert Series with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts & Missouri Arts Council
Hypnopazūzu – Create Christ, Sailor Boy (Vinyl, LP, Clear) Label: House of Mythology – HOM 006 LPC Format: Vinyl, LP, Clear + Vinyl, LP, Single Sided, Etched, Clear, Limited Edition Country: UK Released: 2022 Style: Experimental
HYPNOPAZUZU is Youth (Killing Joke and 1008 other worlds) and David Tibet (Current 93 and 93 other worlds). They both first skipped together on Current 93’s debut album «Nature Unveiled» in 1983. «CREATE CHRIST, SAILOR BOY» is their new album, and their first as HYPNOPAZUZU. 93 years in the making, this elaborately-packaged 3-sided LP (with a laser etching of a Youth/David Tibet Hallucinatory Cartoon on the 4th side) contains ten songs and brings together Spheres and Planets for the Ultimate Hallucinatory PickNick, and is unlike any other Face or Trace that has vanished before. 2LP (180g, crystal clear vinyl) incl. printed inner sleeves, 4-page insert and printed protection sleeve
Hypnopazūzu – Create Christ, Sailor Boy (Vinyl, LP, Clear) Format: Vinyl, LP, Clear + Vinyl, LP, Single Sided, Etched, Clear, Limited Edition Ref: HOM 006 LPCP (Solo envíos a España)
€40 EUR Envío y manipulación €9,95 EUR Total €49,95 EUR
Portraits is a new series from Unexplained Sounds Group focusing on electronic and electro-acoustic music composers. Each release creates a ‘portrait’ of three musicians by showcasing representative pieces of their recent musical journeys, serving as a guide for further listening and a means of exploring their work. This first volume is dedicated to three Italian musicians: Gabriele Gasparotti, Daniele Ciullini, and Mario Lino Stancati. Gasparotti and Stancati are among the most talented emerging musicians on the Italian experimental scene, while Ciullini is a veteran of the post-industrial underground who, after a very long silence, returned to music in 2012.
GABRIELE GASPAROTTI
Gabriele Gasparotti (05/09/1987) composes electroacoustic music on analog instruments. He is the creator of the project Extrema Ratio (music inspired by the script of Alberto Cavallone’s lost movie Maldoror – Il dio selvaggio) and of the artistic collective Gasparotti Muga Muchū Morphing Theater – a multimedia project that aims at the interaction between music and the performative arts and is deeply influenced by surrealism and esoterism. His video La nascita di Zelda v. 2.0 (Zelda’s Birth v. 2.0) was screened at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in the section Il futuro del corto d’autore (The Future of Art Shorts). He is the founder of the record label Il Dio Selvaggio and his latest album is Istantanee vol.1 (Il Dio Selvaggio, Dio Drone, Dornwald).
Active since the 80s in the area of the tape-network with some self-productions and participations in compilations of labels and fanzines of the time, after a iatus lasting about thirty years, Daniele Ciullini returns to the music and live sets. His recent works were published by Luce Sia and Silentes. Unexplained Sounds Group presents some unreleased tracks made by using toy instruments, field recordings and automatic voices.
Mario Lino Stancati (Italy, 1981) graduated in «Disciplines of the Arts, Music and Theater». He is an actor, director, playwright, poet, musician and composer.Not chained to any individual musical genre (he crosses progressive ambient, concrete music and avant-garde composition) and motivated to explore any form of experimentation with music, he developed methodologies and expressive practices capable of merging both vocal performativity and guitar playing.
The three-way compilation is a compilation form I actually like, especially if the three projects/musicians get the space a CD allows; well, twenty minutes each. Here we have three Italian composers, each granted four pieces. I had only heard of Danielle Ciullini before; he recently released a work after a long time of silence and first heard on releases by Trax (Vital Weekly 1254). There are short biographies on the cover of the CD, to pique your further interests. The CD starts with the quartet of pieces by Gabriele Gasparotti, the youngest of the three. He «composes electroacoustic music on analogue instruments». In his music drones play certainly a role, generated from mainly guitars, but also effects or keyboards and throughout there is quite some variation to be noted. The music is a bit dark, quite spacious, with a touch of cosmic music. Sometimes a bit too freaky, but that gives it also a free-spirited edge. The next four pieces are by Mario Lino Stancati (1981), who is an actor, director, playwright, poet, musician and composer. I believe the guitar plays an important role, next to voices, but a fair share of the legwork here is done using electronic processing. It might be his work with theatre that prompted him to add this vocal stuff (not in all pieces), which, for me, adds a bit of a gothic edge to the music. Perhaps, so I thought, this is something of an Italian tradition, along the lines of Ain Soph (especially in ‘Magma Crecia’). His music certainly is touched by a darker force of a mytikal origin, as I am sure this should be spelt. The final four are by Daniele Ciullini, knows for his work with Trax in the 80s. In his pieces he works with massive ambient passages, maybe derived from heavily processed field recordings, versus otherwise heavily treated acoustic sounds, reminiscent from the world of musique concrète. Curiously, his four pieces sound like one long collage of music, with the odd start and stop cues. Strictly personally speaking I was most fond of his work from these three, even when I enjoyed much of the others too. The way Ciullini worked with various musical interests I enjoyed a lot. (FdW)
RHaD (Research for Historical Audio Documents) is a side project of Raffaele Pezzella (better known as Sonologyst). What Pezzella brings us here is a concrete example of something of what I have always believed – that ALL sound is music, whatever its source (radio transmissions, telephonic conversations, hi-fi test signals, old and forgotten documentaries, unknown field recordists). More than that, there is something else that goes beyond the simple creation of seemingly random sound collages; there is no doubt that here we have the uncovering of secret worlds and other realities, existences parallel to ours and yet separated by vast temporal and spatial distances. Here we have recordings and found sounds that have been manipulated in such a way as to render their contexts irrelevant and meaningless. Subtle concatenations of sound and substance, mood and context, in some instances creating a sense of otherness, that what we’re hearing are broadcasts from dimensions and realities that are not the one we live in. It’s exactly like trying to tune into a specific station on a vintage radio set but you don’t quite know where it is: as you turn the dial this way and that, you catch glimpses of other lives and other existences playing out just like your own. They are of our world and yet not part of it either. These six “metasonic” messages from seemingly emanate from an unknown Otherwhere and that alone will entice us to listen further and more deeply, in the hope of catching something that will peel back the layers and give us what we’ve yearned for. And that, I think, is where the true beauty lies in this album.
Vetrophonia – Vizualizacija Label: Ultrasomnambula U – USU 01 Format: DVD, DVD-Video, Compilation, Limited Edition, Numbered Country: Russia Released: Apr 2017 Style: Experimental, Industrial, Noise
Tracklist 1 – Тридцать Три И Одна Треть – Шумовизуальная Поэза (2014-2016) 33:40 2 – Столетие Манифеста «Искусство Шумов» Луиджи Руссоло (Концерт В ГЭЗ-21. 11.03.2013) 31:22 3 – Обращение Дев Непорочных Голубицами Небесными (Концерт На Пушкинской-10. 03.08.1996) 49:00
The video disc «Vizualizacija» by St. Petersburg-based project Vetrophonia (Alexander Lebedev-Frontov & Nick Soudnick) consists of several parts. First of all, this is the completely new multimedia album created in 2013-2016 with the help of Yuri Kovalskiy (Worms, Monument Straha), entitled «33 1/3». The album is comprised of the carefully crafted half-hour long collage of various industrial and retro-futuristic sketches, analogue video-noises and meticulously constructed soundtrack perfectly matching the visual part. Despite the quite abstract nature of this work, it keeps the viewer in suspense during all its length and dense saturation of images is compensated by the peculiar sense of humour. The disc also contains the digital version of the live material «Turning Virgings Into Doves» originally released in 1996 on VHS, and the recording of a gig in Experimental Sound Gallery (ESG-21), St. Petersburg, played on 11.03.2013 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of publication of the famous «L’arte dei Rumori» manifesto by Luigi Russolo.
Lex-Or – Futuro Pasado Label: Fill-Lex Records – FLCS-05 Format: Cassette, Album, Special Edition, Limited 25 copies Country: Spain Released: 10 Oct 2020 Style: Techno, EBM, Experimental
/ / / ESP / / / Lex–Or vuelve a Fill-Lex Records con su primer álbum en solitario, canciones que marcan un fin de una etapa. El disco está compuesto de dos partes:
Futuro, temas compuestos entre 2019-2020 una mirada crítica hacia un fin que nos envía cada día a lidiar con nuestros propios miedos y nuestras inseguridades. No es música de baile es música desde las entrañas.
Pasado, canciones compuestas en un periodo anterior, desde un directo en su estudio en 2014 con la canción paisajes cerebrales, a algunos temas que pasan del 2015-18, estando más próximos a la pista de baile y a sus patrones más rítmicos, volviéndose un techno oscuro y decadente.
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Lex-Or returns to Fill-Lex Records with their first solo album, songs that mark the end of a stage. The album is composed of two parts:
Futuro, songs composed between 2019-2020 a critical look towards an end that sends us every day to deal with our own fears and insecurities. It is not dance music, it’s music from the bowels.
Pasado, songs composed in a previous period, from a live in his studio in 2014 with the song “Paisajes Cerebrales”, to some songs that go from 2015-18, being closer to the dance floor and its rhythmic patterns, becoming a dark and decadent techno.
Futuro – tracks 2019-2020 Pasado tracks 2014 – 2018 Mastering en Sountess Studio
