Akari is the third album from Tokyo duo Illuha. Following 2011’s debut Shizuku (12k1067) and 2013’s Interstices (12k2028), Akari takes the next artistic step for the band. While Shizuku was recorded in the US and completed separately by the artists, Interstices captured the duo creating their exceptionally detailed music together live during a Japaneses tour. Akari, in turn, is the first studio album where Illuha recorded and mixed together, throughout the entire process. The beautiful st-robo studio in Tokyo put a collection of amazing equipment at their fingertips, from vintage mics and outboard gear to a vast collection of instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Their writing sessions were numerous and long with details meticulously obsessed over for nearly a year. The result is the most bewildering music Illuha have created to date. An album swimming with the most delicately tactile sounds and instrumentation that draws the listener in with hushed, motionless attention.

While Illuha’s Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are often drawn to the most sparse notes of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, acoustic grand piano and guitar, the breadth of instrumentation is partially what makes Akari so abosrbing. They have succeeded in creating their own universe of sound, so beautifully recorded, where each element not only has its own space but connects and interacts so fluidly with the other sounds. It is as if they are placed perfectly by nature, the compositions are fluid and organic, a far cry from anything calculated or structured. It is this open space that the music exists in which in turn defines the music itself. There is ample room to breathe within this forest of gentle tines, bubbling analogue synthesizers, clicking percussion and quiet field recordings. This is subtlety at its most refined; hushed without being saccharine, distant without being morose.

Akari is the Japanese word for light. Conceputally the duo used this word as a guide, as if they were searching through the dark, trying to keep the light alive, as if one is cradling a candle doing everything in their power to keep it alight in a storm. It is this almost visceral sense of sheltering, of protection, that gives Akari a very human and personal sound whose intensely deep focus is as impressive as it is arresting.

Akari

Structures Based on the Plasticity of Sphere Surface Tension

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Structures Based On The Plasticity Of Sphere Surface Tension

Craig Leon - Nommo

Purchase from RVNG: http://smarturl.it/cleon-aifmv1-rvng
Purchase from Bandcamp: http://smarturl.it/cleon-aifmv1-bcamp
Purchase from iTunes: http://smarturl.it/cleon-aifmv1-itunes

Taken from Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1: Nommos / Visiting.


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Craig Leon - Nommo

Taken from the album 'Quixotism' released as CD and Download.

Oren Ambarchi 'Quixotism Part 5' (eMEGO 202)

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Sketch for Winter I: New Christmas Classics

Purchase here: geographic-north.com/cassette/a-sunny-day-in-glasgow/
Catalog #: GN24
Black Liquorice cassette, limited to 300

When it comes down to it, there’s no one else we’d rather settle down with for Christmas festivities than A Sunny Day in Glasgow. The Philadelphia six-piece has always had a knack for unexpected arrangements, meticulous layering and editing, and downright addicting wordplay and melodies, all delivered with the band’s dark sense of humor. Now kicking off the first in our four-part ‘Sketch for Winter’ cassette series is A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s aptly titled New Christmas Classics.

Hot off the heels of Sea When Absent, the band’s fascinating fourth LP released earlier this year on Lefse, New Christmas Classics both heightens the band’s sense of detail and concept while simultaneously stripping it all down to an intimate affair. Featuring heartfelt covers and artful, shoegaze pop, Sketch for Winter I’s five songs play like a holiday mixtape to anyone willing to listen.

“Shut Your Mouth, It’s Christmas” sets the scene with unabashed flair and enthusiasm for the season, immediately inserting itself into your psyche with an earworm’s hook and instilling aural space with faux snow and genuine sentiment. “Saturn Pulls Me Apart (Death of the Unconquerable Night)” continues the bizarro festivities with super-saturated passages of frigid, amped-up shoegaze that snugly soundtracks our collective, snow-bound melancholy.

“Fantasia on Xmas (From Vaughan Williams)” mines the trusted songbook of yore, providing more than an ounce of trusted chamber pop and showing A Sunny Day in Glasgow in their most intimate, acoustic form, warmly accompanying the figurative yule log. “The Strange Presents of Idols (Merry Christmas!)” speaks to the band’s vocal pop expertise, playing up the alluring seduction of a lost Stereolab B-side produced by Phil Spector, leaving only New Christmas Classics’ closing tune, which will surely be recognized by anyone lucky enough to catch a holiday-time set by the band. Bundle up and come along!

A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Shut Your Mouth, It's Christmas

Pre-order Alessandro Cortini's Forse 3 and a deluxe Forse t-shirt box set here: 
http://importantrecords.com/imprec/imprec418

Alessandro Cortini "Scappa" from Forse 3  2xLP   Pre -Orders available now

from the album Charles Cohen - "Brother I Prove You Wrong" out on Morphine Records 2015 - doser026LP

Composer, improviser, and Buchla Music Easel master Charles Cohen returns to Morphine with a suite of new material. In keeping with the timbre spectrum of his semi-modular system, Brother I Prove You Wrong is built around pointillist analog tones—Cohen's cosmic "beeps and boops"—that swarm and scatter in mesmeric patterns across four sides. Moving through surrealistic textural overlays and industrial miasma, the album's nine tracks reveal a more introspective and personal side of the artist, following from a retrospective LP trilogy released via Morphine in 2013. Those assembled works, dating back to the late '70s, quickly became essential listening and brought Cohen—at the time largely unknown outside Philadelphia's experimental circuit—to critical renown. 

Brother I Prove You Wrong was recorded in Berlin in September 2014 using the Buchla Music Easel, with production help and support from Rabih Beaini. Mastered by Neel and curated and designed by TankBoys; cover art by Nathalie du Pasquier.

Charles Cohen - The Boy and the Snake Dance

Alessandro Cortini, live instrumental set at Death By Audio, NYC, December 11 2011. Performed on a Buchla Music Easel.

Alessandro Cortini - live at Death By Audio, december 2011

Serge 606

Track 1 from Lea Bertucci 'Metal Aether' [NNA108]
Available February 9th, 2018 on Vinyl, CD & Digital formats.
Order: http://nnatapes.com/available-releases/lea-bertucci-metal-aether

Metal Aether

Lea Bertucci "Patterns For Alto"

First track taken from the album Distant Early Warning.
LP/CD/Digital pre-order: https://laurencepike.bandcamp.com/

Laurence Pike - Life Hacks

Taken from Futuro (Music for the Waldorf Project) released on 2LP and download 01/02/19.

• Not Waving’s engrossing, highly original soundtrack to Sean Rogg’s world-renowned art/theatre project
• Ambient tonal works and abstractions written between 2013-2018
• Mastered and cut at D&M, Berlin.
• Limited edition vinyl with full colour insert featuring photographs by Lee Arucci
• RIYL Laurie Spiegel, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Shuttle 358

’Futuro’ is Not Waving’s sublime synth/ambient soundtrack to one of the world’s most intense art/theatre experiences: Sean Rogg’s radical immersive artwork ‘The Waldorf Project’ - fusing choreography, spatial design, music and performance into a cohesive experience.

Drawn from more than 20 hours of material made for the project between 2013-2018, ‘Futuro’ finds Alessio Natalizia exploring a style of tonal and spatial minimalism that works as a fine palette cleanser from much of what you’ve heard from him in the past. 

While not a new solo album, per se, the long form, Eno-like results of ‘Futuro’ demonstrate the full wingspan of Not Waving’s obsessive knowledge and emotive feel for electronic composition, making it in some senses one of the more substantial and unusual releases in his catalogue to date.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Shut Your Mouth, It's Christmas

GeoNorth