@0 EP1

Morning Spring

Colleen, aka Cécile Schott, is really one of those artists where if you know, you know. Her run of albums from 2003-2007, mostly on The Leaf Label presented an exquisite set of dream-worlds, where you could easily drift away on her loops of cellos, bells, flutes and musical boxes. But then a six-year hiatus from the music world made it almost seem like it HAD been a dream. However, she returned with The Weighing of the Heart in 2013, easily up there with her very best work - and now, teamed up with Thrill Jockey, she's showing that she's stronger than ever. This is the first track from her Captain of None album coming on April 7th, and damn, it's beautiful. 

Colleen "Captain of None" - Boiler Room Debuts

TripHop Instrumental Beat - Memphis Sessions Pack VIP

Contact - TripHop Instrumental Beat - Memphis Sessions Pack VIP (14)

https://cosmicleaf.gr/releases/1136/synthesizer-museum-live

Chronos - Synthesizer Museum Live (album preview)

Shadow Strings

Hearing Music

Going Through the Veil - Becoming a Swan

This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the 70s.

https://www.aguirrerecords.com/collections/aguirre-records/products/terry-riley-persian-surgery-dervishes-2xlp

Californian composer Terry Riley’s In C, first issued on vinyl in 1968, is widely acknowledged as a Minimalist landmark that altered the course of twentieth-century music. His influential album A Rainbow In Curved Air, which appeared the following year, is a vivid fusion of rock and raga, jazz and psychedelia realised through overdubbing on an 8-track machine which had recently been installed at the studios of Columbia Records.  

By the early 70s Riley had come to feel that scores were a distraction. Faithful interpretation of an already written piece was a deviation from the true purpose of making music, which was spiritual quest. Fortunately, some of those live performances, personal journeys towards a state of transcendence, were captured on tape. Persian Surgery Dervishes, issued initially on the French label Shandar, features two such concerts for electric organ and reel-to-reel delay, one recorded in Los Angeles on 18th April 1971, the other in Paris on 24th May 1972.

At the start of that decade Riley became a dedicated student of the great Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Looking into North Indian classical tradition he found correspondences to modal and cyclic ideas that he was already working on. In 1971, as a way to learn more, Riley himself started teaching Indian music at Mills College, in Oakland. That experience fed directly into his solo keyboard performances, but other influences were also shaping the music heard on Persian Surgery Dervishes. Personal research into ancient Persian culture and the poetry of Rumi lit up his imagination, while the repetitive swirling of Sufi devotional music from North Africa, which Riley had first encountered in Europe during the early 60s, reverberates through these performances. Jazz, as conceived by such masters such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane, is also present as an enduring source of inspiration. 

The Californian version of Persian Surgery Dervishes starts with low dark tones, dense and brooding like a huddled human figure, deep in introspection. But as the improvisation unfolds Riley’s buoyant spirit asserts itself, spiralling out in ecstatic coils, as though liberated from the grip of body consciousness. The Parisian concert conveys a different mood, brighter and more open in texture, more relaxed from the outset and breathing with greater freedom as it takes flight. 

Echoes of Terry Riley’s inspired music have spread far and wide - into progressive rock, New Age and ambient soundings, film soundtracks, blissed-out electronica and dance-floor trance. His fluent and hypnotic keyboard playing can be heard as part of a continuum, transmitting energies from ancient and distant musical sources into the living here and now. Persian Surgery Dervishes is a significant part of that picture, a mesmerising record of a vital stage in Riley’s ongoing quest for connection with the universal mind and the sublime music that flows ceaselessly from it. 

“Music is my spiritual path. It’s my way of finding out who I am.”  Terry Riley, in 1976

Terry Riley - Persian Surgery Dervishes - Performance 02 Part 1

Vocals, Lyrics-  Ola Szmidt
Recording and Mixing- Ola Szmidt
Mastering -  Kieran Hebden
July, 2017

Wrapped

04 Wrapped

‘Tunnels’ begins with a flurry of drums before being enveloped by sub-bass pressure, like stepping directly into a basement club in full flow. As the track climaxes, saxophones sweep the air like green-spoked lasers overhead, creating a contrast of pinpoint clarity against the background atmosphere. Though sonically well outside Bristol’s dubstep legacy, it accurately portrays the smudged perception of a peak time rave. On the flip, we find the more introverted 'First Light', wherein the group downshift from the buzz of a bustling room to the hum of one’s head as dawn breaks. It is a moment of spacious solitude shared only, as Cunningham pictures it, with “swans fighting over polystyrene chip boxes” in the canal below.
Buy limited edition 7" here: https://ishmaelensemble.bandcamp.com/album/severn-songs-2

Ishmael Ensemble - First Light

from 'Collection' [3xCD|4xLP BOX|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den287
available on all formats at http://denovali.com/dictaphone

The first 4 Dictaphone releases now available as a very limited Boxset with a wonderful new timeless design. The vinyl edition is also available as limited single LPs.

Already formed in the late nineties in Berlin, Dictaphone was born by Brussels-bred multi-instrumentalist Oliver Doerell. In 2000 Oliver Doerell found a partner in Berlin's Roger Döring, who shares Doerell's love for the Brussels-based music of the eighties. In the following years the duo and several guest musicians (e.g. Stephan Wöhrmann (SWOD) , Malka Spigel (Minimal Compact) & more) released the critically highly acclaimed "m.= addiction" (2002), the "Nacht" EP (2004) and "Vertigo II" (2006) via the City Centres Offices label of Thaddeus Herrmann and Shlom Sviri (Boomkat, Modern Love). In 2009 the violin player Alex Stolze joined the band. During their two decades of existence Dictaphone played shows in more than 20 countries with festival appearances at Mutek, Transmediale, Unsound, Benicassim & more. Their latest release "Poems from a rooftop" from 2012 came as a very limited edition through the Berlin-based boutique label Sonic Pieces. In 2017 the band released the long awaited third album "APR 70" on denovali. The label now also offers a reissue of the trio's past repertoire.

Dictaphone never make music for the sake of it, they always want to create something which was missing before. And they did.

Praise for Dictaphone:

"minimalistic and subliminal elegancy" (ARTE)

"timeless, unusual & beautiful" (Colin Newman)

"Dictaphones gives warmth to the concept, your thoughts a body and atmosphere to the music" (Spex)

"This is the music to fall in love with over many evenings, each subsequent rotation capturing another moment of time to be recalled in the future. Highly recommended" (Headphone Commute)

"When played from a rooftop, this music may be as quiet as a poem, but it carries the power of a manifesto." (A Closer Listen)

Poems From a Rooftop

Dictaphone - The Conversation

Breath Chant

www.ishmaelensemble.com

bookings: sinan@atc-live.com
everything else: hello@ishmaelensemble.com