Underwater Lament

The Alias Sessions

Unboxing Utopia

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0oUfRWpvIFYlxCI11qjdBB?si=187cc19f44174981

Apple music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/aleksiz/1646935937

Donations: https://paypal.me/aleksizmusic

My mixing and mastering services + all my other links:
https://linktr.ee/aleksi_leskinen

https://instagram.com/aleksileskinen_

Afterlight Kingdom

Cutting 22

menace bass

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

Northbound - Music for Season One

Cloud Cover

Tiny Leaves - Notes on Belonging was released in 2017 and has now been reworked by a host of artists. The album, an exploration of landscapes was inspired by the Welsh term 'Cynefin'. When translated it means the environment in which you live, to which you are naturally acclimatised.
The beautiful vocals and talents of Julianna Barwick rework 'Cynefin'. An uplifting melancholia results alongside crafted sounds that envelop and delve deep into the soul, setting the tone as the first single of the highly anticipated Notes on Belonging rework album.
Other artists on the forthcoming rework album include Haiku Salut, Oscuro, Billion One and Ink Project

Cynefin - Julianna Barwick rework

Midori Hirano - Close to Life
From the album “Mirrors in Mirrors”

Release date: 5th March, 2019
Pre-order “Mirrors in Mirrors” here: https://daisart.bandcamp.com
© Daisart / daisart.info

From the liner notes:

If you stand between two mirrors facing each other, you’re faced with a curious and unique visual sensation – endlessly repeating reflections bounce off one another into an infinite, spiralling prism. Any movement from your vantage point derails the point of focus, and transforms the illusion in real-time before your eyes. Light bends, and with it, colours slip in and out of dominance, in an
Escherism of endless space, despite no change to the dimensions you inhabit in that ever so concrete space between two mirrors.

Midori Hirano speaks of “waning lights” and “edges blending into fog” as some of the sensory indicators inspiring Mirrors In Mirrors – her debut on Daisart – and these Impressionistic sentiments are deeply imbued within Hirano’s delicate, restrained compositions. The hallmarks of modern classical, electronica and ambient are adopted as an assemblage to explore nuanced tones and techniques less dictated by those stylistic underpinnings, perhaps somewhere hovering between – but never too far away – keenly aware of form and
function.

An emphasis upon the piano is an immediate point of reference for placing Hirano’s work within a broader context, but important to point out is the subtle and careful use of synthesisers and effects processing throughout the record – sometimes providing a more detailed background terrain, sometimes taking centre stage. Whichever instrument she turns her hands to, Hirano has crafted a record with enough dedicated focus and space to allow the listener to immerse oneself in her devised temporal expanse, an Impressionistic liminal space of Mirrors in Mirrors.


Written, produced, recorded and mixed by Midori Hirano in Berlin, Germany 2017-18. 
Mastered by Sean McCann of Recital Program.



“Mirrors in Mirrors” comes in a first edition of 200 x 12inch 145gm black vinyl (incl. download) with Pantone printed inner and outer
sleeves designed by Jeroen Wille and Rudd Ruttens [ruttens-wille].

Midori Hirano - Close To Life

Release date: 15/04/19 (01/04/19 on AI Bandcamp)

If you would like to review this release, please email info@astralindustries.co.uk

Format: 180g vinyl//mastered by Noel Summerville//original artwork by Theo Ellsworth.

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Belgian artist Bernard Zwijzen, aka Sonmi451, has for over a decade now been quietly making some of the most luscious ambient we’ve heard here at AI-HQ. We are delighted to announce him as part of the Astral family with this six-track EP - Nachtmuziek - sit back, tune in and drift away.

Pre-order

A3. Outer Shell

PRE-ORDER VINYL & CD: https://noton.greedbag.com/buy/two-120/

N-046 - ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO - TWO (LIVE AT SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE)

RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER  15TH, 2019

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - THE REVENANT THEME (LIVE)

Electronic musician originally from Tijuana, Mexico.

Unboxing Utopia

Murcof

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