This takes my mind from the thoughts that inhabit it, and I flow in the ether. I feel reassured, somehow.

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

Oren Ambarchi 'Quixotism Part 5' (eMEGO 202)

Artist: BITCHIN BAJAS
Album: Transporteur

Cat #: HITD 024
LP – 600 copies on black vinyl
CS – 100 copies
Release date: 4th May 2015

Cooper Crain, Daniel Quinlivan et Rob Frye : orgue électrique, synthétiseurs analogique, synthétiseur modulaire, basse électrique, flûte, clarinette basse et percussions

Artwork by Nick Ciontea
Mastering by Rashad Becker

Label, orders: www.handsinthedarkrecords.com

BITCHIN BAJAS - Marimba

Suzanne Ciani
Buchla Concerts 1975
FKR082LP
Finders Keepers Records

Finders Keepers invite you to witness the incredible first ever Buchla synthesiser concerts/demonstrations providing a distinctive feminine alternative to The Silver Apples Of The Moon if they had ever been presented in phonographic form. This is history in the remaking.

This spring Finders Keepers Records are proud to release an archival project that not only redefines musical history but boasts genuine claim to the overused buzzwords such as pioneering, maverick, experimental, groundbreaking and esoteric, while questioning social politics and the evolution of music technology as we’ve come to understand it. To describe this records as a game-changer is an understatement. This record represents a musical revolution, a scientific benchmark and a trophy in the cabinet of counter culture creativity. This record is a triumphant yardstick in the synthesiser space race and the untold story of the first woman on the proverbial moon. While pondering the early accolades of this record it’s daunting to learn that this record was in fact not a record at all… It was a manifesto and a gateway to a new world, that somehow never quite opened. If the unfamiliar, modernistic, melodic, pulses, tones and harmonics found on this 1975 live presentation/grant application/educational demonstration had been placed in a phonographic context alongside the promoted work of Morton Subotnick, Walter Carlos or Tomita then the name Suzanne Ciani and her influence would have already radically changed the shape, sound and gender of our record collections. Hopefully there is still chance.

In short, Suzanne was a self-imposed twenty-year-old employee of the Buchla modular synthesiser company, San Francisco’s neck and neck contender to New York’s Moog. Buchla was run by a community of festival freaks and academic acid eaters whose roots in new age lifestyles and the reinvention of art and music replaced the business acumen enjoyed by its likeminded East Coasters. In the eyes of the consumer the creative refusal to adopt rudimentary facets like a piano keyboard controller rendered the Buchla synthesiser the more obscure stubborn sister of the synth marathon, steering these incredible units away from the mainstream into the homes and studios of free music aficionados, art house composers and die-hard revolutionaries. Championed and semi-showcased by composer Morton Subotnick on his albums The Bull and Silver Apples Of The Moon, Buchla’s versatility began to open the minds of a new generation, but the high-end design features and no-compromise modus operandi was often confused with incompatibility and, in the pulsating shadow of Moog’s marketing, the revolution would not be televised nor patronised. Suzanne Ciani, as one of the very few female composers on the frontline (and also providing the back line) did not lose faith.

These “concerts” are the epitome of rare music technology historic documents, performed by a real musician whose skills and academic education in classical composition already outweighed her male synthesiser contemporaries of twice her age. At the very start of her fragile career these recordings are nothing short of sacrificial ode to her mentor and machine, sonic pickets of the revolution and love letters to an absolutely genuine vision of and ‘alternative’ musical future. In denouncing her own precocious polymathmatic past in a bid to persuade the world to sing from a new hymn sheet, Suzanne Ciani created a bi-product of never before heard music that would render the pigeon holes “ambient” and “futuristic” utterly inadequate. Providing nothing short of an entirely different feminine take on the experimental “records” of Morton Subotnick and proving to a small, judgmental audience and jury the true versatility of one of the most radical and idiosyncratic musical instruments of the 20th century. These recordings have not been heard since then.

Suzanne Ciani - Buchla Concerts 1975 (Excerpts)

Elements Chord Mode

LR084 - Cool Maritime - Some Sort of Wave Portal
WW release date 01.29.2016

Cool Maritime is the New Age synth wizardry of Sean Hellfritsch - named after the coastal region between San Francisco and Vancouver. "Coast Quest" was recorded in real-time to cassette using mini-modular synthesizer, re-201 space echo, and t.e. op-1. 

cover illustration by: Jesse Balmer 
jessebalmer.com/

Cool Maritime - Coast Quest

Taken from the album 'Unfold' released as 2LP and download

The Necks 'Timepiece (excerpt)' (SOMA025)

Ama Yes Uzume (featuring Caroline Polachek on vocals) 
Track B2 from All Kind Music, out 11/11/2016

paltoflats.com/release/georgia-all-kind-music
www.rushhour.nl/store_detailed.php?item=92370
asemic.club

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/18620-georgia-ama-yes-uzume/

Georgia - Ama Yes Uzume - All Kind Music / PFLP 005

from the "Zephyr" LP (NNF350)
Not Not Fun / 2018

ACCESS: 
halles.bandcamp.com/album/zephyr
midheaven.com/item/zephyr-by-les-halles

Les Halles "First Distance"

Physical: geographic-north.com/cassette/coyotes/
Digital: geographicnorth.bandcamp.com/album/coyotes
Catalog #: GN49
Cassette, limited to 100

Félicia Atkinson is a composer, sculptor, painter, poet, and publisher from Rennes, France. Atkinson has led a fruitfully fantastic run of eerily blissful, serenely euphoric sounds. Whether under her own name or via her defunct recording pseudonym Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Atkinson has released work on Umor Rex, Digitalis Limited, Aguirre, and Shelter Press, an imprint co-run with Bartolomé Sanson.

‘Coyotes’ is an EP inspired by Atkinson’s last voyage to New Mexico in February 2017, when she visited and took in the geographic landscapes from Taos to Ghost Ranch. The same vistas also inspired much of Agnes Martin’s and Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, as well as Jerome Rothenberg’s poetry and translation’s works.

Atkinson describes a ‘Coyotes’ as a “Carnet de Voyage,” a tape you could directly play in your car while traveling somewhere, a kind of imaginary map to a sentimental journey. A spontaneous gesture, close to the notion of gift or offering. Or, simply, a postcard to a friend.” But it’s also a praise to the conservation of national and state parks and its human and non-human souls, menaced as we know now by drilling and violent economic speculations.

Here, coyotes act as a kind of metaphor of ambiguity and doubt, a state of mind that Atkinson find interesting to transcribe musically; the ambiguity furthered by Atkinson as a literal “foreigner” in New Mexico. She conveys a sense of visiting these native sacred lands and wondering what you are doing there.

Musically, ‘Coyotes’ is composed of two long tracks, “Abiqiu” and “Lighter Than Aluminium.” Each track features an effervescent froth of piano, midi sounds evokes marimbas, Fender Rhodes, bells, sub-basses, and spoken word poetry written by the musician to display a melancholic landscape made of transparent but deep layers of pale colors and blurry lines.

Les Halles "First Distance"

NOT NOT FUN

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