Artist: Lawrence English
Title: for varying degrees of winter
Price: $14.00
Catalog #: karu7
Released: 2007

 

Tracklisting and preview MP3s:

01 end game
02 fleck
03 desert road
04 swan
05 soft touch
06 unsettled sleep

Winter is a season for introspection, contemplation, and listening. It is the season when Nature reasserts its rights and imposes its law on humankind, forcing those creatures to shack up, wrap up…and dream of higher temperatures.
The Australian composer and electronic artist Lawrence English delivers a record for varying degrees of winter. Sounds twinkle and scintillate like snow under the sun, they shine like icicles, they hiss like a polar wind and seep into you through your insufficiently isolated ear holes. Each one of the six pieces is a monochrome composition ranging from the blinding whites of the snow to the blue-grays of cloudy days. Although English’s music can be quite abstract at times, here it turns out to be surprisingly evocative and inhabited by an understated sense of musicality.
Recorded in 2005-2006 in Japan, Hong Kong, Europe, and at home in Australia, For Varying Degrees of Winter features contributions by Mike Cooper, Janek Schaefer, and Aki Onda on one track each.
A key figure of the Australian sound art scene, Lawrence English has released several solo albums, including Ghost Towns, Transit, and Happiness Will Befall. He has also presented sound art installations in Australia, Europe, and the USA. He has worked with, among others, David Toop, Terry Riley, Damo Suzuki, DJ Olive, Scanner, Janek Schaefer, and Japanese electro-pop singer Tujiko Noriko, for whom he produced and co-wrote the album Blurred in My Mirror in 2005. He is at the helm of the label and multi-arts organization ::ROOM40::.

Artist: (etre)
Title: A post-fordist paradise in the strike of events
Price: $14.00
Catalog #: karu6
Released: 2006

 

Tracklisting and preview MP3s:

01Anatomy of this faded flower (for Sarah Kane)
02 From the parallel line, before and after me (for Faust)
03 ____________________________
04 Dogs from my childhood: multiple white (for Thomas Hirschhorn)
05 Luego existe (for Giuseppe Gabellone)
06 Don’t ask me why rain becomes hail (to John Bock)
07 Considering the hypnosis of the stone (to Harmony Korine)
08 Naturalist Tokyo 3.0 (for Michel Houellebecq)
09 And you are free in the icon of neurotic realism (for Santiago Sierra)
10 What are we doing here (to Sharunas Bartas)
11 When you cry for the first time on this earth (for Antonio Moresco)
*Search & destroy white calligarphy (video track)

For going beyond the laptop clichés, that is, as a first listen to A Post-Fordist Parade in the Strike of Events – (etre)’s debut album – clearly demonstrates: vocals, toys, and all kinds of guitars and percussion instruments unceremoniously blend in with field recordings and custom Max/MSP patches.
Under a glitch guise, (etre)’s music hides a resolutely personal approach combining melodicism, collage, lyricism, and a sharp sense of digital textures. Ekkehard Ehlers, Tim Hecker and Greg Davis come to mind, not because (etre) sounds like them, but because he sounds as unmistakably unique as them. The 11 tracks on A Post-Fordist Parade in the Strike of Events form a loose suite of sorts, like the successive dreams of a restless night. The album also includes an extra track, “Search and Destroy White Calligraphy,” accompanied by a remarkable video signed Virgilio Villoresi and Giuseppe Chiesa.
(etre) is the project of Italian sound artist Salvatore Borrelli, who was first active in the fields of sound art installation and experimental performance art. A member of the collective iXem, he has worked with interior decorator Lin-Kuhn Liao and ceramist Fabrizio Quintelmo.

Artist: Urkama
Title: Rebuilding Pantaleone’s Tree
Price: $13.00
Catalog #: karu4
Released: 2006

 

Tracklisting and preview MP3s:

01 Ex Jonath Donas
02 L’Asino Arpista
03 Olifante
04 Achmed Giedik
05 Panta Nifta Scotinì
06 Abraxas
07 Confusio Linguarum
08 Bestiaire
09 Retour En Arrière

unique, Urkuma’s music offers namedroppers little to cling to. Proceeding from free improvisation and noise, the music pairs together harshness and delicateness to piece together carefully spatialized sonic mosaics. Murmured drones, liquid growls, electrical discharges and acoustic touches: dissembling pieces are assembled into a stunningly unified whole.
Urkuma is Stefano De Santis, born in the Southeast part of Italy. He began his artistic career as a playwright, and later developed his unique musical approach to translate his theatre concepts into sound. Live, he is prone to make use of anything within his reach, including laptop, small electronic devices, clarinet, home-built instruments and tapes. Rebuilding Pantaleone’s Tree consists of nine pieces of various lengths, including a collaboration with Strinqulu’s David Della Rossa on "Olifante". The word urkuma is specific to De Santis’ home region of Salento and expresses the opposite to the Buddhist concept of nirvana.
Rebuilding Pantaleone’s Tree is a concept album based on the monk Pantaleone’s marvellous mosaic floor in the Cathedral of Otranto. The mosaic depicts several unusual elements, including a number of animals playing musical instruments, such as the donkey with a harp seen on the album’s cover. Rebuilding Pantaleone’s Tree draws inspiration from the techniques of mosaic art and Pantaleone’s symbolism.

Artist: ENT
Title: Fuck Work
Price: $13.00
Catalog #: karu:5
Released: 2006

 

Tracklisting and preview MP3s:

01 beating cherry nipples
02 all night long
03 eternal plans
04 milk oblo
05 nothing for money

Fuck Work has been obtained through the advanced yet surprisingly vivid distillation of several avant-garde music aesthetics, including electronica, post-rock, turntablism, noise and electroacoustic improv. Instruments and machines blend together into a multi-hued soundscape that entices the listener to dive in and immerse himself/herself into the listening experience. You might detect influences as varied as AMM, Gastr del Sol and Pan Sonic, alongside Giuseppe Ielasi and the recent Italian quiet improv scene. The five pieces found on this CD were first composed in the studio, before being deconstructed during live improvised sets and finally reconstructed back in the studio, keeping only the elements deemed crucial. The resulting album is unfailingly magnificent, from first second to last.
Italian multi-instrumentalists Michele Scariot and Emanuele Bortoluzzi formed ENT in the end of 2000, shortly after they first met. One of their first tracks was selected by the widely renowned Fat Cat label for inclusion on its website in 2001. The duo has self-released a few demos and contributed tracks to a number of compilations released by labels such as Ojo de Apolo (Chile), Saag (Japan), Giardini Sonori (Italy) and Baskaru (France), in addition to a few collaborations with net labels (Tu M’p3, Homemade Avantgarde). ENT has performed live throughout Italy and in France. Crowning five years of intensive artistic research, Fuck Work is ENT’s official full-length debut. It is being released by the young French label Baskaru, recently involved in the production of fine releases, such as "Pirandelo Suona" (with the Italian label DSP-Recordings) and "35 Mutant Seconds: Based on Rafael Toral’s Creamy Burst" (with the Portuguese label Grain of Sound).