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17.4.11

Mirror Tapes Catalogue


From September 2010 ---> May 2011


MT001 - Brighter Death Now - Primitive Perversions - 3 x tape box set - the project which did not manifest - do not hope for a release of it from Mirror Tapes. 

MT002 - Thomas Bey William Bailey - Progressive Lycanthropy - C32 + mini-book 

MT003 - Maurizio Bianchi - SFAG - C47 

MT004 - Conrad Schnitzler - 10.10.84 - C42 

MT005 - Michael Northam - Solar Night - C40 

MT006 - Maurizio Bianchi - Technology-X - C47 + badge


MT007 - The New Blockaders - Live at Morden Tower - C40 
                                                                                  - C40 + badge 

MT008 - Conrad Schnitzler / Wolfgang Seidel - CONSEQUENZ 010B - C65 

MT009 - Maurizio Bianchi - OIRT EMO-DNE - C52
                                                                   - C52 + limited echography  

MT010 - Lionel Marchetti - Alpha Z Centauris - C30 



+ All releases are deleted / sold out and will not be reissued by Mirror Tapes.






MT010 - Lionel Marchetti - Alpha Z Centauris - C30




Notes by Lionel Marchetti :

"I started recording sounds when I was 17 years old, in 1984 when by chance someone gave me a K7 tape recorder with 2 diverse speeds...


I discovered recording sounds was already a full and poetic act which was able to be used for the experimental music which i was dreaming of



In 1987, after one month of hard work in a summer camp restaurant I bought a 4-track stereo tape recorder and I started a lot of experiments in my little flat in Lyon (France) : via an old Radiola radio from the 50's, my hifi system, an old synthesizer, my clarinet (I tried to play in water), a rhythm machine, a bad (good?) microphone etc. At that period I knew nothing about Revox tape recorders and the idea of tape montage. Nevertheless, when I started Katakomb (which is a part of a series of my first 33 little musique concrete compositions, I discovered how incredible was the changing of speed for a recorded sound, or all synthesizer sounds, voices... and the beautiful possibility to reverse all sounds - I was discovering the "power" of a recorded sound.


For me, the act of recording became an incredible acceleration to join a new poetic "world" : Katakomb was the first composition which was talking to me from a "nowhere" place as if, as a composer, I became a "stranger".

Satan and Alpha Z Centauris are composed as little free musique concrete studies and they follow what I started in 1987 : the idea of an accumulation of little aphoristic studies which can communicate all together even if they are composed in diverse periods and studio places.

I have, since that period and always today, numerous little study compositions following that direction and I am happy to build around them, via a first edition of my archives on Mirror Tapes which has founded a new architectural place of montage and perceptions."   L.M.


Note : Inlay cover is created as cosmic camp as wished for by L.M.

 Pro-Duplicated C30 with offset-printed inlay. 
      
Limited Edition : 250 copies


David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

New limited cassette album from this contemporary French concrete composer: with a title like Alpha Z Centauri it’s hard not to evoke the praeterhuman drones of early Tangerine Dream and it does have a heavy alien tongue/shortwave from the stars feel, almost like an indecipherable alien communication, with what sounds like channelled voices churning inside restless cosmic electronics. As the piece builds it starts to accrue all sorts of sonic strata, with voices becoming gradually clearer and endless tone sparkling like deep starfields as it moves in fractal shapes towards the infinite centre of the universe.

MT009 - Maurizio Bianchi - OIRT EMO-DNE - C52





In February 1981, the embryonic form of "Endometrio" had been sketched in sound with "EMO-DNE" being the basic resemblance of Endometrio's "Primo Ciclo" while "OIRT" contains the otherwise lost experimentations from within his creative labyrinth. Flaws and distresses of the original tape are retained for textural intrigue. 



Normal Edition

Pro-duplicated C52 with offset-printed inlay.   

Limited Edition : 216 


Special Edition 

Pro-duplicated C52 with off-set-printed inlay.

Plus an actual echography / ultrasound print of internal organs with a hand-drawn symbol by MB - each different from the other. 

Limited Edition : 34 copies 


David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

Edition of 216 copies that restores a previously lost and unreleased private 1981 cassette from Italian avantist and power electronics avatar Maurizio Bianchi. Oirt/Emo-Dne presents sound sketches that would go towards the realisation of his 1983 masterpiece Endometrio. Endometrio was intended as Bianchi’s introduction of his ‘bionic music’ concept and it’s still a pretty staggering conceptualisation of noise atomics and one that ranks alongside Takayanagi’s Mass Projection and Gradually Projection modes in terms of obsessively regulated electro-formula. Indeed, it’s the Gradually Projection style that dominates here, with some of Bianchi’s most spectral conceptions combined w/the sound of haunted air filtered through primitive effects and analog tape dirt to create a form of oppressively bleak psychedelia.

Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records

A reissue of a private cassette Maurizio Bianchi made in 1981, whose ghastly noises would become the foundation for Endometrio, one of Bianchi's undisputed masterpieces of grim powerdrone electronics. Endometrio was a self-released LP from 1982 that formed a diptych with Carcinosi, which explored Bianchi's self-described 'bionic' music, and which metaphorically described the encroachment of technology within the human body as a form of self-annihilation by way of cancer. The heavy drones of thick vibration seemed to be a magnification of cancerous cells growing within bone tissue. Yeah, Bianchi's work is fucking bleak.

Oirt Emo-Dne features many of those spectral vibrations, slumping drones, and frigid noises that would later form the monolithic wall of sound Bianchi would deliver on Endometrio; but this tape is far more composed than most of Bianchi's proper albums, which pretty much begin and end with rough edits and hardly anything as subtle as fade-out. Instead of a relentless torrent of sound, Bianchi allows his sounds to ebb and flow with various cracklings (possibly left over from his early turntable experiments as Sacher-Pelz), sounding very prescient of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith and especially the NWW track "No Longer His Dominant" with its arrangement for swelling low-end feedback. This tape is pretty limited itself, with just 216 copies of this edition, although the tape and the inserts are professional grade. An exceptional artifact of early '80s noise culture!

25.1.11

MT008 - Conrad Schnitzler / Wolfgang Seidel 'CONSEQUENZ 010B' C65 cassette




In an unlikely abandoned subterranean bunker at the monumental Tempelhof Airport of Berlin, a secret recording of two long-time friends - Conrad Schnitzler & Wolfgang Seidel - had been given existence from the depths of the hidden space.


Includes:

Pro-duplicated C65 with offset-printed inlay. 
    
Limited Edition : 250 copies


David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue 

Another excellent cassette on the great Mirror Tapes, Consequenz 010B documents a meeting between Conrad Schnitzler – still the greatest exponent of austere Industrial synth and electronics – and long-term collaborator Wolfgang Seidel. Recorded in an abandoned subterranean bunker beneath the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, the atmosphere is suitably macabre and claustrophobic, with Schnitzler generating some of his most psychedelic creations, ranging from wobbly purple architectures of electronics through ominous blocks of silence torn apart by invasions of odd keyboard melodies and sudden bursts of noise. The feel is highly ritualistic, almost like a séance, and there’s a weight to the music that is lacking in some of Schnitzler’s later work, a seriousness and a weight of execution that makes this one of his best contemporary recordings. 

Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records

So often you might read about an album we carry here at Aquarius that sounds as if it were recorded in a bunker, a tomb, a sewer, a cave, a warehouse, or some other nasty, gritty space whose nastiness and grittiness seeps into the recording itself. As much as we would like for each of those times we make such allusions to be true, it's actually quite rare that musicians would record an album in such a location. Conrad Schnitzler and Wolfgang Seidel have done just that, as they brought a bunch of synthesizers down to an abandoned cellar at the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin to record this excellent set of Kosmische electronic blorp. Schnitzler, of course, is a Krautrock legend having worked with the earliest incarnations of Tangerine Dream and the first sessions in Kluster (before the K became a C), and moving on to producing some of the finest examples of claustrophobic proto-electronica from the Krautrock era (e.g. Con and Ballet Statique). Seidel had worked with Schnitzler in the aforementioned Kluster as well as Eruption way back in the day, with sporadic collaborations throughout the past couple of decades. It's impossible to tell who's doing what on this recording of oblique electronic mashings that are equally psychedelic and claustrophobic. Warbling structures of algorithmically complex patterns get torn apart with thrumming electronic noises, weird semi-melodic clunkery, and mad-scientist erratic behaviors.




12.1.11

MT007 - The New Blockaders 'Live at Morden Tower' C40 cassette







Notes by TNB :


Includes two TNB live shows (2nd. / 3rd. respectively) from 1983, originally self-released on cassette (in an edition of 100) that year and re-issued on cassette the following year by Aeon. These recordings were also released (in edited form) as ‘Seinsart,’ bootleg LP (RRR, 1988.) A reworking of the recordings (also in edited form) was released, also as ‘Seinsart,’ on CDR (Siren, 2000), also included on ‘Gesamtnichtswerk’ 4CD (Hypnagogia, 2003.)


This previously unreleased (and final) version includes the original, complete recordings which were re-mastered digitally from the original 1983 private tapes in 2000 by Colin Potter at ICR.



Normal Edition 



Pro-duplicated C40 with offset-printed inlay 

         
Limited Edition : 130 copies




Pro-duplicated C40 with offset-printed inlay 

Plus : a TNB "Sonic Nihilism" retro badge

Limited Edition : 100 Copies 




Special Edition 

Pro-duplicated C40 with offset-printed inlay 

Plus : TNB "Sonic Nihilism" retro badge 

And : a two-sided collage made by Richard Rupenus featuring portraits chosen by him, housed in a protective casing, each collage unique from the other. 

Limited Edition : 20 copies 


Note :

At the TNB 30th Anniversary shows of 2011, another 100 copies of the TNB badges will be available from TNB themselves. 

David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

Newcastle’s tiny Morden Tower has been a lightning rod for counter-culturalists worldwide ever since Tom and Connie Pickard started curating poetry and art events there in the mid-Sixties, attracting everyone from Basil Bunting through Allen Ginsberg , Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and Eric Mottram. It rose to notoriety once again in the early to mid-80s as it became the Northern focus for the new Industrial underground, hosting notorious performances by Whitehouse and The New Blockaders amongst others, a tradition that local legends Jazzfinger continue to this day. This beautifully presented cassette from Mirror Tapes – who are quickly establishing themselves as one of the premier tape labels – bundles two legendary early performances from the UK’s most radical and enigmatic ‘noise’ group recorded at Morden Tower, their second and third shows from 1983. Both performances were originally released on cassette in 1983 in tiny runs and while re-worked versions of them have shown up on the Seinsart bootleg LP/CD-R, this is their first reissue in full and is re-mastered by Colin Potter of Ora/Nurse With Wound et al. The sound matches the furious electro-acoustic form of their classic first LP, with jackhammer rhythms, squealing electronics, unidentifiable tools and appliances and that unrelenting attack combining to re-wire your ears. These days it’s a hell of a lot easier to ‘make’ noise, what with all the pedals and loop stations, entry level electronics blah blah... but this is the real deal, the sound of a bunch of non-musicians single-handedly reconfiguring musical aesthetics with their bare hands. And it sounds fucking great.

Byron Coley - Wire magazine -July 2011

Two slabs of classic archival TNB scree from 1983. One side is by the Rupenus Bros duo format; on the flip they’re joined by Ashleigh Grove. Whatever, the music is amazing. It sounds like porcupines riding rusty bicycles around really fast in a figure of eight, crashing into each other and howling the way only porcupines can. Previously released more than once, this is the definitive, remastered version of both full shows and it’s a stone form classic.

My first listening experience of TNB was the cassette 'Live At Morden Tower' in 1983. I marvelled at the unbelievably relentless and inaccessible intensity of their sound. I became fascinated with them. I became a kind of TNB 'groupie'. Toshiji Mikawa 

TNB continue their work with anti-theories, anti-instruments and anti-music. The mysterious instrumentation of their debut, Changez Les Blockeurs, remains constant with that used in these live performances. However the mood produced differs greatly. The atmosphere, here, is one of an abrasive and unrelenting attack where metal scrapes, slams and drags against hissing noise generators and piercing feedback. The Blockaders seem to take great joy in dealing with the uncertainty and often precarious nature of live confrontations which result in an energetic celebration/barrage of new sounds and ideas. Aeon
Anti-music done by anti-musicians, this tape is full of hissings, bangings, scrapings, grindings and very little of what could be called traditional instrumentation. At times it sound like rush hour in a particularly noisy subway station; at other times like 20 chefs simultaneously banging their pots and pans. Yet somehow it all works and comes together as a coherent whole. The pieces show continuity and purpose. Rhythm emerges from the chaos. How do you define music? Listen to this tape then see if you still agree with your previous definition. Sound Choice

The cyclone hits and sheets of pure metal godlike shrieking rain down and ring out. Unrelenting and visceral, it’s a phoenix in its execution and a peacock in its diversity. Audience dulls around a bit, and then another simoom in the room – a lower kind of grating now. Occasional stalactites of sound jut from the proceedings and there seem to be ‘breakdowns’ in the sound from time to time. Squeaking and rolling, quacking and cajoling, and the sound spikes and speaks and spills from the guts of that time and place. It still holds the same power to incite, inspire and unnerve that it had when it first emerged almost 30 years ago. Freq

The crackle of broken amplifiers precipitates a whole new order of independently morphing soundforms, all given shape via flashes of metallic lightning, smashed glass, trashed microphone feedback and acoustic low-end pellets that scale the walls like slugs. Gradually accruing hypnotic significance, they birth spontaneous form in the shape of textures that recur with such accumulative force, they threaten to collapse the performance under its own weight. In this mode, their music feels like inverted minimalism, a leery psychedelia. The Wire

6.10.10

MT006 - Maurizio Bianchi 'Technology-X' C47 cassette








From 1981, a forgotten album from the archives of Maurizio Bianchi had been retrieved to be remastered by Edward Sol of Quasi Pop Records / Garna Studios. Inlay vortography is credited to Alvin Langdon Coburn long-deceased. 

Normal Edition

Professionally duplicated & factory sealed C47 cassette tape 
with tape inlay professionally offset printed in full-colour + silver. 
Plus : An MB 'Technology-X' badge.  

Limited Edition : 218 copies

Special Edition 

Professionally duplicated & factory sealed C47 cassette tape 
with tape inlay professionally offset printed in full-colour + silver. 
Plus : an MB 'Technology-X' badge.  
And : an abstract film negative strip by MB, each different from the other

Limited Edition : 32 copies  



David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

Great archival exhumation of a previously unreleased album from Italian Industrial/electronics legend Maurizio Bianchi recorded in 1981. Technology X has a parallel relationship to the 1981 double cassette Technology with a similar palette but with a completely different track listing. It catches MB on the cusp of a bunch of different approaches, with conveyor belt rhythms and miasmic/organic electronics giving way to triumphal single note keyboard solos that are as epic as Fushitsusha circa Pathetique. Some of the keyboard work has the wonky appeal of the early Asmus Tietchens/Conrad Schnitzler sides but the fidelity is so rusty and destroyed, with serrated beams of electro-violence threaded between sad gothic keyboard-isms, that it feels more related to terrestrial apocalypse than cosmo-fantasy. Edition of 218 copies with MB badge, fully remastered and highly recommended. 


Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records

The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.

Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button! 

MT005 - Michael Northam 'Solar Night' C40 cassette




Notes by Michael Northam :

Solar Night consists of recordings gathered during one week of intense geographical movement, where sounds were developed over one midsummer’s night in Lapland with golden foil, shakuhachi, chance objects and pitch pipe followed by live performances in Cazalla, Spain and Berlin. These recordings are layered into an immersive four-part sound journey, which is at once subtle and dense in construction. The external world is woven through with elemental sounds from Lake Saskam in Northern Sweden, yet there is an inward dimension based on Northam's two decade research inspired by the French metaphysical explorer René Daumal. All that is apparent is only but a mask hiding layers of illuminated fascination pull open the ear-holes and dive in.


"Je suis le voyant de la nuit l'auditeur du silence car le silence aussi s'habille d'une peau sonore et chaque sens a sa nuit comme moi-même je suis ma nuit et suis le penseur du non-être et sa splendeur je suis le père de la mort." - René Daumal



Pro-duplicated C40 with offset-printed inlay

Limited Edition : 250 copies 


Massimo Ricci - Touching Extremes 

Northam inhabits sonic highlands where apparently ordinary actions are informed by a portion of just anything in the intersecting areas of exploitation of concrete substance, field recordings, deconsecrated ritualism and tactile entrancement. He applies an individual discernment of the “beyond” to a series of gathered materials which turn out to be, with the passage of time, the means to a connection with certain dimensions of the psyche which not everybody is ready or willing to experience, despite the evident traces of environmental life and human tampering. The alteration of the mechanisms of insight elicited by some parts of this tape – most notably, the splendid consecutiveness of “A Tunnel” and “Sonorous Skin” – is obtained through the adjustment of raw components that – although somewhat fathomable – collectively form a milieu of morphing shapes and translucent threads whose layering defines bulking masses of acoustic muscle. The spellbinding factors become essential, gradually unconcealed intensities summing to generate scorching rays of unexplained information. In these agglomerations, the single elements may be completely diverse – wooden flutes, insects, bells, crumbling ground, gurgling liquid, mysterious voices – but the glue that keeps everything together is our own reaction to the unusual combinations. A palliative against the ruinous effects of instrumental gluttony, Solar Night is an important release – on cassette – from an interesting Malaysian imprint.

Caleb Deupree - Classical-Drone

Sound toward the light

René Daumal was a mystic and writer in interwar France, a fertile time for the imagination even if it was highly unstable economically and politically for most of Europe. Born in 1908, his early years most famously included a bit of drug experimentation, specifically inhaling carbon tetrachloride, which gave him a glimpse of a higher reality. Although he later renounced external stimulants, he spent the rest of his life searching for the spirit that he glimpsed in his trances. In the late 1920s, he and a few friends created a literary group, Le Grand Jeu, parallel to the surrealists but eventually diverging over Daumal's more spiritual aspirations versus Breton and surrealism's engagement with Marxist politics. After exploring several religious traditions, Daumal found a home with Hinduism, learning Sanskrit well enough to translate some of the sacred texts into French. His spiritual work eventually led him into the circle around G. I. Gurdjieff, whose disciples were Daumal's teachers until his death from tuberculosis in 1944. In addition to many poems and essays, Daumal also published a novel in 1938 entitled A Night of Serious Drinking and left a second novel, Mount Analogue, unfinished. Published posthumously, it later became one of the sources for Alejandro Jodorowsky's allegorical film The Holy Mountain.

Sound artist Michael Northam's most recent release, Solar Night on C40 cassette from the Malaysian label Mirror Tapes, is directly and overtly inspired by Daumal. This isn't the first time Northam has cited Daumal for his music. More than ten years ago, Northam's collaboration with John Grzinich The Absurd Evidence was named after a book of Daumal's essays. The album included as an epigraph "tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr," the unpronounceable word that Daumal heard in his mystical trances immediately preceding the recognition of eternal truths. On Solar Night the significant quotation is from one of Daumal's early prose poems, given in French on Mirror Tapes' site and recited in English in the music. The texts are set in a passage describing the reversal of the speaker's perceptive faculties, which enables him to see the true world that lies hidden behind the encircling daylight existence.

In many works Northam's primary source material is field recordings, and so with Solar Night. In addition, some of the sound sources are from Northam's live performances during the summer of 2010. I imagine Northam's performances to be similar to Jeph Jerman, who performed in Tucson last winter, and years ago with Northam, and — small, natural objects, rattling and rustling into intricate environmental textures. Remarkably, when I listen to Solar Night, I hear the spontaneous performances, rooted in active and direct communication, quite clearly amidst the various layers. In fact, I thought that there was less processing of the individual layers here than on most previous Northam works. The field recordings, such as the ferocious weather in Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, were detailed and crisp. Other layers seemed to have a more human agency behind them, so I could imagine that it was produced live, in real time. Inevitably, some layers resisted such anthropomorphic fantasies, but I listened to them all the more attentively for the ambiguities.

Solar Night is released only on cassette, with two tracks making up the episodes that comprise each side. Episode A opens with the aforementioned Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, the stormy field recordings subsiding into a watery swamp, getting its complexity from the layering. The first Daumal quotation leads into the second piece, Mask of the Sun, a gentle resonant drone, full of delicate bells and flutes, boundaries between natural and processed completelly blurred. But there's a fire crackling away in the background, more or less audible throughout the whole piece — here we are, sitting around the campfire in the woods, enveloped in Northam's unearthly performance.

Episode B opens with a walk through a Tunnel passing through environments both natural and perhaps not so much. Accompanied by birds and insects, flutes and bells, the walker's steps parallel Daumal's spiritual journey, toward the light. Insect sounds are especially prominent, dancing through the field that needs to be heard on headphones to be truly appreciated. The last piece, Sonorous Skin, sets up a watery nocturnal environment that provides the background for an intense electronic loop, the most alien sound on the tape so far. The album closes with a second Daumal reading, "i am the seer of the night an auditor of silence a silence dressed in a sonorous skin."

Although all four pieces work with shimmering, continuous textures, Northam ends them fairly abruptly, with little twists that open the pieces outwards rather than simply drifting back into nothingness. These endings give the pieces a lift, leaving the listener more suspended and aware. Like Daumal, Northam is embarked on a spiritual journey, for which Solar Night is not only a demonstration, an immersive invitation to find the light behind the natural world.

Classical-Drone Website


Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records

The peripatetic sound artist Michael Northam built these psychedelically tinged compositions for liquid drone, field recordings, and hypnotic instrumentation via his longstanding affinity for the work of Rene Daumal. A mystic who ventured in and out of the Surrealist circles in the early 20th centuries, Daumal had done much in the way of metaphysical introspection, with only a few written works published. Mount Analogue would have been his second novel, had he not died before it was finished; this allegorical travel narrative, even in its unfinished state, became the template for Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain. Northam in his investigations of found sounds, activated spaces, crackled minimalism, and recent studies in Indian raga has put forward an earth-bound transcendence, not far removed from Daumal's mystical visions. Out of masses of bowed metals and small flutes, Northam constructs haunting elongations of harmonic tones that flicker throughout streams of textural noises, which sound like leaves rustling through through a wind-swept house perched somewhere up in the Himalayas. Northam's work is far from static, as tones subtly shift and burblings of those textural abrasions slip between a variety of monochromatic variations. Here, Northam offers something not too far from the classic sounds of Zoviet France mingled with those of Small Cruel Party and one-time collaborator Loren Chasse. More gritty, tape machinations speak throughout Northam's work, providing a post-industrial touch to all of the floating flute loops and bell tones suspended in meditation and harkening back to one of his early masterpieces The Absurd Evidence (with John Grzinich). This is an excellent recording, and limited to 250 copies through the Malaysian label Mirror Tapes.

Elise Florenty

"Composée en 4 temps, Solar night est une sorte de plongée intérieure extra sidérale. Macrocosme et microcosme se mêlent dans un délire cosmique, où l'on ressent à la fois les vibrations d'un monde "subréel" et celles du monde bien concret - terrestre - où se trouve celui qui part sur d'autres rives ou galaxies. Et une chambre. Et un être dans cette chambre. Et son voyage. Inspiré des expériences de mort imminente de René Daumal, Solar night est une petite constellation de traversées d'un monde à un autre : tout est trouée, tunnel, passage, et même "le masque du soleil ne peut se cacher de lui". Mais aussi intenses que les départs et les parcours eux-mêmes, sont les moments de pauses, de retours ou mieux de "réveils" : des voix, des silences, ou une voix à la fin qui appelle le silence. Est-ce ma voix dans ce désert?"


MT004 - Conrad Schnitzler '10.10.84' C42 cassette




A documentation of the 10th October 1984 performance of a kassetten konzert, this particular mode of performance being the brainchild of the legendary Conrad Schnitzler mixing and layering pre-recorded synthesised sounds from separate tapes through adjustments of volume and EQ into broader amalgams of improvisation.



Pro-duplicated C42 with offset-printed inlay


Limited Edition : 250 copies


David Keenan - Wire Magazine - Jan 2011

Conrad Schnitzler, once of Tangerine Dream, Eruption and Kluster, remains one of the loneliest and most uncompromising figures on the fringes of Industrial Krautrock. 10.10.84 is a cassette release of one of his rare ‘kassetten konzerts’ where Schnitzler would mix simultaneous cassette playbacks of pre-recorded works to create an even more confusing multi-layered soundworld. For much of his career Schnitzler has dedicated himself to removing or reducing aspects of traditional performance and musicianship from his art, pioneering a form of musical ‘automating’ that predates Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. But like Stapleton, Schnitzler is paradoxically unable to escape his own preferences which make his music as ‘expressive’ as any singer-songwriter. 10.10.84 is instantly recognisable as prime-Schnitzler, with a crucial umbilical to the colour-coded series of albums he released between 1973-1981. His synth work is characterised by a specifically portentous sleight of hand, subverting doomy melodies with flat or oddly placed notes played in Frankenstein rhythms and always with a hint of gothic camp. The loneliness of Schnitzler’s universe is as personal as an Ed Wood set and as awkwardly revealing. Beautifully packaged by Mirror Tapes, the cassette has the feel of the kind of lonely early-80s Industrial postcard you might once have traded through the mail. And despite Schnitzler’s antipathy towards performance, it’s a hell of a show. 

Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records


Once a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler evolved into one of the most distinctive artists within the Krautrock scene. Through such seminal albums as Ballet Statique and Con, Schnitzler developed an uncompromising aesthetic that blossomed beyond the cosmic expansiveness of his fellow psychedelic journeymen and into oblique experiments whose bleak results were the templates that inspired post-industrial expressionists such as MB, Giancarlo Toniutti, Arcane Device, and Cranioclast, not to forget about his impact on the works of Emeralds, Omit, and Oneohtrix Point Never.


10.10.84 is a document of one of Schnitzler's 'kassetten konzert', during which he played back a number of pre-recorded cassettes through upwards of six decks that he would sometimes suspend from a belt around his waste and broadcast through a megaphone wired to a metal helmet that he wore on his head. Given his studies with Joseph Beuys in the '60s, one could postulate that these performances might also warrant some theatrical gestures given the mobility of this set-up. For this konzert recorded in Berlin, Schnitzler overlays sweeping oscillations, clouds of static, and nervous electronic percolations, all of which hold a metallic sheen as if each of these sounds could sharpen knives intent on scraping out the collective inner ear canal of the audience. While the step sequencing of his more accessible works isn't all that present, scattershot firings of horror-laden synth notes burst throughout Schnitzler's signature use of heavily filtered electrical tones. 


 Frans de Waard - Vital Weekly - Jan 2011

No doubt I wrote this before, but I have great, utmost respect for Conrad Schnitzler. His music fits no genre, no scene and the man is, even at the respectable age he has now (73!), he continues to work on his own sound matter. Having said that, I must admit I didn't hear all of his work, nor do I believe that is necessary for my appreciation. But when possible, I like to hear it. I must assume that this particular release is made on the date it was named after (and my mother's birthday), which would be a typical Schnitzler thing to do. Record a brand new work in one day. In 1984 he was still heavily involved in 'non-keyboard electronics', which means that he would have all of his synthesizers connected and 'just' fiddle about with all the knobs, leaving the keys to rest. The result is some highly abstract electronic music, which owes more to Cologne/Stockhausen in the fifties then to cosmic music of the seventies. Yet Schnitzler's work is more free than Stockhausen c.s. and 

 doesn't 
 seem to obey any formal composition techniques. This free-ness is also from an improvisational side of things and is probably the reason why Schnitzler has always been so productive. Yet this work is not an easy thing, conceived on the spot, but sounds like planned out, and then taped. A particularly great work actually.

31.8.10

MT003 - Maurizio Bianchi 'SFAG' C47 cassette






Notes by Maurizio Bianchi

"S.F.A.G." is the deliberate and analogic destruction, in whole or in part, of the prepacked sound. As perpetrator of this work, I had the aim to annihilate the modular particles themselves and the objectives of the comformist music with its foolish institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence in order to avoid the annulment of the personal creativity, security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to experimental-underground field. The morbid resonances of this humoral opus will floodlight the chemosurgical delitescence of eliminative genocide in order to knell the downfall of the present mass-media system" - Maurizio Bianchi.



From the private tape of 1981, corresponding to the deleted CD reissue by Tegal Records in 1994, a psycho-specular companion piece to the more widely-known "Symphony for a Genocide".

Pro-duplicated C47 with offset-printed inlay

Limited Edition : 200 copies


David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

Edition of 200 copies cassette reissue of an obscure 1981 cassette album from Maurizio Bianchi, originally only available direct from the artist. Paralleling his work on Symphony For A Genocide, this is classic Bianchi, with that heavily-delayed organic/electronic sound that makes for some of his blackest psychedelic Industrial ritual. I still think Heather Leigh’s Jailhouse Rock album is the closest comparison to early-80s Bianchi, that same miasma of F/X damaged sound and staggering implosive rhythms that give the impression of haunting foghorns through cotton wool, and SFAG sounds a lot like some of Heather’s most trashed rock/roll.  Some of the keyboard sounds are particularly loopy, almost with an eerie Joe Meek appeal, and the gothic passages of doomy synthesized melody raise it way above the bar.

MT002 - Thomas Bey William Bailey 'Progressive Lycanthropy' C32 cassette + mini-book




Notes by Thomas Bey William Bailey 

Thomas Bey William Bailey is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and cultural re-searcher, whose work has manifested itself as books, articles, music releases, sound installations, experimental radio shows, and completely undocumented or personal creative actions / interventions. He has lived and worked in Japan, Central Europe, and throughout the US, struggling to overcome the psychic fatigue which is unique to our 21st century congestion culture. His work critiques and frames this culture by avoiding the obvious, easily perceptible middle ground and instead focusing on ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aspects of lived experience in an information-saturated epoch. To this end, Bailey’s work tends towards either ‘atomizing’ life (e.g. making recordings of asthmatic breath and incomprehensible sleep-talking, strobing videos limited to only a couple visual elements) or illuminating its hyper-complexity with intense noise, etc. It is a celebration of ‘life before death’ and a valuation of intimate exploratory nature above mass technological progress. Many of these ideas are further fleshed out in Bailey’s first book-length survey of his influences and allies, ‘Micro Bionic,’ published in 2009. His second book is in the completion stages at the time of this writing.


The Progressive Lycanthropy package includes one professionally duplicated cassette as well as a handsome information booklet (also pro-duplicated), in which TBWB explains his motivations in an exclusive essay “A Weapon For The Wolf Age” (the booklet also includes a number of other illustrations and surprises along the theme of wolves, nature and modern warfare.) The three epic pieces on the cassette were built up from a “feraliminal lycanthropizer” drone, an experimental binaural frequency supposedly used by the military as an “audio truth serum” or as a combat stimulant-  as the name suggests, this technique was meant to hurl individuals into “wolf-like” states where they would careen between poles of focused rage and woozy ecstasy. Complemented with other sonic ornamentation and digitally-manipulated samples, this material is an eerie interpretation of the ‘lycanthropized’ state as it might exist in a hyper-modern, technology-driven society. Conducted in the spirit of the d.i.y. audio research that characterized the ‘industrial music’ era, this material should have a wide range of effects on individual listeners, from restlessness to wild abandon, and as such does come with a disclaimer not to play while experiencing high stress levels or while engaged in potentially dangerous activities (driving motor vehicles, handling firearms.) If you have ever wanted to travel to a world where fur and fangs mesh with integrated circuits to form an invincible hybrid, here is your ticket.




    Pro-duplicated C32 with offset-printed inlay

Plus : Off-set printed booklet of 22-pages written with lycanthropic inspiration

Limited Edition : 200 copies

+++

And, 23 copies reproduced on Verbatim CD-r with card cover with booklet - only available in Malaysia. 

+++


Massimo Ricci - Touching Extremes

Not only Thom Bailey produces some of the most invigorating computer-assisted noise music around; he can also write interestingly on hundreds of disparate topics, typically in relation to the effects of certain sounds on the human brain. The booklet accompanying this tape explicates too many unknowable facts to be listed here, but the main objective is that of letting people realize about the potentially nefarious behaviour of individuals subjected to a treatment via the “feraliminal lycanthropizer”. This is an acoustic apparatus that almost nobody knows of, allegedly utilized prior to selected military actions in order to render soldiers able to commit ghastly crimes in times of war. Employing drones derived from that – modified by spectral shaping software – plus samples of black metal and his own violent cries (quite bloodcurdling, even if mixed relatively low), Bailey constructed a work that exudes acumen in the same places where average distortion-mongers attacks the ears inconsiderately, ultimately losing both focus and artistic value. On the contrary, TBWB is creditable for the clobbering lucidity of the overall design, a quality that allows him to sonically expound aspects of brutality and behavioral coercion with the scientific inflexibility of a laboratory analyst. Rarely scathing hostility and harsh droning have sounded so attractive; grab one of the 200 exemplars of this cassette fast and, while you’re at it, find a copy of 2009’s book MicroBionic. It was calculatedly destroyed by Wire (having Bailey previously not been gentle enough with them) hence you know that it’s mandatory reading.

 Frans de Waard - Vital Weekly 

To change into a wolf, that is what this release is about. Not just a piece of music, but it comes with neatly designed and printed pocket book on the subject of wolves. In history, in military and in legends. A well researched work. I don't like wolves, or any canine descendent for that matter, but that didn't stop me from wanting to hear this. Thomas Bey Williams Bailey is someone whose work I respect a lot. He's one of those people who think about noise and do something that is more interesting than what is regular in that field. For this release he works with a 'feraliminal lycanthropizer drone modified with "spectral shaping" plug ins', samples of black metal using the word 'wolf', processed vocals spontaneously captured during fits of rage and 'additional sonic ornamentation, of a too varied nature to list here'. This are put together into a piece of music that lasts almost thirty minutes and that has an unsettling power. Particular loud here, compared to some of his previous work, but Bailey knows how to pull back and add that much needed variation in his work. Brutally loud at times, and unsettling quiet at well chosen times. White static noise, banging metal samples, piercing drones and uncontrolled voices make this both an unsettling and pleasant work. It didn't change me into a wolf, nor did it make them appreciate more (or perhaps even less, come to think of it), but Bailey proofs once again to be a master of intelligent noise. 


 Paul Takahashi - Soleil Noir Mailorder

Surprisingly good and original concrete cut-ups based on a lycanthropic theme. Something reminiscent of KK. Null's electroacoustic noisy staccatos blended with eighties Nurse With Wound's freedom and organic feeling. Very solid release.