New limited one-sided LP from this modern composer presents an elegy to Fluxus by encoding the names of various key players (including John Lennon. LaMonte Young, Yoshi Wada, Yasunao Tone, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Joe Jones, Philip Corner, Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Henry Flynt, Joseph Beuys, Henning Christiansen et al) in the form of International Morse dots and dashes which were 'performed' on a keyboard with a voice-pattern setting going through a loop unit and a mixer and straight to cassette. Front cover reproduces the original score. Edition limited to 345 copies.

Limited edition of 500 copies LP from legendary minimalist composer, pianist and artists Charlemagne Palestine. Less than 200 copies of this LP were ever put on sale, with 350 of them offered to the audience who attended a Palestine performance. Sound 1 represents the apex of Palestine’s experiments with oscillators as universal drone generators and features 16 machines played at full volume and subtly tweaked to generate gorgeous, complex blooms of clashing tone, ghost patterns, hypnagogic shadows and subtle orchestral movements. Palestine talks of the piece as a 3-dimensional sculptural canvas in mid-air, likening the sound to the humming of gargantuan Tibetan bees. It’s a mesmerising piece, one that fully occupies and takes over whatever space it’s played in, a classic slice of minimal electronic psychedelia in the tradition of LaMonte Young, Coil’s Time Machines and the recent Eleh LPs. Recommended.

Edition of 340 copies archival release from NNCK documenting their earliest four-piece incarnation. This is NNCK at their most alien, with the abrasive sound of the classic “Clearing” 7” extended to two sides of abstract metal tones punctured by bursts of acoustic noise and the kind of all-devouring soundfields of AMM circa The Crypt. If you prefer NNCK at their most extraterrestrial and less ethnic/rhythmic focussed then this is a winning blat of early improvisatory refusal and makes a great companion volume to Locust’s At 6AM We Become The Police. Beautifully packaged with hilarious conceptual sleevenotes by Keith Connelly. Chris Morris couldn’t have done a better job. Recommended. 

Edition of 380 copies documenting the incredible heavy metal sonorities of Greek sound sculpture Takis’s electro-magnetic creations. Takis uses magnetic waves caused by electricity to trigger repeat-soundings from his industrial creations, allowing you, in the words of William Burroughs, to hear the metal think. Sonic reference points would be Paul Lytton’s percussion work, the ambient sculptures of Harry Bertoia, the faraway wires of Alan Lamb but with a slightly more Unruh/Neubauten-style aggressive sheet-metal edge. Comes with a fantastic text appreciation by William Burroughs “on a planet of heavy blue metal.” Highly recommended. “Takis was born in 1925 in Athens. Preferring, as a matter of principle, to teach himself rather study in an institution, he left Greece in 1954 and lived as a citizen of the world, travelling through Europe and the USA. Some of his earliest manifestations in the 1940s consisted of explosions carried out in open places. His first “Signals” date from 1954: they were rods consisting of piano wires which created musical vibrations as they stuck against each other in the wind. In fact they constituted the first appearance in his work and in contemporary art history of a form of musical expression in which sounds are called forth in an un-programmed way, owing to the action of natural forces. In 1961 Takis meets Marcel Duchamp in New York. Duchamp’s perpetual moving bicycle wheels inspired Takis’ hydromagnetic sculptures. In the period between 1964 and 1965 Takis conceives his “Pendules magnètiques” and constructs his first Sound Sculptures. After the exhibition of Takis titled “Electro-musical relief” at Indica Gallery in London in 1966, the New Scientist magazine in an article entitled "The sounds of tomorrow" commented that Takis, Iannis Xenakis and John Cage are the most promising musicians of the century. Takis' “Pendules magnétiques” are based on the simple concept of using magnetic waves caused by electricity as a means to activate repeated musical sounds: the latter are to be heard every time a needle strikes a string, when attracted by a magnet. The sounds reproduced in this edition were recorded in 1993 by Samon Takahashi at Takis’ retrospective at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Takis participates in 1984 at the exhibition titled “The Century of Kafka” at Centre Pompidou in Paris and sound work with the same title is also reproduced on this LP edition. As an artist he seeks a natural origin for the construction of sound, and in particular that origin which is furthest removed from the artist's arbitrary decision. For about forty years now, it has been Takis's purpose to investigate language as a natural function, conceiving function as a form of work. Furthermore, he has broken down the frontiers between sculpture and music in a number of pieces which can only be read by identifying their functionalism as structured units, with their morphological, visual and acoustic aspects.” – AM.

Fascinating collection of work from Jean-Louis Brau, a member of the pre-Situationist Lettrist International alongside Gil Wolman and Isidore Isou. Brau was an artist, writer, soldier, radical, sound poet, brothel owner and drug dealer with a biography that’d make Blaise Cendrars blush. In 1973 he gave up all artistic work completely. This album compiles a bunch of the surviving recordings, including two tape pieces that were played during Isou’s conference at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1961, two pieces first published in the Poesie Physique book that came with three singles, one by Brau, one by Dufrene and one by Wolman, and a wild 1972 track with freakout Wildman drumming – “Turnback Nightingale” - that first came out in Poesie en question, Opus International. The sonics run from grainy sound poetry and tape work that pre-dates the Chocolate Monk aesthetic by a bunch of decades through barbaric non-musical actions and convulsive epiglottal gymnastics. Pretty amazing. Edition of 350 copies. 

Fascinating engagement with the work of the late Luc Ferrari, specifically his electro-acoustic “Presque Rien No.2”, a minimal soundwork where Ferrari occasionally talks to himself while moving through a sonic field that includes a repeating bird cry. eRikm combines a real-time playback of the piece with the movement of a microphone in and outside of his house while another bird sings in his garden. The live interaction across time between the two pieces creates a third space/time element that is fairly disorientating and that generates such a deep listening field that it almost succeeds in bending time while creating an odd mood of nostalgia. “Visitation, created on April 1st, 2011 is a very unique kind of collaboration between two French sonic artists, master Luc Ferrari and eRikm. Here is eRikm direct testimony about this new work: “When the sun set on April 1st, 2011 I heard through the windows of my house the repetitive song of a night bird. ‘Madeleine’ brought me immediately back to Luc Ferrari¹s electroacoustic piece ‘Presque Rien N° 2’. I became curious about comparing the bird that was officiating in the garden of Cap15 (in the North area of Marseille) with the bird of ‘Presque Rien’. My curiosity triggered the desire to play Luc¹s piece in the acoustic space of my house. With my rudimentary recorder I moved inside and outside the house moving back and forth between both spaces. I played with the depth of field, the beat between these two birds separated by 34 years and immersed myself in these acoustic events. This Ursprung or temporal Klein bottle was recorded and edited in one single sequence shot”.
Very hard to confront with one of the all-time masterpieces of modern creation as Luc Ferrari’s “Presque Rien N° 2”… but listening to this piece you immediately get the impression of a perfectly accomplished work, published now on LP on your favorite label. So here is the first ever LP by eRikm, elegantly released with “Presque Rien” iconic mouth picture on the sleeve; dedicated to Brunhild Ferrari and to Natacha Muslera.” – AM.

Edition of 270 copies LP from artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel, using brushes and sticks on a series of prepared gongs and self-built instruments to create a tone field with a Zen clarity somewhat akin to some of Harry Bertoia’s singing sculptures or even the more minimal/percussive Mirror sides: "PLANAM proudly presents the second LP by the artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel. Born in 1941 in Strasbourg, France, Michel Vogel artistic activities start in 1960 when, as a painter under the materic influences of Antoni Tapies and Jean Dubuffet, his mineral and sound experimentations built a universe influenced by free jazz, extra-European music and Olivier Messiaen. His researches develop with new sculptures and the creation of his own resonating metal instruments. His friends of the minimalist group, and specially the Fluxus artists, supported and pushed him to carry on his acoustics explorations while his sonic creations get closer to the music of John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. After the deep cosmo night music of “Une petite music de nuit” (Vogel first LP) PLANAM decided to issue two more early-morning oriented realizations, or “Ronde mattinale à Amillis” and “Berenice”. These alfa-wave improvisations for ‘prepared’ gongs and self-built metal instruments, selected in direct collaboration with the artist, will make you enter into luminous sonic dimensions." - AM

Another fascinating environmental transport from composer and Fluxus member Philip Corner: Coldwater Basin presents “a home recording of water running from a faucet into a sink” that was made on the Lower East Side of New York City “sometime in the 60s”.  Much more than how it reads on paper, it’s more about the sound of a room, the specifics of time and space, and the sound of their collision and unfolding. The recording is hissy and seems to slowly pan towards the delicate sound of the water that increases in volume throughout, with lots of background street noise and the hum of the city somewhere in the distance. The effect is curiously hypnotic as Corner points out in his notes: “... and I had always dreamed of passing an entire night bathed in this. It was never long enough.” Mesmerising, historically potent slice of minimalism, edition of only 180 copies with calligraphic design by Corner himself. 

Two LPs of staggering a-musical disobedience, strangulated free vocal freak, feedback threnodies and the most primitive nod-out free/metal/garage/skronk this side of the Breakdance The Dawn crew from Oren Ambarchi, Nick Kamvissis and Brendan Walls (who plays alongside Andrew Chalk in Marsfield) with contributions from Lisa and Naomi Tocatly. By far the best thing this wild group have ever done, Puppet Island seems them take on the lumbering metal-dirge style of Kousokuya but w/an obsessive, destructive streak that is almost autistic. The drumming is amazing, with a Bill Ward plays The Shaggs feel over repeating thunder-struck riffs that sound as if they are being played by electrified rubber bands. Throw in vocals alternately sung by small retarded children or macabre puppets and you have alla the ingredients for some of the most deranged free rock of this group’s ‘career’. Pretty amazing, edition of 280 copies in a full-colour gatefold sleeve. Highly recommended.