Her 1968 masterwork, arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier, originally released on Saravah. Approved by Brigitte, this expanded edition features the original album, newly remastered from the original tapes, along with a second LP of demos, instrumentals, and a live rendition of Il Pleut recorded for France Inter/ORTF. With a twenty-page bilingual booklet, including an introduction by Laetitia Sadier, plus full lyrics and rare archival photos.
Remastered direct from the original master tapes, with previously unreleased outtakes and rarities — including Patti’s 1975 RCA audition tape.
Single-sided.
Last of PU’s cheeky threesome of early-seventies soundtracks for the noirish erotica of Luigi Scattini, with lots of electric piano, wah wah and vocalese, drama, melancholia and sleaze, shot through with spaced-out jazz, true Umiliani style.
‘This work has accompanied me like a secret, an almost silent meditation on what the viola means in my life. Through it I have experienced how much this instrument connects me to listening, to patience, to inwardness. Here Morton Feldman is not composing in order to shine, but so as to make us hear the infinitesimal, the unspeakable – that is what has touched me profoundly, and I want to share it with the listeners.’
Antoine Tamestit
The ‘un-muting’ or ‘sonic restitution’ of African instruments held in Western museum collections, this project began with a recording session in October 2023 at the British Museum in London, when Hoyt was granted access to instruments from the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. These recordings were then developed in his studio, blending in African and Western instruments from his own collection.
‘This record is not an album but a diagram, a blackground score for a people who have never stopped dancing. Instruments exiled into the vitrines of empire, their voices stilled by taxonomic theft, now murmur and hum again. This is restitution by vibration, and the sounds you hear refuse to be forgotten, to be fixed, to refuse to die. You won’t find Western time signatures here; you’ll find time folding, spilling, catching fire. His compositions bespeak an afro-sonic-philo-sophy, more drastic than gnostic. These desperate times call for desperate pleasures.’
AA is the close collaborator of Ennio Morricone. He’s worked with Bruno Nicolai, Nino Rota, Franco Micalizzi, Francesco De Masi… He says he wrote the Muppet Song (and that Piero Umiliani nicked his royalties). He whistled for Fellini.
Originally released by Octopus in 1975, Angoscia catches him at his creative peak.
Twelve enactments of mental distress. Anguish, dismay, desperation, uncertainty, pride, resignation, frustration, desolation, agony, prostration, obsession and — finally — fear.
Arnold Schoenberg’s in the house.
A barrel of laughs, then; warmly recommended.
‘Eight tracks of jagged electronics, heavy basslines, and fractured spoken word collide in a body-jerking soundclash that is both raw and vital.’
Good On Paper enjoyed ‘Baldauf’s crisp, distanced tones accompanied by Roe’s ominous, pulsating programmed bass line and four-to-the-floor whack, coaxing pure pop out of tension and incongruity.’ Electronic Sound Magazine hailed the LP as ‘a blistering, club-forward workout’, with ‘top-drawer, nose-bloodying electronics,’ positioning the Stroud duo as ‘rather like a wonky Tom Tom Club with added grit.’
Intensely evocative, meditative duets by modular synthesizer and viola, interwoven with field recordings — birds, the sound of forests — encapsulating sojourns on the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland.
Moody Umiliani, with tasty Hammond and plenty of breaks. Set between Egypt and Ferrara, tackling racial integration in 1973, this is the second of Scattini’s films featuring Zeudi Araya. (That’s her singing on the spaced-out Cantata Per Miriam, over proto-Headz funk-drumming. Pretty great.)
Scintillating, alchemical kosmische; visionary, deep, and luminous; and beautifully sleeved, with gold foiling and silver ink.
Works In Metal fans out a set of acid treatments and finely sharpened blades — cutting, shaping, suspending form. Sounds are melted down and forged as if liquid metal.
The works are paired. Arc’s Blue Flame previews the smoking volatility at the album’s core. Echoes and resonance soften the dissonant, bright textures; all overlaid with Fofana’s signature, percussive kick drums. Welding drills into the discordant thrills and spills of metamorphosis. Sparks fly and the bittersweet arc of change unfolds.
Fofana discreetly folds in text, poetry, and field recordings, spooring their decomposition and recomposition with a prismatic point of view. The coupling Obscure Light (Decomposition) and Obscure Light (Recomposition) marks something new in his music. The pulse is brightly honed, cascading beyond the dancefloor, exultingly eluding musical genre.
Works in Metal is perhaps Fofana’s most narrative album. At its heart is the killer, extended Lure of the Fragment / So Another Sound Suggests Itself. Melodies circle in call-and-response patterns, balancing proximity and distance, signalling the inward gravity required to work with metal. A nested story-line, with birds flying in; an album within an album. Dredging up memories and associations, Fofana filters in selections from his sound-archives. Layered with synths, field recordings become instruments in their own right. The last three minutes proffer precious clarity — a memory, in miniature, flashed onto molten metal.
In 1943 Suzanne Césaire declared that ‘our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage: the powerful magic of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn from the very wellsprings of life. Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s blue flame. The mettle of our metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions — all will be recovered’. Works in Metal is a tribute to her prophecy; its enactment, sculpted in sound.
A harum-scarum bloodbath of sixties rock, seventies motorik-fusion, and eighties punk.
‘The landscape Orcutt Shelley Miller inhabits lies deep in the stoner American bedrock, fed by volcanic riffage and hypnotic phrasing with rhythmic nods to the SoCal ’60s and atonal slash piled on a mid ’80s SST punk-fusionoid substrate, ultimately blasting a ‘big rock statement’ that treads the line between good times and blown minds.’