Electronic & Dance CD 452 Items

As a musician he plays alto saxophone, guitar, percussion and synthesizer with several bands and an expanding collective of like minded artists. Being a self-taught musician, his sound work is an extension of his visual work and his music is a mixture of joyful noise and simple naive melodies.

Seljuk has performed and recorded with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Senyawa, Hada Benedito Mateo, Eiko Ishibashi, Mitsuaki Matsumoto, Pisitakun, Yuen Chee Wai, Dharma, DJ Sniff, Maximilian Glass, Duncan Bruce, Hilary Jeffery and Hayden Chisholm. He has also worked with many theatre practitioners & performance artists in India making music for theatre as well as curating shows & workshops with actors and performers from around India.

The recordings on Cardboard Castles were made at Seljuk's studio in Kochi between 2016 and 2021 and were mostly instant compositions and single take recordings created in collaboration with a number of fellow travellers who've passed through the studio. At the inception of the album's creation Seljuk sought to reflect on what freedom means and what the musical limitations of this are, and how his involvement as a free improviser might project fixed ideas onto a listener. He wanted to use an improvisational approach that focussed on presenting ideas with a beauty inherent in their sound, coalescing these into song form. Cardboard Castles is the resulting album and application of these concepts.

We at Hive Mind feel privileged to have worked with Seljuk to bring you these deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic works which really do defy easy description. Ranging from strange and wonky electronic improvisations, gentle acoustic instrumentals such as the lush opener with the input of the Cochin String Orchestra, through experiments in traditional Indian song, this album will keep you guessing. Everything appears touched with a mischievous sense of playfulness that's maybe reflected in the face of the grinning camel that adorns the sleeve. We're sure you'll agree there's plenty to delight the listener on this strange dream of an album, Seljuk's first to receive a physical release.'

The CD version comes in a gatefold card digisleeve in an edition of 250 copies

Seljuk Rustum: Piano, Synthesizer, Sequencer, Acoustic & Electric Guitar, Saxophone, Voice, Percussion Sekhar Sudhir: Violin on Tracks 5, 7&8, Acoustic Guitar on Track 4, Mandolin & Melodica on Track 3 Akshay Ashokan: Electric Guitar on Track 4 Joffy Chirayath: Drums on Tracks 3 & 10 Cochin String Orchestra: Strings on Track 1 (Thanks to Duncan Roy Bruce)

Produced, Engineered & Mixed by Seljuk Rustum Tracks 9,4 & 8 Edited by Sekhar Sudhir Track 3 voice from the Alan Lomax Archive from recordings made in Kerala in the 1970s to document the Malayam language Track 2 was composed for BUS (a theatre performance Written & Directed by Firoz Khan

Album Art: Unknown Artist (found on the walls near Palayam Market, Kozhikode).

French electroacoustic veteran Lionel Marchetti returns to Room 40 with a special release composed in Australia and recorded telematically between three separate locations..

For his second Room 40 release following 2018's "The Last Days of Reality", Marchetti again collaborates with Aussie chamber ensemble Decibel. He worked out what he wanted to do in 2019 while visiting Australia, and devised a way of composing the piece that avoided a traditional score, instead working with conversation, listening and experimentation. After rehearsing with different instrumentation and imaginatively placed speakers, he adapted what he calls the 'partition concrète’ using his various studio techniques. But when he was due to record the final version of the piece, he was hit with a problem - Australia was in pandemic lockdown, and Marchetti was in France. So a special recording method was developed; some musicians were based in Melbourne, some in Perth, and Marchetti joined from Europe, everyone was connected via conferencing software that was adjusted to improve sound quality and latency.

Marchetti worked into the final recordings in his studio, adding the finishing touches and making sure it sounded as close to his original vision as possible. The final version clocks in at almost 37 minutes in length, and is as impressive as you'd hope from the story of its construction. Decibel's work from two different sides of Australia is at the center of the recording, but it's Marchetti's smart, restrained processes that have us coming back for more. If you're not completely concentrating you might miss it, but the small glitches and spacial effects that Marchetti provides gives the orchestral elements a distant charm. It's not completely acoustic music, and it's bending the possibilities of the sonic presentation just as Marchetti did with the recording process itself. He finishes off the album with a shorter two-minute composition recorded for Decibel's "2 Minutes from Home" project, a hand-scored piece that he wrote on crumpled paper using ink and white-out. Each member of the orchestra recorded their part separately in their own home, and the result is beguiling - otherworldly and tonally exhilarating without being overwhelming or overstaying its welcome.

Absorbingly paced and inventive electro-acoustic/concrète chicanery by Melbourne’s clarinet improvisor Aviva Endean, giving the ear something to chase with her micro-to-macroscopic proprioceptions.

Dynamically recorded across multiple spaces and hugely variegated in texture and tone, ‘Moths & Stars’ is titled for the artist’s attempt to zoom the ear’s eye between natural intimacy and the sidereal. Fucking with fundamentals of time and space she uses canny microphone placement and feedback systems to poetically mess with the listener’s sense of place and atmospheric pressure in a way crossing lines with the sound arts of Leila Bordreuil and Teresa Winter. In the process Aviva evinces a an underlying narrative by meshing and wrapping perceptions of the abstract with more palpably human vocal tones in a very instinctive and sensually haptic manner where it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the surprising folds and discreet dimensions she delves into.

“The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other.

Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.”

Subtly hallucinatory, Burroughsian field recording collage by CM Von Hauswolff and Eric Pauser’s Phauss, stitching abstract meta-narratives from the ether of mid ‘80s Switzerland, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, India, Thailand, The Philippines and USA, Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Benin and Nigeria, with assistance of engineer Zbigniew Karkowski. Reissued for first time in 35 years.

“Audiodrome collects together two discreet works that sit somewhere between field recording, chance composition and experimental soundscape. Both pieces pre-date the widespread arrival of field recording as a creative practice, and expand outward the work that had been developed by musique concréte and other experimental music approaches concerned with the intersections of found sound and composition. Both works were devised using the same working methodology, whereby an alarm would sound every few days and wherever and whenever it sounded the pair would start recording their surroundings. Those raw material became the basis for the pieces.

The first composition Zürich - Zürich is a piece that traces a line around the world, Phauss travelling on a round the world air ticket stopping only in countries where conflict was present. This unsettling journey became a meditation on the evolving state of the world in those moments. Voices, traffic, cafes, radios, transportation system and other incidental environments float into one another in a kind of stream of (temporally incongruous) consciousness.

The second work Alger - Lagos brings to mind some of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs tape cut-ups. Street musicians are splice against bursts of radio, roadside conversations and searing blasts of industrial noise captured from aircraft and other unfamiliar sources. It is an unsteadying journey where even the sounds of the everyday feel alien and repositioned. The sounds call to us prompting a sensing that is at its heart utterly fascinated, and fascinating.

The edition includes a book featuring an exhaustive collection of photographs, documents and artworks made by Von Hausswolff and Pauser during their journeys undertaken to complete each of the compositions. Many of these images and artworks have never been published previously.”

Formed in the early 1980s,​ Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser.

"Von Hausswolff and Pauser, who both operated across sound and installation, used Phauss as a means for deconstructing ideas of composition, situationalism, site-specific works and extended performance methodologies. Across the second half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, they made connections, through their travels, outward from their homeland into scenes and communities that stretched from the Middle East, through North America and into Asia.

Like their travels, their ways of approaching the work they made was similarly wide-reaching and innately curious. They worked with often quite strict conceptual structures within which they were able to unlock entirely new ways of considering composition and also the material production of sound, through performance, through iteration and through considered experimentation which allowed for failure, just as much as success.

Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth is a recording made in the United States whilst the pair were undertaking an exhaustive tour in 1991 alongside Hafler Trio and Zbigniew Karkowski. This, now legendary, tour was both arduous and rewarding. Living in a van for many weeks at a time, travelling between cities with the most modest of means meant Phauss came to know a very particular vision of the United States, one that existed below plain view. Their’s was an experience had at the rawest edges of cities.

Equally the performances they gave, from which this edition is assembled, were raw and quite frankly dangerous. Fire on stage, sparks flying from short circuiting electronics and intense physical rituals guided so much of their work during this tour and looking back at bootleg videos from the time it’s difficult to imagine the work being able to be presented in the modern world.

One of the flyers from their tour reads ‘Extreme Swedish Industrial’, and as familiar as those words might appear now, in 1991 they held a very different resonance. They were unfamiliar terms of reference and the intensity of Phauss’s music maintains that unknowability to this day. This is a profoundly individual work and sets the stage for a generation of musicians who followed them."

Heralded by the “Soul Drum” 12” EP (scep507, 2022), Gerardo Frisina’s new double record “Joyful Sound” represents another step forward on his ongoing travel towards new musical paths. Joyful sounds narrate a journey made of wisely distilled notes, bright and sometimes mysterious atmospheres, harmonies that wander through shadows, silences, and lights. A chameleonic Gerardo enchants with every release, mixing jazz, Latin, Afro-Cuban sounds, oriental fragrances, electronic beats, tribal percussions, funky variations and, to summarize, elegant symphonic arrangements with refined mastery. “Joyful Sound” once again sees the participation of the late Enzo Frassi (double bass), Fabrizio Bernasconi (piano, Rhodes), Gendrickson Mena (trumpet, piano), Alfonso Deidda (sax, flute) and Ernesto Lopez (drums, percussion), with the addition of Piero Perelli on drums and Giovanni Guerretti on piano, Hammond and Rhodes. This new record, carefully orchestrated and produced by Gerardo, required over a year of intense work, however it is worth every second of its 75 minutes of music. As the great Charles Mingus once said, “Play it in the key of your soul”. Without a doubt, Gerardo always gives his soul in full!

For this uniquely personal retrospective spread over twelve vinyl discs, Sven Väth takes us back to the early days of his DJ career. On What I Used To Play we meet great pioneers of electronic music, gifted percussionists, obscure wave bands, and innovative producers of a bygone 'new electronic' era. Rough beats and irresistible grooves from the identification stage of house, techno, and acid remind us not just how far electronic music has evolved over the past four decades, but how great it was to dance to EBM, techno, and house for the very first time.

If there is one protagonist of the electronic music scene who has remained curious, innovative and at the very cutting edge of music for over four decades, it's Sven Väth. His multi-layered artist albums and Sound of the Season mix compilations have been defining the genre for over two decades, and even today, he is constantly on the lookout for the next top tune to add to the highlights of his next set. At least, that's the case when he's not producing them himself as an artist or remixer. "Actually, it's always been part of my DNA to think ahead," and nothing had been further from his mind than looking back at his past, but when in spring of 2020 the international DJ circuit had to be scaled down to virtually zero, the 'restless traveler' suddenly had time. Time to stop and reflect on "how it actually was back then, at the very beginning of my career..."

"It was a great trip and with every track, beautiful memories came flooding back".
In the London apartment, he had just moved into, Sven has set up a "little music room", where he cocooned himself for several days, "to look way back for the first time and review my musical journey through the eighties, so to speak."

The interim result was six thematically oriented playlists with a grand total of 120 tracks from 'early 80s' to 'Balearic late 80s', together with excursions into afrobeat, European new wave, and EBM sounds and a few epochal techno/house tracks from the USA in between. From these 'Best of Sven Väth's favorites', the project What I Used To Play crystallized. Sven remembers how the Cocoon team reacted to his proposal: "They found the idea of making a compilation out of it MEGA from the beginning and everyone said 'Sven, go for it', but then, of course, the work really started, namely, to clear the rights and to get clean sounding masters of the up to 40-year-old tracks. There was also disappointment, of course. We couldn't clear certain titles because the rights holders in the USA had fallen out with each other or simply disappeared from the scene. In short, it wasn't easy, but now I can safely say we got the most important tracks."

Finally, after two years of research, curation, design, and administrative fine-tuning, the "little retrospective" from 1981 to 1990 is available. The exquisitely packaged, and three-kilo heavy box set is not only physically impressive, WIUTP is also the definitive record of Sven Väth's musical development. On each of the twenty-four sides of vinyl, you can trace track by track, what influenced him during which phase, and how he took off as a DJ from his parents' Queen's Pub straight into the spotlight at Dorian Gray. There and at Vogue (later OMEN), Sven became the style-defining player in the DJ booth that he still is today.

A two CD set containing Eliane Radigue's live performance of »Chry-Ptus« (1971), her first work for modular synthesizer, and the world premier of parts one and three of »Triptych« (1978) – Part 2« is also performed. Upon hearing these performances for the first time in many years Radigue declared them to be the best versions she'd ever heard. Radigue's sublime renderings of these major pieces are full of illusory stasis, slow change and dense, slow motion drone that has characterized her pioneering electronic work.

Eka Faune offers a surprising mix of Asian cultures, shamanism and post-punk in the form of a record called Healing of the Nation. The band merges dark mantras, hypnotic rhythms, ethnic samples and the acid sounds of Seika Faune. Delphine Poupard's voice and Robin Plastre's sax are added to produce a haunting music, dark and luminous at the same time, alternating dance and trance, taking the listener far inside... Similarly to the other albums by Eka Faune, Seika first recorded his drums and sounds machines as well as his sampler-sequencer in one take. Then he added the instruments and voices. Sax, bass, sarod, tambourine and vocals accompany loops captured on the streets of Delhi, the mountains of Asia or old acid house vinyls.

Eka Faune is a musical project based in Nantes, France, initiated in 2014 by the artist Guyseika. The project evolves under the influence of guitarists, cellists, singers or dancers who join the band for a concert, a recording, a tour - or more. Over the years, Amélie from Breedz Insane, Steph from Modules Étranges, Budwarrior or Vincent Roy, have taken part in the project. Recorded in 2021, the album Healing of the Nation is a deeply thought-out answer to the crisis we are all going through. It offers a way to heal from it: sounds coming straight out of a feverish cave located between the Himalayas and Detroit bewitch us into quite a trip.

Fabrice Lig has melody running through his veins. On his quest to explore his deep love for the bitter-sweet yearning of Motor City techno, his tracks transcend trends. Over his three-decade spanning career he has refined his blend of soul-infused dance music to striking effect. His gift for a catchy hook is unmatched. His new studio album ''The Mental Bandwidth'' shows his musical range as a producer once again. On the album's twelve tracks, he effortlessly traverses, cosmic house, funkified techno and electronica, combining his trademark quirky melodies with playful songwriting and dance floor focused beats. The album format is giving Lig enough space to explore his musical ideas from different directions while staying true to the overall atmosphere. ''The idea for the album was to go back to the fundamentals of the original Detroit sound and to find new ways of expressing that soul in my music - as I've been doing for years'', explains Lig. With Ann Saunderson and the former Kraftwerk-member Wolfgang Flur, the album features two heavy-weight collaborations that connect the ''The Mental Bandwidth'' to Detroit's musical legacy, too. Slikk Tim aka Garry Grittness also has a cameo in the form of a funky bassline on ''Healing'', the pop-infused Ann Saunderson collaboration. The title of the album is inspired by Lig's lecture of Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir book ''Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much'' which explores new approaches to reduce poverty. ''The authors discovered that the mental bandwidth of poor people is sometimes really low because of short term issues they are facing and are forced to solve'', explains Lig. Those issues are reducing the mental bandwidth for long term thinking capacities, which in turn has consequences for the decision making process. An example: before the quality of education of poor kids is increased, the quality of life they have must be increased. This increases the capacities of the kids to learn more than solely better educational programs.

3CD and booklet in double jewel case. close to NM

close to NM. slight stain on front cover

digipak. tiny wear

digipak close to NM

tiny wear

The journey gives your senses a taste of a future groove, erotica and nu-disco exploitation. With Private Alex is stepping forward musically into a new club direction, bringing a fresh sound to the production with retro drum machines, synthesizers, house piano, and killer funky basslines. Open the door and walk through the secrets of the night with ”Submission”, ”Blue City Club”, ”Dark Room”, ”The Visitor” and the singles ”I Feel You”, ”Attraction” and ”Odyssey 9000”.

Acclaimed saxophonist, producer and composer Yasuaki Shimizu will release Kiren, his unreleased album from 1984, on the Palto Flats record label on February 25, 2022. Liner notes by music historian Chee Shimizu, and credits in both Japanese and English.

By the early 1980s Yasuaki Shimizu had established himself on the Japanese new wave scene, producing many important experimental pop records and releasing several albums as the bandleader of Mariah. Following the release of his widely regarded solo classic Kakashi, from 1982, and the otherworldly Utakata No Hibi, by Mariah in 1983, he went into the studio the following year with frequent collaborators, producer Aki Ikuta and Morio Watanabe (bassist of Mariah), to record a mystifying collection of experimental dance music. Utilizing cutting-edge technology and studio trickery, Kiren showcases Shimizu's trademark playfulness, marrying richly layered production techniques to off-kilter, sometimes traditional sounding rhythms and melodies. Portending his work with the Saxophonettes as well as forecasting trends in techno, new wave, and futuristic rhythmic music, this formerly lost album represents an important period of Shimizu's artistic expression, an artist at his peak, while successfully exploring the intersections of fusion, synthpop, new wave, and jazz.

As Chee Shimizu (no relation) writes in the liner notes, Kiren, and his concurrent release Latin were “born out of a free environment of collaboration that existed between Yasuaki and Aki Ikuta ... (exemplifying) his most energetic works.” In listening to Kiren, we might share with Yasuaki Shimizu the joy and excitement of experimentalism and movement that went into the making of this album, now released for the first time many years later.

Music for Real Airports is a series of exciting live art events and installations in art galleries/spaces that are artistic response to the reality of occupying the semi-public space of an airport, and a contemporary reply to Brian Eno´s work from the 70s. Produced by musicians and artists with an international reputation - the Black Dog and Human - the project will portray airports as they really are, rather than idealised utopian vision of what they should be. Combining performances of electronic music and live-mixed animation and digital video projected on multiple screens, Music for Release Airports will be a unique, immersive experience that will draw in new audiences to art galleries.