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“Shotns - Shadows: Songs from Testimonies, Volume 3” - is the latest addition (2024) to the Fortunoff Video Archive’s Songs from Testimonies project., brought by the Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble featuring Sasha Lurje. The project brings to life painful memories of surviving the genocide, and memory of those who did not make it, but first and foremost these are the stories of these people’s lives. Volume 3 stays as linguistically and musically diverse as the previous two albums. Songs in Greek, Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Czech; music from concentration camps and ghettos of Vilna, Warsaw, and Lodz; music of cabaret and theatre from across the globe— adapted to tell the stories of suffering and betrayal, hope and loss.

200g

The Discomfort Of Evening is the incredible and original soundtrack by prolific Belgian composer Michiel de Malsche to 2020 International Booker Prize winner The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Visceral and virtuosic, Rijneveld's novel follows Jas, a girl growing up in a devout Christian family that runs a Dutch dairy farm, whose brother dies in an accident after she wishes he would die instead of her rabbit. Lost in grief, her family falls apart as she becomes consumed by increasingly dangerous fantasies.

Michiel de Malsche has captured the atmosphere and spirit of Rijneveld's book perfectly, moving through moments of confrontation and introspection, sinking into spirals of despair, stasis and subtle hope and change. Brooding ambient basslines, driven by droning murmurs, are offset with melismatic electro-acoustic pieces that embody the novel's haunting and dissonant world, whilst also incorporating manipulated field recordings such as animal sounds and a church service, allowing for a full manifestation of Jas’s world in a completely new way.

De Malsche achieves this by rallying an unusual combination of acoustic instruments (16 in total) played by top-of-their-field musicians, creating a truly unique sound world and tonal palette, including an Ondes Martenot, a 7-stringed Chinese instrument called a guqin, a marimba, a string 6-tet, a toy piano and a bass flute.

De Malsche always confronts all emotional levels of his source material head-on, making his soundtrack into much more than just a fever dream. It is a precise description of, and accompaniment to, a devastatingly impactful book.

Michiel De Malsche is a Belgian composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound designer. He studied classical composition at the conservatories of Rotterdam and Ghent. His music has been performed all over the world and he has composed and produced dozens of soundtracks for contemporary dance, theatre, movies and documentaries.
Besides his work as a contemporary classical composer, he is active as a studio musician and producer in the world of electronic music.

Vinyl with a couple of light scuffs. Copy n° 220

Home is a powerful concept with an abstract definition. This solo album takes those subjective ideas and unifies them under one roof. Evolving from Jerve’s #dailypiano posts in 2019, ‘The Soundtrack of My Home’ relays thoughts and improvisations that trace his journey from childhood home to adult and now, father. Nurturing a mood or feeling, each song begets a sonorous story of someone close to him, expressed through the language of piano playing.

Jerve makes use of his hands as a human step sequencer, often programming two or more motifs of varying lengths in a polymetric fashion. These melodic patterns and arpeggios evolve at varying rates but grow around clear progressions with standard 8-bar forms.

The first track - ‘Kjetil’ enters with an earnest, gentle and endearing character - like a young river near its source. As with such a river, it will grow to varied sizes throughout the album but must begin as a humble expression from the source. The following titles sketch his interpretations of the people that have made up his home.

There is a theme across the album that unites the songs, so much so that differentiating tracks can at times be difficult. Though, Jerve punctuates this overarching mood with a few distinct structures, as found in tracks ‘Karoline’ (wife), ‘Espen’ (brother) and ‘Sven’ (father). ‘Turid’ (daughter) and ‘Jon Eirik’ (brother) seem less directive and welcome more intrigue, reminiscent of a curious child wandering through the dappled light of a forest.

‘Iben’ (daughter) and ‘Eivor’ (daughter) have a hypnotic, three-pointed melodic structure that leaves the listener suspended; transfixed - while ‘Sussi’ (cat) carries unique momentum and suitably feline autonomy. ‘Mette’ (mother) has a mood of ascending, like that of a child's upward gaze at their maternal carer. Utterly nuanced in structure, Jerve leaves ample space for subjective interpretation and allows the listener to weave their own life into the tones.

As expected from the founder of Dugnad rec - this album signifies a deeply personal sentiment. Sometimes we are forced to confront the music and other times, we are left to wonder. Here, we find a balance and unity that allows little thoughts and worries to drift away, bringing us warmly to rest in the present. The LP edition's bonus track features producer/performer extraordinaire Stian Balducci, drawing a line to the next chapter of piano-based music from Dugnad rec: Tokyo Tapes: Piano Recycle.

Still shrink wrapped but opened.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case.
All booklets included.

"Absence of the loved one is a theme running through both films, but during the creative process we never discuss with the Havels the themes, symptoms or attributes of the characters. We do not specify any meanings. Our collaboration is intuitive, based on interconnectedness. We neither explain things to each other nor analyse. From the outset we have a common goal: to quieten the viewers’ perception, to attune them to certain vibrations by visual, musical and acoustic repetitions, thus enabling them to focus on every tiny detail, every subtle aesthetic quality, so that by the end of the film they have a sense of reconciliation. In fact it is a state similar to meditation or prayer. The aim is being shown Mercy. Each time, the linking of the filmed images with Irena and Vojtech’s music has uncovered a new quality that we have named: a commentary on eternity. Characters cease to be determined by their senses, psychological motivations, or the times they live in. They find liberation in the stream of eternal time." /Václav Kadrnka

"We would like to thank all our friends, sound engineers and musicians. The main thanks go to director Václav Kadrnka, his family and all his collaborators for the precious opportunity to assist them in creating both films. We have worked on our music for the film Saving One Who Was Dead for three years. We met with Václav, discussed the screenplay while it was being born and many other things. We have gradually prepared several working versions that included compositions for piano, Indonesian gamelan, gongs, Tibetan bowls, bells and mini-bells. Yet, step by step, we made it simpler and simpler and eventually only kept violas da gamba, organ and chanting. Everything else was redundant. We made most of the recordings of the compositions for viola da gamba in a church in Prague. The composition for organ was recorded in Milan where we performed a concert shortly before the pandemic arrived in December 2019. We tried to record it in various churches in Bohemia but it was not until the church in Milan that we found the best sounding organ.

As for Little Crusader, we recorded the music for the film after it was completed. We had several versions and used the piano version for this album. Together with Václav, we searched for instruments that would work the best for this Medieval story. Eventually, we opted for harmonium with simple chanting which accompanies the character little boy Jenik. Violas da gamba intertwine, move close and then apart from each other the same way as paths of little boy Jenik and his father who is searching for him. Simple chanting and Tibetan bowl accompany scenes with little boy Jenik’s mother who awaits them at home. Trombone and saxophone are like metal swords and the knights’ armor. Violoncello and viola da gamba walk in the rhythm of horse’s hooves, in the rhythm of heartbeat of both the horse and his rider – a father searching for his lost son." / Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi

Hogan’s involvement with new wave, new romanticism, post punk and all-things-avant makes her a uniquely placed character through the last four decades on the scene - her recording/performing biography intersects with everyone from Soft Cell, The The and The Human League through to Simon Fisher Turner, Barry Adamson, The Style Council and more recently with Karl O’Connor aka Regis’ Downwards universe. For ‘Without the Moon’ (a title borrowed from Cathi Unsworth’s book of the same name), Hogan pulls out some of the most satisfying collaborations from her archive, featuring a couple of tracks originally released in 1985 on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, as well as recordings that are here issued for the very first time. It’s properly all-over-the-place brilliance, ranging from Nick Cave’s incredible 1983 piano blues slo-mo grind ‘Vixo’ all the way thru to the Paul Kendall (Nitzer Ebb/Depeche Mode) engineered ‘Come Take My Hand’ produced and featuring Barry Adamson and sounding like some vintage Les Disques du Crépuscule poolside obscurity. Opening with ideas mapped out while staying at Lydia Lunch’s gaff in summer ’83, the record lassos 30 years of Hogan’s personal highlights, harking to a time circa 1984 when she regularly caught The Birthday Party playing Leeds or London, often crossing paths with Cave, and right thru to 1989’s ‘Come Take My Hand’. While ‘Delirious Eyes’ is a gorgeous slow dervish of swaying middle eastern scales featuring Gini Ball’s elusive smoke trail vocals, it’s best heard in context of the sequencing, which soon erupts with Marc Almond’s vocals on the arsonist thrill of ‘Burning Boats’ and JG Thirlwell’s signature clangour, while ’Scattered Carelessly’ was written in 2008 and gives the sweetest canvas for Hogan’s keys complemented by a whispering Jarboe ov Swans, and ‘Black Nocturne’ stars a perfectly tempered guitar shimmer by Kid Congo Powers, a longtime accomplice, whom Hogan first heard playing guitar on The Cramps’ records that she played in DJ sets at the time. Illuminated by Hogan’s favoured solo piano, ranging from flickering candlelight to hammering theatrics, and even including a rare appearance of her vocals on the could-have-been-a-popsong closer, the six songs on ‘Without The Moon’ speak to an incredibly rich artistic life spent immured at the core of her practice. Song to song, she outlines an extraordinary oeuvre that ties together and leaps between eras, drawing on decades of experience as a performer, composer, collaborator and ardent listener to portray a full spectra of styles she’s been involved in shaping for decades. Stunning.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

Black vinyl with blue haze!

In November 1985, Bérurier Noir and his band of agitated*e*s returned to the studio, in the middle of a social strike. The surprise strikes that plunged the country into a "Joyeux Merdier" were the ideal setting for this new Christmas prank and tinged with rage but also with fun, 4 new tracks and not the least. It is THE record that contains "Salut à toi" and opens the door to the first radio broadcasts of the group, before becoming the eternal anthem of a youth always in solidarity with the peoples of the world zone.