Search "The Closest Thing to Silence" 128 Items

Highly original material on a very limited EP... be quick!

Polyphonic Waves OF Soulful Madrigals

The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous energy to crystal clear focus.

A longtime staple of the local electronic music scene with his hypnotic techno outings as YZ, Zarhoni’s latest focus is on the compositional power of pure harmony and silence: namely, his polyphonic renditions of medieval mystical poetry, sung in multiple voices and left to solemnly radiate beyond their given spatial grounds. Stripped of all instrumental accompaniments, what you get is Gregorian chant meets Boyz 2 Men, articulated by the lyrical ineffability of Arabic tongues and finding their rhythm in the silences that act as the juncture between observation and anticipation.

These sparse stanzas tread under an elusive referential threshold, conjuring visions of architecture and archaism, madrigals and MTV, the sacred and the profane ~ ostensibly disparate elements that seamlessly fold themselves into the radicality of the compositions. In these 20 minutes of verse, Zarhoni oversteps the margins of categorization to deliver an immersive story of song, flowing freely and sustaining the arc of the narrative long after it has ebbed into silence.

Vinyl with scuffs and hairlines. Cover with long open seam split on top spine

Cover with a dented corner and a beginning seam split at the upper edge.

Have you heard of the Nurse With Wound List? If you are a fan of creative-experimental-unlikely music, certainly. You would therefore be aware that amongst the recommendations that Steven Stapleton slipped into the first album of his group Nurse With Wound, were to be found a few restless frogs: Jef Gilson, Luc Ferrari, Jacques Thollot, Urban Sax, Horde Catalytique and last but not least Jean-Jacques Birgé and Francis Gorgé. Stapleton admired their album Défense de. The two Frenchmen just had to conceive of a fabulous precursor to the channel tunnel (check out the inside of the record, you’ll see) to enable Stapleton to come to France in 1980. The Englishman was looking for contributions to a compilation to be released on his United Dairies label that he had created with John Fothergill, and he naturally called on Birgé and Gorgé, who were then playing with Bernard Vitet in ‘Un drame musical instantané’.

It was a done deal and the compilation would be named In Fractured Silence. Alongside Nurse With Wound and Un drame musical instantané, could be heard Hélène Sage (whom Birgé introduced to Stapleton) and Sema, a project from the experimental British musician Robert Haigh who had participated in key records in the Nurse With Wound discography, such as Homotopy to Marie and Spiral Insana.

The curtain is raised and it is Un drame musical instantané who start the ball rolling. Mystery abounds; synthesisers lurk, percussion clatters and the sounds (creaks, whistles, vocal insertions...) fire in all directions. For the piano, it’s a debacle, the Drame won, Hélène Sage can take over. Heading up a quintette including Gorgé and Vitet, she creates a cushioned chamber music with strings and many silences.

On the B side, it’s the other side of the channel. Sema’s piano first off, which dares everything, even melody, before spilling out its darkest ideas in a raucous requiem. Finally, Stapleton appears, delving into his collection of female voices to devote himself to an iconoclastic transformation and concoct a song which collapses under the assault like Marianne at Agincourt. After having listened to In Fractured Silence, you will simply have to choose sides.

Have you heard of the Nurse With Wound List? If you are a fan of creative-experimental-unlikely music, certainly. You would therefore be aware that amongst the recommendations that Steven Stapleton slipped into the first album of his group Nurse With Wound, were to be found a few restless frogs: Jef Gilson, Luc Ferrari, Jacques Thollot, Urban Sax, Horde Catalytique and last but not least Jean-Jacques Birgé and Francis Gorgé. Stapleton admired their album Défense de. The two Frenchmen just had to conceive of a fabulous precursor to the channel tunnel (check out the inside of the record, you’ll see) to enable Stapleton to come to France in 1980. The Englishman was looking for contributions to a compilation to be released on his United Dairies label that he had created with John Fothergill, and he naturally called on Birgé and Gorgé, who were then playing with Bernard Vitet in ‘Un drame musical instantané’.

It was a done deal and the compilation would be named In Fractured Silence. Alongside Nurse With Wound and Un drame musical instantané, could be heard Hélène Sage (whom Birgé introduced to Stapleton) and Sema, a project from the experimental British musician Robert Haigh who had participated in key records in the Nurse With Wound discography, such as Homotopy to Marie and Spiral Insana.

The curtain is raised and it is Un drame musical instantané who start the ball rolling. Mystery abounds; synthesisers lurk, percussion clatters and the sounds (creaks, whistles, vocal insertions...) fire in all directions. For the piano, it’s a debacle, the Drame won, Hélène Sage can take over. Heading up a quintette including Gorgé and Vitet, she creates a cushioned chamber music with strings and many silences.

On the B side, it’s the other side of the channel. Sema’s piano first off, which dares everything, even melody, before spilling out its darkest ideas in a raucous requiem. Finally, Stapleton appears, delving into his collection of female voices to devote himself to an iconoclastic transformation and concoct a song which collapses under the assault like Marianne at Agincourt. After having listened to In Fractured Silence, you will simply have to choose sides.

Original UK Library LP!

Matthew Herbert releases a new big band album - The State Between Us. The double album is released on the day the U.K. is scheduled to leave the European Union. Made in collaboration with over a thousand musicians and singers from across the EU, The State Between Us began as a project responding to the triggering of Article 50 and the dramatic shift in the national story that began in June 2016. Over the course of the next two years - against the backdrop of a relentlessly challenging news cycle and via large-scale recording sessions abroad - something unexpected emerged.

The State Between Us is an album that contemplates what it means to be British in 2019. Its sixteen tracks reflect a journey on foot across Great Britain (and beyond) imagined in beautifully elegiac melodies carefully woven with site-specific recordings. World War II planes in flight rub against a Ford Fiesta being broken down into its component parts; the loneliness of a cross-channel swimmer follows a single cyclist riding around Chequers. Here, the evocative sounds of empty harbours, and factories being demolished, of ancient trees and the calls of soon to be extinct animals ebb and flow through music that poses one hugely significant question - Where’s Home? - and leaves the listener with one resoundingly hopeful answer: You’re Welcome Here.

Whilst the record is a giant collaboration, there are a number of notable special guests including singers Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne, Arto Lindsay, Merz, Patrick Clarke and highly respected solo instrumentalists Enrico Rava, Byron Wallen, Sheila Maurice Gray and Nathaniel Cross. Lyrics include words by Britain’s greatest living playwright Caryl Churchill, Percy Shelley, John Donne and various abusive members of the public and the secretary general of UKIP. Artwork by longtime collaborator Sarah Hopper for The State Between Us is based on an image taken by renowned photographer Eva Vermandel.

Copy close to VG+

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

Japanese pressing with Obi.

2012 reissue. Still sealed with hype sticker.

Sealed copy.
Cover corners slightly dented.

Vinyl is slightly warped, seems unplayed. Limited edition. with booklet. nimbered Limited edition

Vinyls were pressed on audiophile 180 gram vinyl by Schallplattenfabrik Pallas in Germany

Boxset contains: • full-colored soft-touch laminated thick boxset • 3x 180 gram green bottle clear vinyl individually housed in 350 gram soft-touch laminated and shrinkwrapped LP covers with 3 mm spine • download coupon with a code to download Flac version of the albums

The collection Politique du silence contains the recordings of Des plumes dans la tête (2004), Un autre Décembre (2003) and Nocturne impalpable (2001) on coloured 180 gram vinyls. The cover features artwork by French photographer Valéry Lorenzo.

"When I discovered the simple and powerful black and white pictures by Valéry Lorenzo, in the 90s, I immediately fell in love with them. We became good friends and since then I ask him to let me use one of his photos for most of my album covers, or to make my portrait for press shots. It has become a real collaboration, music and images, for more than 25 years. It was then logical to ask him again for the cover of this box set, like a gentle reflection on my piano and strings era. It's a true honour for me to see my early music recollected, repackaged, remastered after all this time. Which gives me hope that this music, in which I've put all my soul and heart during the years 2001 to 2003, is maybe not forgotten yet." ― Sylvain Chauveau

Nocturne Impalpable is a world of minimalism, abstraction, and contemporary rendition of classical music with variations for the piano, clarinet, strings, and accordion which are often compared to the compositions of composers Harold Budd and Claude Debussy. Here, Chauveau partially reveals his versatility as a composer by connecting electronic elements, noises, and ambient planes with monumental strings and piano preludes.

The album of piano variations Un autre Décembre is interspersed with field recordings and electronic noises. The inspiration for the recording of the album and for its name was the song Jaurès by the Belgian singer and composer Jacques Brel. This song tells the story of the grandparent’s generation who toiled in the mines.

An album of 20 short instrumental sketches with several delicate intermezzos for the piano, string quartet, and the clarinet, Des plumes dans la tête, was composed for the eponymous film by director Thomas de Thier.

Sylvain Chauveau was born in 1971 in the French town of Bayonne and currently lives in Barcelona. His extensive discography of mainly meditative neo-classical recordings for the music labels FatCat, Sub Rosa, Sonic Pieces, and Flau is enriched by several collaborations and his participation in the Ensemble 0, Arca, and On projects. Chauveau has also composed many film soundtracks as well as music for the theatre. He has presented his works in Prague several times, most recently in the spring of 2024 at the Spectaculare festival.

Limited White Teal & Beige Vinyl.Spencer Zahn's second record for Cascine emerged from a series of piano sketches born of daily improvisations in Kingston, New York, where he relocated during the pandemic after 14 years in the buzz of Brooklyn. Inspired by the space and pace of upstate life, he explored a more restrained, resonant mode of playing, letting chords delay all the way to silence, until the seeds of songs took shape. Zahn accompanied himself on upright bass, finessing each piece without cluttering it, focusing on the notion of "the instrument in a room.Recruiting long-time collaborator Andy Highmore for piano duties, the duo booked time at Figure 8 Recording in Prospect Heights to craft the lulling, lyrical 12-track suite of Pale Horizon. The tonality of the instruments was central to Zahn's vision, fusing them to feel like a single entity, with upright bass blending in an elegant gradient with the low strings on the piano. An air of Keith Jarrett and Ryuichi Sakamoto hangs over the collection, acoustic and unhurried, stately but subdued, ruminative daydream melodies heard on the breeze in a quiet garden.

what an interesting time to be alive full of hardship and love

let’s take it easy on ourselves but let us not forget to solidify our spirits with earthly challenges in the name of a better future here’s a vinyl edition of an album i recorded in 2021 with a few extras that have been added quite recently for the sake of making it into a full LP (thanks to the initiative of Hhr) i have recorded the whole thing at my home studio with an upright piano, two of my favorite polyphonic analog synths - korg polysix and roland juno 60, and a greco stratocaster, that i have bought accidentally because i understand nothing about guitars. the main material for this album was composed around 2017, when entering my mid-twenties and trying to overcome the disenchantments of some crucial personal realms of human life.

as for the later added instrumentals (1,4,9,10) i have kept the sonic consistency intact but with way more hopeful spirits during the process. despite this ambivalent intervention from the future, this work feels even more complete to me now.

have a nice trip.

and let every lacking soul on this planet find peace and love within the nearest time attainable. let us all make an effort.

settima tacca

Clear wax! Cover close to NM

Clear vinyl!

Santaka is truly the sound of a culture. The name means “confluence” in Lithuanian, and the project has been exactly that from the moment DJ/producer Manfredas and drummer/producer Marijus Aleksa resolved to work together in the early days of 2020.

Not only does it bring together the talents that Manfredas and Marijus have individually honed over their own illustrious international careers in the club underground and young jazz worlds – but their recordings have drawn on talents from across styles and generations within Lithuania, creating a fusion of experimental sounds that represents the living nation. The highest common factors of post rock, jazz, dancefloor and abstract electronics, classical and more all flow together. Now, they are deepening this further, by reworking recordings by composer Rytis Mažulis and the avant-garde choir Melos Collective.

Strictly limited edition of THE Silva Sessions (cd) and THE M. Session (Vinyl-Only) by Rico Puestel coming in natural cotton tote bags with an exclusive artwork fusion print.

The vinyl-only THE M. Session EP by Rico Puestel marks the epilogue to his simultaneously released full-length piano album THE Silva SessionS.

With the recordings being apart seven months, Rico Puestel didn't touch any instrument in the meantime while coming back to it several months after a physical assault (leading to an almost lost hearing on one ear) to completely improvise THE M. Session recordings. Those are based on the things that were happening inbetween.

While not being able to produce any new music back then, playing the instrument was the only opportunity for him to start recovering...

Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons in a fine process of analog loops, prepared tapes of strings and piano, time and pitch shifts, filtering with Synthi Ems and Teac 3340 4-track recorder. On this seemingly cold palette, De Leo deploys his own personal Mediterranean fingerpicking, with vocal timbres peculiar to the music of the South of Italy, but no longer circumscribed to the origins of his Pugliese regionalism, as much as to an expressive range seasoned also with irony and avant-garde.The sound writing harmonizes with the evocative cover, in which emerges a warmest human note of "technological peasant”.

Toronto keyboardist R. Grunwald has played on sessions for hundreds of musicians, and has served as bandleader for jazz/pop chanteuse Jill Barber and country/folk songwriter Donovan Woods for the better part of a decade. Now he's ready to step onto the public stage with his own music'alone. Oma is an evocative and deeply personal solo piano record, inspired in part by the life story of his 96-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and pianist. Drawing from Erik Satie, Nils Frahm and others, Grunwald refers to his intensely melodic compositions as 'extended minimalism.'

'After quitting piano, it was my Oma who inspired me to get back into it. She survived the 2nd world war moving from town to town, hiding from the Nazis, and the Russians in Poland. Music was the one thing that tied her young life together. This music is a tribute to her.'

Enjoy in a quiet environment.

Japanese pressing, no Obi.

All These Years is Phil Cook's first fully instrumental piano release. A prolific songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, solo artist, and in-demand musician whose collaborations have run the gamut of genre - as a founding member of beloved band Megafaun to work with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Kanye West, and Hiss Golden Messenger, to name a few - here, Cook returns to his primary instrument, the piano, back where it all began.All These Years was recorded at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, NC by his cousin and collaborator Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Indigo Girls), on a long-cared-for and much-loved one-hundred year-old Steinway piano. All These Years is near hymn-like, a collection of prayers or meditations, improvisations threaded together by feeling, by the things that matter most. When Cook began these songs, he was in the headspace of meditating on the people in his support network, and those closest to him. Through composing the music, he began to reflect on specific and important presences in his life, and ends up capturing their essence via keys here. He distills decades of friendship, brotherhood, family, love, learning, and loss into flickering piano portraits - impressionistic and fluid and reverent. It's not so much looking backwards as it is just looking around, reflections on all that is human and divine and present, and the roads we've taken to get us there.

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.

Small writing on back cover.

Black vinyl with blue haze!