Sub Rosa Electronic & Dance 17 Items

Dark-folk songwriter Chantal Acda and beyond drums-percussion musician extraordinaire Eric Thielemans propose a new score for »Koyaanisqatsi«, re-actualising the incredibly beautiful, raw, rhythmic and touching images of this 80-ties cinematographic masterpiece. Slow deep electric waves, lonely synths in sonic desert landscapes, rhythmic pulses, transporting drums and bells, and deeply longing sounds and voices make up the audible fundamentals of this imagined, neo shamanic, ritualistic music to accompany the Earth as it keeps on supporting our post human frenetics even today.

Cristian Vogel's best techno tracks from the '90s, remastered in 2015. Cristian Vogel is a composer and music producer, knownfor his DJ sets and live performances, studio composition and production (having worked with artists such as Radiohead, Maximo Park, Chicks on Speed, and Thom Yorke). Following a few solo EP's and collaborations with emerging UK techno artists such as Neil Landstrumm and Dave Tarrida, Vogel released his debut full-length, 'Beginning To Understand', in 1994 on Mille Plateaux, and subsequently became the first UK techno artist to be signed to Berlin's Tresor Records.

Sound architect and filmmaker from Liège, Belgium Phil Maggi is known as the lead singer of heavy-rock combo Ultraphallus. He has shared the bill with Jerusalem In My Heart, Keith Rowe, Phill Niblock, Tuxedomoon, Sote, Thisquietarmy, and many others. The Encrimsoned is the second part of his diptych inspired by Henry Corbin's writings, which started with his previous album Animalwrath. Ranging from free-jazz to ambient-electronic contemporary art sound, this adventurous second and final chapter is an homage to Hardy Fox, pioneer and primary composer for The Residents.

A follow-up to »Electronic Works & Voices 1961-1979«, this release highlights Leo Kupper's earliest compositions with his Game machine - Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generatorof Electronic Music) constructed during the 1960's. Purely electronic sounds into new structures, Leo Kupper shows through his 4 tracks a real spirit of renewal.

Leo Kupper was born in Nidrum, Hautes Fagnes (Eastern Belgium) on the 16th of April 1935. He studied musicology at the Liège Conservatory, then became the assistant of Henri Pousseur who, in 1958, had just founded the Apelac Studio in Brussels. Kupper started to work on his first pieces there, but he would finalize them only upon putting together his own studio in 1967: the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives (which means 'studio of audio electronic research & structuring'). That is where he would compose, to this day, over forty works, most of them on instruments of his own design. In the '70s and '80s, he built a series of Sound Domes (briefly established in Rome, Linz, Venice, and Avignon), places where every sound, every phonem uttered by the listening audience was transformed by hundreds of loudspeakers of various sizes organized in a dome shape. This device transformed sounds through space AND time: something said could be morphed into another sound hours, days, perhaps years later. Leo had envisioned that a device like his, a place for contemplation, would be much-needed in cities where Nature had been evacuated. In the late '70s, after discovering Iranian music master Hussein Malek, Kupper became one of the very few Western virtuosos of the santur. His first pieces were released by Deutsche Grammophon and, later, Igloo. His latest works have been released by the New York-based label Pogus.

In 1961, having terminated his musicology studies, Leo Kupper left Liège for Brussels. By that time, centres for music research such as those in Cologne, Paris and Milan had already produced works of experimental music, where pioneers were forging new and diverse routes in electronic music, 'musique concrète' and electro-vocal music. The Game machine - Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generator of Electronic Music) was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical exploration. The Game consisted of a collection of variable 'sonic cells' sensitive to modulations of positive and negative voltages and programmable manually through the aid of colour-coded cables. Complex electronic loops and sound from loudspeakers and from microphone pick-ups were then either recorded by tape-machines or performed and interpreted by musicians who opened automatic channels, thus triggering automatic sound to exit the speakers. This in turn penetrated the machines by means of microphones and was replayed. Here then was an entirely new way of playing a musical instrument and how the works here were composed and performed.

Rarely do two types of music meet on a level where they threaten to cancel each other out - let alone create something even more meaningful in their mutual vanishing. But the music created within the seminal Murder Ballads (Drift) by Martyn Bates (Eyeless in Gaza, & parallel solo career) and Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Lull, Painkiller, Scorn) creates just such a world. Murder Ballads (Drift) evolves Martyn Bates vocalisations / storytelling song-voices, by turns expressed as labyrinthine layers, calls and responses, muted and distant echoes, sung whispers and counter-melodies, ultimately resulting in a mesmeric conversation of musical inferences and correspondences. Murder Ballads (Drift) created the post-isolationist frame of reference, innovating and extemporising into a truly original dazzlingly unique form.

Mick Harris traffics in the isolationist ambience of Lull, while Martyn Bates is the emotive voice of literate cult-pop duo Eyeless in Gaza. The unlikely pair - one given to terminally frigid drone, the other to impassioned, bittersweet voicings - finds common ground in folk music's most macabre tradition, the murder ballad. These ghoulish parables are awash in blood and tears, the strands of love, hate, birth, death, sin, and salvation entwined within like the roots of an ancient tree. Mothers callously kill their children; suitors slay their maidens without remorse; and fate exacts its cruel price from all.

The archaic murder ballads that leak from Bates' vocal cords are intensely sad and carnal. They tend to leap off cliffs of hollow effects or drone darkly, offering neither a robust delivery nor an element of irony to take the edge off. The archetypal characters that live and die in them give life's full tragedy back to Harris' electronically numbed "post-isolationist" dreaming.

Drift (originally released in 1994) plays out an unbreakable and timeless cycle of bloody folklore (people) and hypnotic soundscapes (the god who watches). The effect is chilling yet engrossing. Where most ambient music has barely enough courage to ring the doorbell and run, Murder Ballads slips through the cracks of the unconscious and does its work with remarkable ease.

On »Elephantine«, Cairo-based Maurice Louca guides a 12-piece ensemble through a 38-minute work that might best be described as panoramic. Elements of free improvisation, Sun Ra's cosmic jazz, gorgeous Arabic melody, trancelike African and Yemeni music and minimalism meet in his wholly unique compositional vision. Louca also makes vital contributions on guitar and piano, and inspires stirring performances from a global lineup.

It's an all electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic-synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic and vivid in nature.

Reinhold Weber, born in 1927, was known as a pioneer of electronic music. In his compositions, Weber placed a focus on twelve-tone music, he became increasingly fascinated in the field of computer music since the 1970s. He produced numerous works at the Studio for Electronic Music at the University of Karlsruhe.

Reinhold Weber was born in Gießen on July 18, 1927. He studied at Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf (including composition with Jürg Baur, piano with Max Martin Stein) and passed his exam in composition, theory, piano and ear training with distinction. He completed further masterclasses with Wolfgang Fortner, Hermann Heiss, Oliver Messiaen (composition), Kurt Thomas (choral conducting), Andor Foldes (piano) and Gerhard Nestler (electronic music). Reinhold Weber was a professor at the Baden Conservatory of Music in Karlsruhe and also worked in the Studio for Electronic Music of the University of Karlsruhe. His works have been performed in numerous concerts and were broadcasted by SDR, WDR, NDR, HR, SWF and Radio Bremen. Reinhold Weber died March 25, 2013.

Actor Kurt Müller-Graf was born in 1913. After visiting the Theater Academy of Baden in Karlsruhe, he appeared on stage at National Theaters of Karlsruhe, Kassel and Munich since 1935. During World War II he performed in about 10 feature films by Bavaria Film Munich. After 1945 he played at National Theaters in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and at Theaters in Nuremberg, Cologne, Munich, Mannheim, Baden-Baden and Burgtheater Vienna. Furthermore he had guest performances in Zurich, Basel, Salzburg and Heidelberg. Kurt Müller-Graf was touring and had broadcasts on radio and television shows at home and abroad. Kurt Müller-Graf died August 10, 2013.

Sub Rosa presents in their Early Electronic series, the final chapter of music by Beglian key composer of early electronic experiments, André Stordeur (1941-2020). Side A features a previously unreleased, stark and poignant composition from 1979; while the B side is vibrant and almost playful of pieces from the 2000s.

The April Sessions immerges the listener into a drone-ish universe, full of random acousmatic events, inner monologues and a vast and unwritten subjective map to be drawn.

For many, the first traces of the Raudive Tapes were in William Burroughs fictions and articles. The fact is, these mysterious magnetic tapes, which capture the voices of the dead, and were recorded by the baltic scientist Konstantin Raudive, are not a fiction but a reality (we are not here to judge their scientific objectivity ). These tapes, as rare as Lovecraft's Necronomicon, are now in our archives.

This is the third album of Book Of Air, a series created by the granvat platform and curated by the composers and brothers Stijn and Bert Cools. This time the 3 interwoven bass lines give the deep drive and foundation of the sound, completed with a layer of acoustic instruments and sparkling chords on top. "Se (In) De Bos" is inspired by the fluctuation objectivity of our daily observations. The album is one continuous 60 minute piece. Presented as one track on the cd, and in two parts on the vinyl version.

With »Discreet Music« (1975), »Music for Airports« (1978) and »Thursday Afternoon« (1985), Brian Eno invented a new music genre, Ambient Music, which he defined as »able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting«. These versions performed and arranged by Dedalus Ensemble, according to the musicians and the critics who listened to it, goes beyond what we expect from it. A mental base that takes us far away. One of the only music without beginning or end in which we want to stay as long as possible.