Archive for ‘music’

July 4, 2018

presenting Eidolons – a survey of adventurous electronic music

Eidolons: A Survey of Contemporary Electronic Music

Steve Mueske set out to produce a compilation that reveals some of the complexity, scope, and variety of current electronic music. Spectropol is happy collaborate with him on the release of Eidolons, an album that celebrates non-mainstream music and brings together artists from a variety of places and scenes. The album also includes some longer works, which are often overlooked on compilations.

In organizing the playlist Mueske also wanted pieces that might “converse with each other in a fortuitous way – an excerpt of a larger conversation that extends beyond the boundaries of a “mere” collection. Along those lines Pierre-Luc Senécal’s breathless acousmatic “Urban Gardens” rubs elbows with Busevin’s sound art piece “Three Chants for Computer” and Shane Byrnes’s meticulous deconstruction of a cello performance in “Machinato for Strings.” There are several microtonal pieces by Christopher Bailey, Paul Cousin, and Carlo Serafini, detailed dark ambient work by Fastus, Antonio D’Amato and Bálint Baráth, beautiful and disturbing sound collages, several sonic experiments, and a sublime classical piece by Paul Marquardt.” 

FREE download at Bandcamp.

June 30, 2018

George Christian: Aos Pássaros Outonais available

We’re thrilled to release a collection of 25 mostly-solo guitar tracks (in three parts) from Spectropol veteran George Christian (Brazil).

Aos Pássaros Outonais (To the Autumn Birds) is an intimate exploration of imaginative ideas on Christian’s main instrument, a highly personal and very enjoyable journey through various tunings, techniques, and emotions.

Stream or purchase a $7 download on Bandcamp.back

June 21, 2018

solstice 2: Earth Stepper

The long awaited Earth Stepper debut is finally available on Spectropol.

Dan Stearns has been posting chunks from this collaborative project with Andrew Heathwaite for a few years, but finally the first full-length album is ready for presentation as a whole, with more collections of tracks coming later in the year.

Stream it and download it (for $5) at Bandcamp:

Earth Stepper is a collaborative project by Dan Stearns (instruments) and Andrew Heathwaite (vocals and text), with a handful of contributions from friends, mixed by Stearns into a microtonal and often noisy multidimensional stew. This album, Passport to Magonia, defies easy description. It beguiles, it challenges, and it gets into the back of your brain and under your skin. As with other music by Stearns (see Golden Town, SpecT 03), there is a conviction behind it that betrays an underlying logic, a subliminal flow, despite the chaotic layered surfaces; a sound-art tethered beautifully to Heathwaite’s words and melodies. Step into this trip.

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December 13, 2017

Lanes is out.

Years in the making, Bruce Hamilton’s Lanes is finally available.

This album collects new recordings of works composed between 2013 and 2015, as well as a live recording from 1996. The music covers much ground, by turns pulse-driven, ambient, microtonal, polyrhythmic, lyrical, and texture-based.
Stream it or purchase on Bandcamp ($7 DL, $12 CD).

munk punq tezilo (2014) for clarinet, sax, accordion, piano and percussion [Ensemble Kompulz]

Attractors (2013) for vibraphone, piano, and recorded sounds
[Iktus Piano & Percussion Duo]

Still Life (1994) for solo clarinet
[Tasha Warren]

osbatt (2015) [processed keyboard improvisation; Bruce Hamilton]

Four Pieces (2015) for flute, bassoon, violin, double bass, and electric piano [Bellingham Chamber Music Society]

released December 14, 2017

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July 21, 2017

Frets Of Yore released!

It’s out. Thanks to everyone who waited so patiently! Pick up a copy (digital, CD-R + digital, or special expanded CD-Rx2 + digital) at our Bandcamp site.

More about this ambitious project here.

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July 6, 2017

Frets Of Yore pre-order!

The Frets Of Yore compilation is finally ready for release on July 21 and the Bandcamp site is open for pre-orders!

Read more about the project here.

The expanded handmade versions will ship in early August.

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March 21, 2017

Frets of Yore out soon!

Spectropol is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Frets of Yore: A collection of guitART Pieces for the Immediate Past.

This compilation features musical responses to 26 graphic art works, each interpreted or reacted to twice, resulting in 52 guitar-based tracks spanning a wide range of styles. The graphic submissions included paintings, drawings, collage, digital manipulation, photography, and even a paper-cutting. Quirky acoustic compositions, European free improvisation, textural soundscapes, minimalism, noise, avant/RIO rock, Canterbury music and songs are among the approaches from the musicians, who include several major figures of the guitar world.

Spectropol will release Frets of Yore in late spring 2017 as a limited edition CDR and digital download. Spectropol and Guerrilla Graphics will also release a very limited edition with handmade cover, art print, and bonus disc.

Frets of Yore, the musicians: Luciano Margorani, Shawn Persinger, Amy Denio, Henry Kaiser, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Ron Anderson, Dave Newhouse, Wadi Gysi, Kalahari Surfers (Warrick Sony), Elliot Knapp, Mike Cooper, Nick Didkovsky, Billy Swann, Bun Itakura, Dereck Higgins, RenÈ Lussier, Jerry King, Karl Blake, Chris Cochrane, John Jasnoch, Frank Pahl, NoÎl AkchotÈ, Brian Woodbury, Miroslav Wanek (Uz Jsme Doma), Jeremy Jacobsen (The Lonesome Organist), Leandro KalÈn, Shankara Andy Bole, Carla Diratz, Bret Harold Hart, Janet Feder, Marc Edwards, Ian Brighton, Mark Stanley, Mark Hewins, John Russell, Anthony Donovan, Dennis Gonzalez, The Songraiders (Dustin Villarino Frias/Irvin Jose Villarino Frias), Raul Valverde, Intage Taluure (Jean-Marie Mievis/Kim DuChateau), Tomoaki Soma, Dario D’Alessandro (aka Doriano Budella), Paul Morris, Michel Kristof, AndrÈ Duchesne, Chris Bywater, Nick Prol, Inesa Navarro, Dan Stearns and project founder Gonzalo Fuentes.

Frets of Yore, the visual artists: Danielle Dax, Cal Schenkel, Matt Howarth, Jad Fair, Little Annie Anxiety, Joey Mars, Kinki Texas, Nick Prol, Garry Gilchrist, Heike Liss, Frederi Lipczinsky, Ria Lenaerts, Iris Terdjman, Carla Diratz, Bret Harold Hart, Paul Morris, Noel Akchote, Chris Bywater, Celine Ka, Dam Ja’Rock, Ayako Kanda, Mark Stanley, Dennis Gonzalez, Dan Stearns, Bernard Khoo and Gonzalo Fuentes.

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February 11, 2016

Resolute review roundup

The first batch of reviews for Marco Oppedisano’s excellent Spectropol EP are in. Check ’em out!

Avant Music News

The Stash Dauber

Touching Extremes

 

 also this:

A VERITAS VAMPIRUS CD REVIEW:

MARCO OPPEDISANO – Resolute (EP-CD)

Marco Oppedisano’s a highly imagistically abstract experimental guitarist-composer-noiseur (include piano, voice, and percussion in that, too) in Brooklyn, New York, and Resolute is his latest release after a much too long quietus, his last effort having emerged in 2010. This new affair arrived quite fortuitously to my attention, as I’d at the moment been listening to Escapade’s duetoafaultypremonition, a satisfyingly experimental noisy affair as well, though definitely zoned-hippie as compared to Marco’s neoclassicalism. His 5-track 21+-minute EP demonstrates the marked contrast in myriad differences between a single highly disciplined musician and a very cool mess of on-the-fly players like Escapade, a sextet.

Marco’s work has long been mindful me of an unusual conflation of any number of past influences: Morton Subotnick (who teaches or taught at the same school as Oppedisano), Morphogenesis, Faust, Cluster, PBK, and a collage of others…but also of an obscure 80s cat, John Wiggins, an HBO sound engineer who released a series of extremely three-dimensional, sonically pristine, found-sound/noise/avant-garde issuances. Oppedisano’s masterful control of his recordings immediately harkens back to Wiggins’ equally painstaking documentations, as do the highly variant sounds residing in a spacey quadrant nonetheless redolent with terrene landscapes.

Should you not be quite as zoned as me and other prognacious bastards, be neither esotericized nor daunted by citations of past-master sonic surrealists because there are elements of Fripp & Eno’s groundbreaking duet work present as well, the opening cut, “Breathe”, a kind of cross between later King Crimson and No Pussyfooting, with a good deal of avant-prog continuing as the quintet of songs progresses. A couple decades ago, I coined the term ‘incidentalist’ to embrace this ilk of work, as everything here is episodic amid individual elements of short duration, yet holds together magically, far more so than the term might suggest.

This is not easy art to produce as its qualities are the most esoteric in all sound production, rooting ultimately in John Cage and the 60s Nonesuch electronicist pioneers, not to mention the remarkable ONCE Festivals, and that’s precisely why I cover it: because, goddammit!, there’s nowhere near enough material on this level being produced, and there should be far FAR more. Evolution depends on it!…or at least the hedonistic satieties of sonic omnivores like myself and hopefully you.

Man cannot live by Butch Morris alone.

-Mark S. Tucker

——

best of ’15 list: Perfect Sound Forever

best of ’15 list: AMN

top album of 2015, Randy Branch:

1) Marco Oppedisano – Resolute
A composer that has laid out a huge canvas, then proceeded to weave a sonic landscape that changes its terrain at every twist and turn. Multiple listens are required to truly get a sense of what has been accomplished here.
For me this release represented someone who truly threw caution to the wind and took a chance at reaching forward with both hands and ears.
My sincerest and heartfelt love of this proves that there is great music being made.

——–

and we’ve had some nice blog/radio play as well.

We’ll post more stuff as it comes in!

 

 

December 27, 2015

Hamilton: Winding

Holiday surprise, as without warning I’m putting out this album featuring some of my own texture-focused ambient electronic tracks. I’d been sitting on it for a while and the time felt right…heck, it’s Spectropol’s 40th album!

Winding is a collection of tracks recorded between 2009 and 2012. Despite marked contrasts between them they comprise a coherent playlist of “ambient” electronic music. Some of the pieces work well for meditation, others are themselves meditations on sounds or ideas. Many of the works employ continuous slow-change forms and drones, others are keyboard-centered and have faster moving harmonies; some employ field recordings and most embrace noise. Microtonal elements are also present throughout, in different forms, including just intonation (this, muuf, window, furse, koni); mixed tunings (hoomz, hae, ronqq), and micro-inflections (elegy, furse, ronqq, dropov). As a whole I think of it as an ambient album realized with an avant-garde electroacoustic aesthetic.

Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

It’s available now as a name-your-price download. You can also purchase ($10+s/h) an extremely limited edition CD-R (shipping in January).

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November 26, 2015

New Marco Oppedisano is here!

Spectropol Records is pleased to announce a new EP of music by NYC guitarist and composer Marco Oppedisano. This project, titled resolute, is Oppedisano’s first solo release of electroacoustic music since 2010. The EP is composed of five compelling tracks based on electric guitar, electric bass, percussion, voice and piano. As in much of his previous work, the resulting music is a kind of electric-chamber/concrete hybrid rich with timbral, contrapuntal, gestural and harmonic detail. There’s an unwavering energy through these tracks that speaks to the title, a sense of direction and tonal focus even through contrasting sections, making the EP into what feels like a unified statement.

resolute is available as a $7 limited edition CDR and $5 digital download at the Spectropol bandcamp site, where it can be freely streamed.