Music

Sonic manifesto by a post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea / new folklore for a devastated planet, including members of Oiseaux-Tempête, H, Karkhana, Polyphème.

The debut studio album from the Montreal supergroup Pangea de Futura, an octet that has been exploring since 2019, the many ways of—slowly—constructing massive textural musical shapes and droning tribal post-rock ambiances.

A comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musicians Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade, across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by an nearly five-hundred-page book.

Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded in 2023 while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland: somewhat a departure for Rushford, working in traces of Klaus Schulze, concrete poetry, and ars subtilior into a precise and ever-unfolding tapestry.

Midsummer, London by one of the world's leading voices in field recording explores the different accents, musics, and other sonic phenomenon of London at locations tracing the river Thames, moving from the outskirts in the west to the outskirts in the east.

The soundtrack to Murnau's Nosferatu composed / improvised / played by the trioof Emmanuelle Parrenin, Quentin Rollet and Jérôme Lorichon. The book accompanying the CD contains four versions of the Nosferatu story by four French artists: Marie-Pierre Brunel, Foolz, Caroline Sury and Alexios Tjoyas.

Anne Mathuri, Amal Khlif, Fanny Chiarello, Delphine Dora, Félicie Bazelaire, Dominique Grimaud, Kevin Orliange, the Fougère label, John Butcher...

A continuation of Jean-Guy Coulange's radio projects and his attempt to "show sound".

Social Engineering brings together thirteen text fragments from so-called phishing emails. Using speech synthesis, they are spoken, sung, and/or transformed into abstract textures. The result is a 36-minute language and sound collage devoted to the dark forces of phishing.

A major work by the American sound artist and composer, the culmination of three years' work inspired by nature and the animal world, introducing her voice, but also drums, into her sound palette.

The first vinyl release from French composer-performer Léo Dupleix, an active member of the international community of younger musicians working with just intonation.

A major archival release from legendary American composer and live electronics innovator Richard Teitelbaum, centred around his soundtrack for Suzan Pitt's cult 1978 animation Asparagus.

Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78'17" is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux.

Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78'17" is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux.

A performance for solo guitar and objects coming on top of a decade-long sonic exploration of the potentialities of the guitar as a pure sound generator by Modena-based composer and musician Luca Perciballi.

The French producer's 9th album features two time-stretched, profound analog-textured pieces based on the physical and emotional swaying motion suggested by its title and recorded during some concerts played in the summer of 2019.

Some of the earliest works by American composer Phill Niblock, including three never before released pieces: "Index" (1969), "Tenor," and "Boston III" (both from 1972). Until now, it's been impossible to encounter Niblock's compositions from earlier than the 1960s, a reality thankfully rectified by the long overdue publication of this LP on Alga Marghen.

An "ABC of the arts in transition" examining the ecological turn of the arts, the outcome of long-term collective research into the fundamental elements running through the art world and, more generally, the aesthetic and social universe in the current ecological crisis.

An overview of the career of Amerindian composer and artist Raven Chacon.

Released in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series, this LP reveals the extraordinary diversity of research—almost all hidden—by Spanish musicians in the '50s and '60s.

New compositions (by Phill Niblock, Klaus Lang, Bernhard Lang, Milan Guštar, Judith Berkson, Idin Samimi Mofakham and Ian Mikyska) for the sixth-tone harmonium conceived by Czech composer and pioneer of microtonal music Alois Hába in the 1920s and '30s, performed by Miroslav Beinhauerr, currently the only player of this unique instrument in the world, who has single-handedly revived it after decades of slumber.

Baudouin de Jaer pursues his exploration of the geomungo, a traditional six-string Korean bass zither, with a wordless opera in three acts.

Jacques Ponzio recounts in text and images Thelonious Monk's 10-day stay in Paris in the spring of 1954.

Bundle (special offer for the purchase of eight issues of OpticalSound).

Interviews with Michel Dector et Jean-Baptiste Farkas, Alice Dourlen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jim O'Rourke, Steven Stapleton, Andrea Laszlo De Simone; Johanna Went and Dame Darcy by Nicolas Ballet; Mickael Vis; Yûichi Yokoyama; SMITH; Marcel Broodthaers; Current 93; IKHÉA©SERVICES; Alan Dunn; Oskar Schlemmer; Blaine L. Reininger; Martin Le Chevallier; Ludovic Chemarin©...

Eight pieces of free vocal improvisation by the duo of Jason Kahn and Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, who have been working together since 2015.

Three pieces spanning free improvisation, noise and extended saxophone technique with Ulrich Krieger, one of the masters of contemporary experimental music.

Berlin-based, Italian-born sound artist Andrea Taeggi introduces his debut release on Hands in the Dark records, an album showcasing six mesmerizing and rhythmically intricate electronic compositions.

Pakito Bolino; Basman Aldiwari; Phill Niblock by Kasper T. Toeplitz; Dominique Grimaud; Félix Blume; Leandro Barzabal; Dror Feiler...

A split album as part of the GRM Portraits series bringing together two pieces by Jessica Ekomane (explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing) and Laurel Halo (for piano and electronics).

The complete texts and photographs published in the fanzine dedicated to free jazz.

A historicist approach of music genres.

An account of artist Io Burgard's experience in the town of Ugine (archives, concert, residency, exhibition), part fanzine, part punk, part white cube.

First vinyl edition of Giuseppe Ielasi's archipelago of animated sound sculptures.

Unreleased tapes from the 70s and 80s.

Archival releases from the Dagar Brothers, among the most revered 20th century exponents of the ancient North Indian dhrupad tradition.

Archival releases from the Dagar Brothers, among the most revered 20th century exponents of the ancient North Indian dhrupad tradition.

Centered around the Villa Aurora Organ, an intriguing and mostly unknown instrument built in 1928/29 by the Artcraft Organ Company in Santa Monica, California, "Outerlands" presents a deeply personal approach to the instrument's particular properties, very much in line with Discrepant's ethos.

On their first album since 2017, the Berlin-based trio Denseland (Hanno Leichtmann, David Moss and Hannes Strobl) instead ventures slowly but steadily into unknown territory.

The heyday of New York's underground and alternative cultural scene in the 1980s: a look back at the history of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, a primary hub for the burgeoning East Village drag, gay, feminist, punk, and art scenes.

This monograph presents the visual language inseparable from the higly influential sound project of Sam McKinlay, pioneer of the "harsh noise wall" with the multidisciplinary entity The Rita.

An overview of the use of textile in contemporary visual arts around the world.

A vast selection of theoretical, philosophical and literary writings by Pierre Schaeffer, accompanied by testimonies of various personalities, providing a privileged entry into the multidimensional universe of the composer, engineer, theorist and radio man, whose tutelary shadow is constantly cast on the landscape of sound creation.