The intention is to promote people who make beautiful music.
The intention is to introduce you to the people who have been carving their own path...with no care for what anybody thinks.
We try not to post things that are still for sale but sometimes post things that are not easily available. If you like what you hear, then find these people and tell them how great they are.
Better still, tell them and then seek out their new releases and buy them. We add links, when they are reliable and active, so that you can keep track if you so wish.
Always go straight to the artist or the label where possible. That way, the money goes straight to the people responsible for this art. These people rely on our support to keep going and make more quality releases!
Please feel free to leave comments as you go along...at least then we know you appreciate this stuff (or otherwise) and you're not just a bunch of freeloading file collectors.
If you made this music and we have pissed you off by posting any of this, please leave a comment in the post and the offending articles will be removed.
Keith Rowe on tabletop guitar and electronics with Toshimaru Nakamura on no-input mixing board recorded live at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo on September the 21st, 2008.
Keith on tabletop guitar and electronics with Taku Unami on his laptop. A study in concentration recorded live on September the 19th, 2008 at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo.
Keith Rowe (co-founder of AMM and a member of MIMEO and The Scratch Orchestra amongst others) on tabletop guitar and electronics with Evan Parker on saxophones recorded live during two concerts at Pannonica, Nantes, on December 31th 1999 & January 1st 2000. What a way to see in the new millennium!
Evan Parker's improvised and dislocated sax skronk accompanied by John Wiese's electronics and crunching tape manipulations. All recorded in real-time ... oh, to be a fly on the wall.
So, what do you do if you are a group of legends about to perform another exquisite set? Of course, you add another member of AMM: John Tilbury on piano. Recorded live at Angelica, Festival Internazionale Di Musica, Bologna, on May the 20th, 2001.
Given the roster of players here, you might expect it to sound like too many cooks all blasting at once. That's not what this is, though. Large group improvisations recorded in 1998 and 1999, edited in 1999 and released as a double CD that same year by a label called Grob. For this album, the band was Kaffe Matthews, Marcus Schmickler, Peter Rehberg, and Christian Fennesz on laptops; Gert-Jan Prins and Jerome Noetinger on electronics and tapes; Keith Rowe and Rafael Toral on guitars; Cor Fuhler on piano; Markus Wettstein on "amplified metal garbage"; Thomas Lehn on synthesizer and Phil Durrant on violin and electronics.
A staggering album of very large-group improvised electro-acoustic noise (amazingly, excerpted from an even longer performance) recorded at Serpentine Gallery and released by the gallery as a triple CD set in 2004. The band includes luminaries from all over the world: Marcus Schmickler (of Pluramon, Wabi Sabi, more) and Peter Rehberg (aka Pita, head of Editions MEGO) on laptops, Jerome Noetinger (head of Metamkine Records) playing tapes and electronics, Rafael Toral and Gert-Jan Prins on electronics, Keith Rowe (of AMM) on tabletop guitar, Thomas Lehn and Cor Fuhler on synthesizers, Phil Durrant on violin and synthesizer, and the whole project was directed by Kaffe Matthews, who also plays sampler and theremin. It's far too much to listen to in one sitting, but I suppose when you go through the trouble of bringing so many busy people together at one time, you may as well be efficient about it and record as much music as possible. The liner notes explain that the players were placed throughout the gallery space and could come and go throughout the performance, so this is not the free-for-all it might have been in less capable hands.
An unlikely homage to Masaya Nakahara's favourite record store complimented by his loathing of it's competitors ... he really doesn't like them.
CDr. Boid. 2010.
This is the last one for now, we're getting a bit twitchy and need to move on. We'll return to the theme soon and will be re-uploading all of the dead Stylistics links and will resurrect the Violent Onsen Geisha posts for good measure.
A short while ago, we re-drifted past the Hair Stylistics discogs page to find that the number of releases had doubled. At the last count, we have sixty seven of them and we were missing quite a few. Then "all of a sudden" it turns out that we are missing at least one hundred and sixteen. Sincerely brothers and sisters, we shed a tear! Actually, I cried a lot. The problem is that we have virtually nothing that was released after 2010 ... maybe three releases (and the two on bandcamp) and that's it! If anybody has any of these Holy Grail items that they would be willing to share we would be forever in your debt. It's more than fair enough if they aren't for posting, me and Mrs Inside are Masaya Nakahara fanatics and every new thing would bring us copious amounts of joy!
You think you've got a handle on him? No chance! Looped bleeps and warped samples that provided a superbly entertaining journey through the inner recesses of a warped mind.
When he called himself Violent Onsen Geisha, Masaya Nakahara produced some of the most scorching albums of the first wave of Japanese noise. But Nakahara, who is well known in Japan as an award-winning novelist, visual artist and occasional actor, has always been harder to pin down than simply as a contemporary of Merzbow and Masonna. In fact, he never considered himself to be part of any scene, and still doesn't.
When he changed his musical name to Hair Stylistics, Nakahara openly embraced the influence of hip-hop and pop music that was hidden beneath his previous electronic din (if you don't believe me, listen again to Shocks! Shocks! Shocks! or the perfectly-titled "Fuck Off RRRecords, Bye Bye Noise Music" off the Come Again 2 compilation). He also ramped up productivity, releasing two 12-albums series' of "Monthly Hair Stylistics" CDs: one album a month for an entire year. If that's not enough, he also self-published huge amount of very small edition CDRs and a few standalone pressed CDs and LPs. Despite the avalanche of product, there has been no sacrifice in quality; improbable as it may be, most of these albums are very good.
Dynamic Hate is one of my favorite Hair Stylistics albums. Released as a CD in 2013 on the pop label Disques Corde, it is essentially an instrumental hip-hop album with short songs comprised of sparse beats and nonsense samples that betray a bizarre sense of humor. Perhaps the line from VOG's "Otis" to "Dynamic Hate" is an easy one to trace.
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