Intelligent Noise Music of the non entertainment genre. Netlabel, CDs, CDRs. Drones & Pop. Free improv, musique concrete. Black ambient metal. Field recordings, Experimental electronics. Since 1983.
Zeromoon & Sentient Recognition Archive are proud to present the new CD from Violet.
Quite an intriguing burst of dark electronic and sample noise from Violet, whose Violet Ray Gas and The Playback Singers (ZEROMOON zero008 / SENTIENT RECOGNITION ARCHIVE SRA 10) is released in a digipack covered with Futurist-inspired monochrome images full of harsh diagonals and fuzzy dreams of the machine age. Jeff Surak arrives here from Washington DC, a hero of the 1980s cassette tape scene when he used to release music under his 1348 alias and ran his Watergate Tapes label. Consequently we can hear much stern authority and grainy power in these grim process-works. My fave so far is the opener ‘All Records Collapse’, with its implacable radio voice plucked from an indeterminate Eastern European zone, but ‘Snakehead Lapping’, ‘Plague Numbers’ and ‘Marionetki’ all communicate the requisite doses of futility. Two long tracks at the end, ‘Violet Ray Gas’ and ‘Interior Ghosts’, are somewhat more musical than atmospheric, shaped from queasy long-form drones tempered with alien sounds. Surak strives to offer ‘near-silence’ and ‘full-on tonal Brutalism’, with all shades in between. - The Sound Projector
All Violet is a collaboration between Scott Allison (sc.all) & Jeff Surak (Violet). Two live sets recorded October 3, 2004 at the 804noise Festival in Richmond, Virginia and February 6, 2005 at Electric Possible, George Washington University, Washington DC. Instruments used: record player, autoharp, prepared speakers, field recordings, lloopp, rocks, foil, flotsam, jetsam, etc.
BLUE SAUSAGE INFANT is the work of Chester Hawkins of Washington DC. The sound of BSI lives somewhere in the space between noise and psychedelia, using a mixture of electronics, toys, and conventional instruments. The result stumbles between delicate ambience, krautrock-flavored trance music, and harsh brutalism.
BSI has performed and recorded since 1988, including collaborations with Haunted Toilet, Lida Husik, New Carrollton, Delta of Venus, Changes to Blind, and Stolen Government Binder Clip. With the milestone of BSI’s 20th anniversary, Chester has launched a fresh attack on live performances in the DC area, promising an unpredictable, hallucinatory stew of sounds for the brave and confused. This Zeromoon product is the first official BSI release since the 2001 CD-R “Supple Supple”.
We are proud to present the latest release on zeromoon in collaboration with Sphairos Productions: 1,2,3 Whiteout (The End of the Light Age) - the latest feature film from James June Schneider. “This ‘tone poem for darkness’ mixes amazing original vignettes with diverse archive found footage, an exceptional sci-fi sensibility and incredible soundscapes to form a blissfully imaginative and retro-futuristic creation. Set in ‘an old-fashioned kind of future’, Veronique and an inventor (the legendary Lou Castel) are trying to bring back a ‘positive’ darkness to offset the glaring, bright, technological man-made light and ‘make the night night again’. As much about sound as about darkness, it asks: Can we shine when we are faced with blinding light?” -Leeds International Film Festival
The set includes a CD with soundscapes, drone, and field recordings from the film. Sound is a guiding force in 1,2,3, Whiteout. The film and audio were constructed to operate as independent forces which work in counterpoint. The soundtrack is composed of found, sampled, and synthesized sound as well music/songs composed for the film. The latter were created by Elmapi and AE and the soundscapes were recorded and composed by Richard Harrison and Michael Schumacher amongst others. Drone Hill, a side project of Richard Harrison (of legendary Spaceheads) serves as one of the fundamental materials which runs throughout the film. Drone Hill was the title of an album Harrison made by placing sound captors on the wire fence at his brother’s farm whereby creating an enormous recording device, capturing vibrations and natural phenomena. Accident and Emergency (AE) from Sonig records performs original music as a Greek chorus in the film. Emiko Ota (singer/drummer/vibraphone) appears in person, in voice, and on screen in 4 different scenes, lamenting, advising and commenting. Elmapi (Elise Pierre) who has just completed her US tour on her second album (mixed and mastered by Andy Moor of Dutch band The Ex) has composed two original tracks for the film as well as acting in 1,2,3, Whiteout. Sound from dozens of different films were sampled along with found sound recorded by Pierre who drew on her experience as an electro-acoustician as she transformed the material. The film also includes a track from NY sound artist Michael Schumacher’s “Fidicin Drones” and a clip from legendary Soviet electro experimentalists Notchnoi Prospekt. Erik Minkkinen who created the international “Placard” headphone festival also plays a soundman in the film. As a bonus the DVD includes 2 short experimental films created using x-rays that feature music performed by Violet. zero007 all region DVD+CD. $15. BUY IT NOW!
The long running collaboration between Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words and Violet has arisen from the ashes of dormancy. Dead Violets has received a new lease on its bleak outlook on life with the appearance of its newest member, Bethany Moore, adding sultry vocals/vocalizations to the mix. “Banish” is the result of the dronecore power trio’s first endeavor, and just an apperetif of upcoming audio onslaught that Dead Violets will unleash. A shiny 3″ cdr that guaranteed not to shine any light. BUY IT NOW.
The Natural History Museum of Sound was founded in the haunted house on Third Street in Louisville, Kentucky on a day in September of the year two thousand and one. Founding members were Tim Ruth, Zan Hoffman and Rinus van Alebeek (thatâs me writing this). In the weeks prior to the institution, the mansion had seen and heard many charming sounds. The result was that every single object be it animal, vegetal or mineral, was aurally possessed. A fifty minutes exhibition of the site-specific recordings was organized by Zan and installed as a Cdr on his label ZH27. It was agreed upon that each of the founding members would be a curator as well.
In Italy I came across Tibor Macek, an Austrian composer and musician, through a chance meeting. We did site-specific recordings in which we used several landscapes, a fortress, abandoned houses, the sea, a mobile phone, a factory hall, a historic hamlet, a valley, olive trees and the very east of Berlin. The works contained pictures as well and were showed on a multi data Cdr or on line, courtesy of zeromoon. In the years two thousand and three to two thousand and six Das Natur Historisch Museum der Klänge hosted three exhibitions. One more exhibition is still on the shelves, ready, but hidden.
In the years two thousand and six and two thousand and seven I have been doing quite some touring. It always included Spain. One reason is, because I like Spain, the second reason being that Spain seemed to like me too. My tour itinerary read like a geographical narrative. The path Bordeaux â Hendaye/Irun â Bilbao and vice versa I must have traveled at least five times. Iâm kind of a local trophy in both of those B-towns. Now while Bordeaux has Radikal Satan and is a town with a kind of life size chess figures feel about it, Bilbao is really rough. But not rough as in rough, but rough as in elegant and worn down. The pandemonic lay out of the town, the mountains that appear at every twist and turn the road takes, the overload of ugly apartment blocks due to some booming constructor, the highway on high legs that cuts the town in two, the beautiful neighborhood of San Francisco with its immigrants and dealers, and loud voices from scarcely lighted bars made me feel at home once.
It is here that I met Oier Iruretogoiena and Miguel Garcia , in Zeromoon catalogue terms Tüsüri and Xedh. Though I am the same age as their parents we related very well, and agreed very soon to spend the last hours of my last day playing together rather then going to a bar shouting at each other choosing from a vocabulary that held fifty words of Spanish and forty three words of English. We went to a storing place turned studio in a concrete block that also had a parking space somewhere on the fourth floor. Well maybe it hadnât, but the public space in it looked like that. It also looked like a place where the shadows and echoes and smells of the twentieth century were first compressed and then stored. It looked adventurous and futureless, as a place should when you are young. The furniture was found on the streets and carried up, and when I came back months later Mikelâs girlfriend, whose place it was, had changed the studio into a storyboard for an untold fairy tale, the one that never should be told to grown ups. I consider it a big honor to be brought to her place.
The boys cooked, we had dinner, and we set up. One microphone was put outside on the windowsill; The Bilbao nights were dense. Even if it was December it was still okay to have the windows open. There was nothing fashionable about the view: the block at the other side of the road, an unpretentious stretch of green, maybe mountains if your eyes were good enough. It sounded like another continent, because it sounded like I was very far away from every thing. Then we sat down, and we imagined that we were broadcasting. We played for hours; maybe some ships passing at night picked up the sounds.
audio_z (Tautvydas Bajarkevičius) is a sound artist and curator from Vilnius, Lithuania.
“breaking the waves” is another journey through abstract flow of rhythms, cinematic soundscapes, minimalistic melodies, intertwining collages and dense ambiences, composed by Lithuanian sound artist audio_z.
The Cutest Puppy in the World is Bryan Rhodes (of Baltimore) and Layne Garrett (of Washington, DC). We explore emergent forms, extremes of saturated and empty space, scorched remnants of the familiar. Our music is all improvised.
Since the summer of 2005, we have performed extensively in DC and the mid-Atlantic region alongside many amazing musicians. In 2005, we self-released a CD-R entitled ::shut in the basement::. It made free103point9’s Top 150 of 2005. Sockets put out FINFOLK in early 2006, with cover art by renowned collage artist Joseph Mills. The record received critical praise from Terrascope, Fakejazz, and Noiseweek, among others. Apotrope came out in April 2007 on New American Folk Hero, to giddy smiles and shrieks of delight the world over. And now A warm winter here on Zeromoon.
These two improvisations were recorded on January 23, 2008 in Washington, DC. Instrumentation includes prepared/de-tuned guitar, various keyboards/synthesizers, found objects, and voice. We were wearing t-shirts in our unheated basement.
Preliminary Saturation is the electro-acoustic, free improv, drone-duo in which Dutch sound artists Wouter Jaspers and Steffan de Turck combine their forces. To some extent, both might be better known for their solo-projects: Franz Fjodor and staplerfahrer, respectively. As Franz Fjodor, Jaspers displays a fascination for the darker side of life; with self-made instruments he creates a sound that shippers between droning soundscapes, depressed noise and dark folk. His style signature varies with his mood: from psycho chants to punk screams, from guitar oriented drones to field recordings. De Turck plays around with crunched and broken (micro)sounds, electro-magnetic waves and noise. Sometimes in a back-to-basics analogue setting, other times solemnly using his powerbook. Every once and a while, they come together in the safe harbor of one of their living rooms, pop open a bottle of wine, light some cigarettes and start improvising as long as the mood is right. It’s how this recording was made.
In October 2008, Jaspers and De Turck will team up for a tour that will take them along the US East Coast, both playing shows as their individual projects and as Preliminary Saturation.