Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver // s / t LP

This is a record released in 2018 by experimental musician Marcin Barski from Krakow, Poland, on Reading Group, an experimental label based in New York, USA.Contains 4 songs from spoken word to noise drone. DL code included.Below is an explanation by the author himself. "The 1980s were special. Microphones became commonplace in many homes. Audio recording was no longer a novelty; everyone could do it. The portable Walkman, the analogue answering machine, the tape player that was always equipped with a red button and a little hole to talk to in order to archive your voice - all these things were everywhere and everyone knew how to use them. The tapes were cheap, and many have survived to this day.The theme of disappointment is a recurring theme in these tapes: a jammed Radio Free Europe broadcast many years ago. The vulgar sexist cabaret that is no longer funny (if it is funny at all), and most of all, the new taxes, the difficulties of everyday life, or the frustration with the telephone system and the hours spent on the phone before speaking to relatives abroad. It is not uncommon for tape recordings of Father Popielszko's truth sermons to be disguised as modern talking cassettes with track lists handwritten on red and white inlay cards. .In the illegal underground circuits of the 1980s, vision functioned as a mask for hearing.The Polish soundscape of that time was happening at the level of the imagination: things you had never seen, things you had never met before. People recorded and shared on tape recordings of people's voices and music that could not be experienced at concerts.Hearing shaped their longing for sight. He had the power to change a reality that was too gray to escape.The other day, I found a box of tapes containing recorded telephone conversations from 1982 to 1984. , recorded all his phone conversations. His wife was living in Vienna at the time and sent him Western products to distribute to friends in Warsaw. But he was also a romantic man. The title of the tape taped to the bottom of the box (in pencil handwriting) is ``Wanda's Dream, May 1982.'' It's a quiet, eight-minute recording of someone snoring. Jan listens back to his wife's breathing. Have you ever fallen asleep listening to this tape in your gray communist apartment in Warsaw after both channels had finished broadcasting? Have you ever tried to imagine what your bedroom would sound like, smell like, and look like?Once again, the disappointment is repeated.In a sense, Jan was living a polygamous life.Both are invisible, but which one is real? " Click here to see more Reading Group releases...

This is a record released by experimental musician Yan Jun from Beijing, China in December 2023 from Reading Group, an experimental label based in New York, USA.Contains 12 drone songs - sounds with no melody. DL code included.Below is an explanation by the label. "In Contradictions, Yan Jun ``plays out'' four writers--through five works that explore the formal, conceptual, and linguistic challenges of literary and theoretical figures through sonic composition and experimental Tracks A5 and A4 "play" Lu Xun, an early 5th century Chinese literary critic and fellow member of the Leftist Writers' Union in the 1s.These two "actions in the environment" explore Lu Xun's contradictory depictions of sound and silence, shaping seemingly "empty" field recordings as completely silent containers of unintentional action.The following track uses "acoustic mechanisms" to interpret provocations from post-Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek about the mechanization of sexuality and desire in expanding global capitalism, resulting in a battery-powered approach to eroticism. It creates a noise sequence that indexes commercialization. On the B-side, jun explores the "hyperrealism" of audio feedback without a manual interface by "playing Jean Baudrillard."The final track is a silent reading of Samuel Beckett's Chinese translation of ``Texts for Nothing,'' an interpretation of Samuel Beckett.In the artist's extensive liner notes, he sums up this piece with words that serve as a clue to the entire record: How about letting everything collide and disappear through this "I" voice? "Click here for label and other works ///...

This is a collaborative record by British poet Zara Joan Miller and cellist Ute Kanngiesser, released in December 2023 on the experimental label Reading Group in New York, USA. Contains two tense improvisational songs, one for sound poetry and one for cello. DL code included. Below is an explanation by the label. ”This LP is the result of the first live collaboration between poet/artist Miller and cellist/improviser Kanngießer, recorded at Cafe Oto in London in January 12. Kanngießer's exploratory and focused The cellos pave the amorphous terrain that passes beneath fragments of Miller's poems (from a collection of poems of the same name, published in 2 by JOAN Publishers), becoming billboards dotting the internal freeway of liminal perception. The spectral and textural details in the cello's sound seem to dramatically or mirror the microscopic world of unspoken meanings left between the threads of language. The world produces a dull anxiety or a quiet frenzy, but occasionally there are poetic expressions that suggest slow-motion jokes ("I once saw a sign on the side of the road that says 'SLOW DUST'") or random errors ( ``A seagull pooped on my face'') or mysterious interruptions of domestic boredom (``Someone's girlfriend called and told them not to come out''). The progression of the dates, which are inserted from time to time, gives the feeling of running through the year of Blue Monday, as the cello wanders around like the seasons. The live set is accompanied by a literal slideshow of a stack of fictional vacations, adding to the sense of looking back on the year. But the imperceptibility of the spaces (tonal and narrative) between these entries/fragments takes us beyond the strict view of the calendar to something that cannot be measured: the space of syncopation. There is. "Watching your life unfold/is the key to getting stuck," she said. "Click here to see more...

This is the latest record released in April 2022 by collage artist James Krivchenia from Minnesota, USA, on Reading Group, a label headed by Minnesota experimental musician Derek Baron.Includes 4 pieces of information overload collage, IDM, collage pop, and collage techno using a large amount of sampling.It is wrapped in a disturbing atmosphere as if it was composed by AI. Comes with DL code.Click here to see more Reading Group releases available...