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Nmperign and Jake Meginsky: Selected Occasions of Handsome Deceit - LP
Rel Records$18.00
The motive behind improvising with new players is frequently to find a new music in yourself. Sometimes, this new music is found in a struggle, where opposing approaches attempt to meet in a play between power and tolerance. More rarely, the new voice simply causes the music to appear - no struggle, all play. The music happens to you, and you just stay out of its way.
When Nmperign met with Jake Meginsky, the music happened to us. Participation was pure joy. Even with long silences and sudden changes, there was always the sense of being carried by a purposeful force. For me, this single, 14-minute piece conveys that force. I couldn't imagine it surrounded by other music. It warrants its own platter; a single object for a singular moment. I hope you enjoy it.
From the label:
REL012 is the recorded debut of the trio Nmperign with Jake Meginsky. Pressed on 160 gram copper plate mastered vinyl, REL012 features Nmperign in an energized, turn-on-a-dime form. Prodded by Meginsky into unnamable, angular textures, the trio is agile and unpredictable, occupying musical extremes with intelligence and grace. REL012 is a one-sided LP cut to 45 for Maximum Dynamic range. Featuring a striking cover, designed by Eli Keszler, printed by Ashley Paul. A light blue fold-over paper is integrated in to a heavy picture disc sleeve, labeled with a color sticker. Screened notes are featured on the inside. REL012 is a one-time, hand-numbered edition of 300 copies.
Nmperign and Jake Meginsky: The All or Nothing Package - LP, CD, 2-LP
Rel Records$40.00
Selected Occasions of Handsome Deceit, Ommatidia, and We devote every effort to offer you the best you deserve to have for your enjoyment.
Nmperign and Jake Meginsky: The Fetishist - LP, 2-LP
Rel Records$30.00
Selected Occasions of Handsome Deceit and We devote every effort to offer you the best you deserve to have for your enjoyment.
nmperign: Ommatidia - CD
Intransitive Recordings$12.00
nmperign are one of the most celebrated and influential bands in contemporary improvised music. Yet surprisingly, more than a decade after their debut, Greg Kelley (trumpet) and Bhob Rainey (soprano sax) have never recorded a studio album as an unaccompanied duo… until now!
The music is spare and peerlessly inventive as always, but the mood rema ins light and joyful, with a subtle undercurrent of absurd humor. While improvised music can sometimes seem airless and precious, Ommatidia opens the window on a sunny afternoon… the album’s gusts of breath, percussive splatter, and controlled explosions form six succinct pieces that feel alive and vital, while still speaking in nmperign’s utterly unique sonic language. A perfect way in for newcomers and a revelation for long-time fans, Ommatidia is the essential nmperign.
Previous nmperign albums have employed guest musicians – notably close collaborator and tape loop saboteur Jason Lescalleet, but also luminaries such as Gunter Mueller, Axel Doerner, Andrea Neumann, and Burkhard Beins – and subversive or dodgy recording techniques; their 2xLP on Siwa was recorded entirely to micro-cassette and cassette walkman, while an early CD on Selektion was edited from live mini-disc recordings. Intransitive is proud to present the nmperign album that fans have been waiting for: the core duo, beautifully recorded in an actual studio with excellent microphones.
When not making nmperign music, Greg Kelley performs with the aggressively psychedelic noise unit Heathen Shame (along with Wayne Rogers & Kate Village of Major Stars), minimalist chamber group The Undr Quartet, and raucous rock band Life Partners. Rainey regularly tours with folk/pop duo Damon & Naomi and leads The BSC, an eight-piece electro-acoustic improvising ensemble. They live in Boston and New Orleans, respectively.
Limited edition CD comes in full-color digipack designed by Mike Shiflet.
Listen on Last.fm
Various: Tiny Mix Tapes Vol. 1: Darfur - CD
Tiny Mix TapesNmperign contributed a track to this beautiful CD/LP to benefit Darfur.
Order directly from Tiny Mix Tapes: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/FOR-SALE-Tiny-Mix-Tapes-Vol-1
- > Play "Remote Sensing"
nmperign / Skeletons Out: Split 7" - 7" vinyl
Absurd Records$8.00
Nmperign on one side, Skeletons Out on the other. Pure gold throughout.
- > Play "Marvin"
Bhob Rainey / Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase: Rainey/AHPN Split - 7" vinyl
Sedimental Records$8.00
Two boisterous pieces of musique concrete, one from Rainey, "Ain't it Grand", and one from Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase (aka Chris Cooper of Fat Worm of Error, BSC, etc), "Journey to the Center of Something or Other".
- > Play "Ain't it Grand"
Damon and Naomi: Shibuya O-Nest, Tokyo Japan 2008 - DVD
20/20/20$12.00
After a month of touring the U.S. followed immediately by a month in Europe, this band hit Japan to finish up D&N's biggest tour in years, supporting their release "Within These Walls". After so many shows, the band had truly gelled, creating a constantly weaving, breathing music.
This DVD was filmed by Hiroo Ishihara and mixed from multi-track board recordings.
The two nights from Shiuya O-Nest were split between new material and D&N classics, so there's plenty of goodness for old and new fans to enjoy.
Bhob Rainey / Ferran Fages: Compost and Height Split - 3" CD
Compost and Height
Amazon.com Rhapsody Lala Emusic Napster
Compost and Height has this wonderful series of split 3" CDs in very limited runs. The Fages piece, "IRRADI", is a glorious rain of acoustic clicking, and the Rainey piece, "A Flickering Bid", is both an understated and wrenching *nearly* solo saxophone piece. More about these pieces can be read at compostandheight.blogspot.com.
- > Play "A Flickering Bid"
Bhob Rainey: Two Bites of a Bitter Sweet - 7" vinyl
Evolving Ear
Amazon.com Rhapsody Lala Emusic Napster
Chris Forsyth at Evolving Ear originally asked me to do an 8" lathe cut for his label. I was hesitant for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I had already consigned a number of pieces to the format fetish void (a 3" CDr, a split LP, download only, etc). Still, I gave it some thought. I had been working on a number of complex, large-scale pieces, some with Ralf Wehowsky, some for dance and film, others to who knows what ends, and I began to feel that the time and conceptual constraints of a "single" might be refreshing. I convinced Chris to let me do a 7" instead of a lathe cut (I didn't need to go THAT lo-fi), and I set about making two formally related pieces with clear, simple trajectories; pop songs from a broken mind. And that's sort of how it went. The two sides of this release, "A Desert of Consolation" and "The Summering Unsound", both follow a singular form: an ambiguously intensifying exposition followed by an unfolding of previously hidden elements. The materials, however, could not be more different: "A Desert of Consolation" consists almost entirely of synthetic sounds lying in a narrow frequency band, while "The Summering Unsound" is made up of a good deal of untreated field recordings, beats, and broadband noise. And, though I followed my dictum of simplicity in the pieces' trajectories, I couldn't stop myself from piling a lot of layers into the mix. So, there's a simple, if perverse, horizontal unfolding, and a morass of detail vertically. Kinda like a nice pile of fall leaves with a rake and skeleton hidden inside. I should also mention that artist Elaine Kaufmann made the beautiful, hallucinatory covers for this release. No photo would do them justice, as they play with real light in a way that's difficult to describe or reproduce.
- > Play "Desert of Consolation"
Bhob Rainey, Ralf Wehowsky: I don't think I can see you tonight - CD
Sedimental Records$10.00
5 years and a mint's worth of postage bring us this dense, musique concrete epic. Each of the three extended pieces presented here have undergone serious transformations, mutilations, and rebirths, as discs were burnt, sealed and sent from Cambridge to Mainz and back again. Yet, despite all the fine-toothed combing commited by the obsessive perfectionists at the helm of this project, the music is wild, ruptured, assymetrical and WAY INTENSE. Tendrils of possible outcomes camoflage trap doors and the saturated memories of an unclean conscience. This is that kind of sublime that's a bit on the scary side despite the occasional reassurance of a slowly flowing rhythm or an almost major chord. This is the haunted closet you can't keep shut.
- > Play "Awaken, Elsewhere, Unforeseen"
Various: Music Overheard - Double CD
Boston ICA$10.00
- > Play "Fold-Out"
nmperign, Lescalleet: Love Me Two Times - Double CD
Intransitive Recordings$16.00
The highly anticipated double-CD epic by Jason Lescalleet (tape loops) and nmperign (Bhob Rainey - soprano sax, and Greg Kelley - trumpet). The result of six years of live and studio collaboration, LM2X is by far the most ambitious and uncompromising statement yet by this formidable trio. The album begins simply enough with an ominous trio track, but don't get too comfortable... over the course of the next two hours, the ground steadily shifts, the bottom drops out, and any expectations a listener may have had going in are thoroughly trampled. Fans will find the usual ingredients here: crusty old reel-to-reel tape decks, cheap keyboards, amplified and acoustic horns...but rude tape splices, violent humor, and confusingly degraded fidelity push the music far from safe territory. The visceral drama of LM2X does not neatly spell out its intentions, nor does it signal exactly what it has up its sleeve. It exists in its own universe, demands repeat listens and to be taken on its own terms.
- > Play "I Remember"
nmperign: Nmperign live at Music Lover's Field Companion - Download
7hings
nmperign: We Devote Every Effort to Offer You the Best You Deserve to Have For Your Enjoyment - Double LP
Siwa Records$22.00
For those of you who already know and love nmperign, this release is about as goddam necessary as they come. For those of you who have yet to meet this odd bird, start here, ask questions later. It has been called nmperign's "most perverse and blackened work to date." Nicolas at absurd records says "The siwa 2LP rocks hard straight into my heart! love it!" i, myself, am somewhat speechless about the whole thing. Features beautiful silkscreen covers and a super high-quality vinyl pressing. You'll be happy just holding it.
- > Play "We Devote Every Effort... Part One"
Axel Doerner, Greg Kelley, Andrea Neumann, Bhob Rainey: Thanks, Cash - CD
Sedimental Records$10.00
This long-awaited document of an historic tour marrying two of Berlin's finest improvisers with Boston's hometown sluggers has finally been released. At the end of August, 2001, Doerner and Neumann arrived at Boston's Logan airport for a tour that would cover the continental United States and take up the entire month of September. They started by recording with Boston's BSC (released on Grob Records as 'Good'), and then, faced with the challenge of how to fit all of their stuff into a luxury Hyundai (courtesy of a free upgrade coupon from Hertz), they embarked, with Rainey and Kelley, on what would normally be a significantly perception-altering tour of the U.S. It turned out to be more literally mind-melting, which brought out the bottomless magnaminity of each player and all of the characters encountered from New York to San Francisco to Bloomington to Birmingham. The music lets light in through dark slats, and is filled with the richness of sound these musicians bring to their best projects . It retains a 'live' feel while apparently derived from a tattered, ancient score, reserved for especially confounding times.
- > Play "Berkley"
nmperign + Doerner/Beins: s/t - LP
Twisted Village
- > Play "ndb 04"
Bhob Rainey / Kevin Drumm: s/t - LP
Fringes Records
- > Play "6 Standing Desert Parts 2-5"
