RADIO/GUITAR
Thrum
Lanthanides Series
2004
Table of the Elements
[Holmium] SWC-LP-67
Phono LP, silkscreen
PAULINE OLIVEROS
A Little Noise In the System
Lanthanides Series
2004
Table of the Elements
[Thulium] SWC-LP-69
Phono LP, silkscreen
ZEENA PARKINS
Devotion
Lanthanides Series
2004
Table of the Elements
[Lutetium] SWC-LP-71
Phono LP, silkscreen
Solos for Contrabass Saxophone
Lanthanides Series
2004
Table of the Elements
[Erbium] SWC-LP-68
Phono LP, silkscreen
"Mats is the most modern of players where the genre tags of jazz, noise, experimental, avant-whatever are finally transcended to a new millennium — where compositional concepts are at once in check with open improvisation and a super-postmodernism becomes what we always wanted: Rock & Roll!"
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
Lanthanides Series
2003/2004
Table of the Elements
SWC-LP-58 through SWC-LP-71
14x phono LPs, silkscreen, metallic ink, luminous ink
#8/14:
MIKE KELLEY
Silver Ball (Light and Color, Mostly)
Lanthanides Series
2004
Table of the Elements
[Gadolinium] SWC-LP-64
Phono LP, silkscreen
“Kelley has explored every imaginable media, including video, sculpture, performance, writing, and drawing. His charged, psychosexual, humorous work resonates deeply with younger artists ... He today ranks among the most influential, genre-exploding folks on the international art scene."
Seattle Weekly
“Mike Kelley is perhaps the most influential American artist of the 1990s."
Los Angeles Times
Lanthanides Series
2003/2004
Table of the Elements
SWC-LP-58 through SWC-LP-71
14x phono LPs, silkscreen, metallic ink, luminous ink
#5/14:
LAURIE SPIEGEL
Harmonices Mundi
Lanthanides Series
2003
Table of the Elements
[Promethium] SWC-LP-61
Phono LP, silkscreen
“In 1977, American astronomer Carl Sagan selected the composer Laurie Spiegel's computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise "Harmony of the Worlds" for inclusion aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft's "Golden Record". Kepler's "Harmony of the Worlds" was the lead cut on a collection that held recordings of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, selections from Beethoven, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry, for the sake of demonstrating to other life forms in the galaxy that there is intelligent life on our planet. And now, Laurie Spiegel's music has traveled to the edge of our solar system.
"Even if Spiegel's music weren't already launched into the firmament, it would finds its natural home there; it's when she contemplates orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through sound that her imagination is unparalleled. While Kepler mused that the "Harmony of the Worlds" would be audible only to the ear of God, what reaches human ears via Spiegel's realization is bracing, menacing, and disorienting, the piercing tones not unlike a choir of air raid sirens. An alien life form encountering it on Voyager's "Golden Record" would conclude that our world was a maddening, maniacal place.”
Pitchfork
Side A:
GASTR DEL SOL
The Japanese Room at La Pagode
Side B:
TONY CONRAD
May
1995
Table of the Elements
[Copper] TOE-SS-29a
7" single, 21.75" x 29" poster
“Why May Day? In honor of Maia, Roman 'good goddess' of fertility and women's chastity, worshipped only by women. Love is not a suitable topic for music made by those whose history stinks of their habitual suppression of women. Why May Day? An international workers' day in celebration of women and men together not as lovers but at labor. The high and low voices in polyphony signify women's and men's equity in a society unsoiled by the stain of love. Why 'May Day!' as men in distress face death? Love in music is only to yoke woman in opposition to man."
Side A:
GASTR DEL SOL
The Japanese Room at La Pagode
Side B:
TONY CONRAD
May
Sides C/D:
TONY CONRAD with GASTR DEL SOL
Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain
1995
Table of the Elements
[Copper] TOE-SS-29b
2x 7" singles, 21.75" x 29" poster
“I had a dream that I shared a space with every living thing. Huge and waiting in the even light there stood a wall covered with windows and doors variously labeled with animal spoors and marked with names. As soon as I focused it clearly, each ancient door mysteriously became open, and a sound current flowed out all over the infinite plain. Other doors opened from time to time, reverberating the sound everywhere, but differently. And then suddenly there was nothing alive — but nothing had changed, and when I had returned, the sound was still there.”
JIM O'ROURKE
TONY CONRAD
RICHARD YOUNGS
FAUST
KEITH ROWE
untitled ("Nickel")
1995
Table of the Elements
[Nickel] TOE-SS-28
7" single, hand etching, poster, cloth sleeve, silkscreen, poster
“This free record is for everyone who supported our live events in London, Manchester, NYC, Hartford and Chicago during February and June, 1995." An oddity, given away during the Table of the Elements tours of 1995. The reverse is etched. Engineered by the artists with Scott MacLeod and Steve Albini, packaged in a silk-screened cloth jacket. Edition of 250.
Slapping Pythagoras
1995
Table of the Elements
[Vanadium] TOE-CD-23
Compact disc, poster, obi
"In the beginning there was the Drone, the primordial, mind-splitting hum generated by the strings, keyboards and revolutionary lost-chord Zeitgeist of 60's group the Dream Syndicate ... Slapping Pythagoras is the sound of stasis in excelsis, the fluid microtonal om of Conrad's violin resolving into deep pools of rich, alien harmony."
Rolling Stone
Early Minimalism Vol. I
1996
Table of the Elements
[Arsenic] TOE-CD-33
4x compact discs, custom enclosure, 112-page book, video CDROM
"Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy old guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Early Minimalism Vol. I
1996
Table of the Elements
[Arsenic] TOE-CD-33
4x compact discs, custom enclosure, 112-page book, video CDROM
""Minimalism's critical document ... Astonishing"
Art Papers
"100 Records That Set the World on Fire"
The Wire
"Totally uncompromising ... a marvel."
Artforum
"The perfect sound."
Chicago Reader
"Brain-blistering."
Luna Kafe
Ordier
2005
Table of the Elements
[Bromine] TOE-CD-35
Compact disc, board, wood case, silkscreen
"Genius enacted with off-hand majesty."
Melody Maker
Les Evening Gowns Damneés:56 Ludlow Street 1962-1964
Volume I
1998
Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive
Table of the Elements
[Palladium] TOE-CD-46
Compact disc
Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island:
56 Ludlow Street 1962-1964
Volume II
1998
Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive
Table of the Elements
[Silver] TOE-CD-47
Compact disc
"Brilliant is an overused word, but it is the only one that will do for Smith. He was a difficult man who made an art of radical absurdity, one that recasts notions of beauty and authenticity in a new language — pansexual, by most lights grotesque — without abandoning the core concepts themselves. And he lived more or less the life he preached — a cross between agent provocateur and struggling student — to the end of his days.
"This isn't a model with much cachet at the moment. Maybe the streets have become too mean, or too soft to encourage it. Art schools turn out professionals; art itself often comes bite-size and neat as a pin. But Smith's work was the opposite of that. For him, one suspects, art wasn't bigger or smaller than life; it was life — messy, silly, awful, grand and above all transformative."
Holland Cotter, New York Times
"I genuflect before Jack Smith, the only true 'underground' film-maker."
John Waters
"Gadfly, trickster, visionary — Jack Smith changed the art world. In what seems like tamer times, it's great to look back at a genuine and truly out-there revolutionary."
Laurie Anderson
Day of Niagara
Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol. I
2000
Table of the Elements
[Tungsten] TOE-CD-74
Compact disc
"Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music; Jim O'Rourke's unlikely entrance in the pantheon of indie rock; and Sonic Youth's worship of the avant-garde; these instances and countless others were all born from the same seed: the legend of the Dream Syndicate. One of the most significant and controversial releases of 2000, Inside the Dream Syndicate is the high-throttle point when 20th Century Classical almost became rock 'n' roll. This is the Big Bang of Minimalism."
Pitchfork
"The skyscraping wall of amplified string drone that is erected here towers over almost everything. Coupled with Cale's hypnotic, deafening, avant-rock viola is Conrad's equally impressive double-stop violin playing. Together they produce the sound illusion of some huge electrical generator, a grinding musical turbine that is forever shooting sparks to ignite the imagination ... Day of Niagara is an incredible piece of music. That it exists and is, at last, available to anyone who wants to hear it is nothing short of a miracle. Rejoice!"
The Wire
"These recordings are (part of) a library of effort that represented, for Tony and I at least, a labour of love. The power and majesty that was in that music is still on these tapes."
John Cale
"No lie, this might be the most historically significant music release of the last 20 years ... A fantastic piece of deeply ecstatic sound."
Aural Innovations
"A bracing and powerful document of a hugely influential ensemble that changed the sound of modern music."
Chicago Tribune
"Number 1 'Not-Pop' Release of 2000"
LA Weekly
"Exhilarating."
New York Times
"A bombshell."
Art Papers
"Amazing."
Village Voice
"Mindbending."
Spin
The Expanding Sea
2002
Table of the Elements
[Thallium] TOE-CD-81
3x compact discs, book, foil stamp, 96-page catalog
"San Agustin works in suspended slow-motion patterns that revolve around simple resonating phrases, like a rock trio stripped of all content, just leaving a bare skeleton of tone traces behind. The beauty is in its strict restraint; unlike many improvising trios, the group never heads off into chaos, with every piece a tamed and trimmed exercise in controlled feedback and subtle cymbal chimes. Bridging post-rock and avant-garde on one axis, and on the other retaining a strict adherence to rock tradition, the feel is of a familiar austerity that calls to mind the chilling moments of Sonic Youth's first album."
All Music Guide
Fantastic Glissando (1969)
2005
Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive
Table of the Elements
[Lead] TOE-CD-82
Compact disc, enclosure
“Massive slab of temporal disruption from one of the most consistently wowing figures to come out of the cultural meltdown of the 1960s. Conrad was a key mover in the Lower East Side rock and avant underground in the early to mid 60s, playing with Lou Reed, John Cale and Walter DeMaria in Reed’s frat-rock combo, The Primitives, and standing in with early line-ups of The Velvet Underground. But it was his activities as part of The Dream Syndicate/Theatre Of Eternal Music, a group dedicated to extending waves of single note bliss into whole new zones of psychoactive ecstasy, that were to have the most far-reaching cultural impact. Alongside John Cale, Angus MacLise, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Conrad founded a whole new approach to sound, working tiny pulsing intervals into long monotonal drones generated by bowed strings and vocals and birthing a minimalism several cells more blasted than the saccharine soundtracks associated with bigger hitting names like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. Fantastic Glissando dates from 1969 and features four tracks of degraded sine-wave oscillations that approximate the roar of a fleet of V-2 bombers.”
Volcanic Tongue
Sails
2005
Table of the Elements
[Actinium] TOE-CD-89
2x compact discs. custom enclosure
"Loren Mazzacane is one of those guitarist who has truly conceived his own instrumental language. That language speaks clearly and purely, and in short clusters of notes says more than most guitarists work says in a lifetime. His genius is rendered in his simultaneously abstract and intuitive improvisations; whether fragile and quiet or loaded with feedback, it all seethes with a gorgeous lyricism. Loren's work is as necessary and vibrant as ever, and you owe it to yourself to discover and explore the deep beauty of this guitarist's work."
Forced Exposure
Rien
1995
Table of the Elements
[Chromium] TOE-LP-24
Phono LP, gatefold jacket, 24" x 36" poster, playing-card insert, 12" x 10" obi
"O'Rourke vacuum-packs Faust's ear sabotage — rain-dance drumming, power-tool percussion, the crackle of gunfire — with such vivid energy that Faust sound less like a band than a living organism. In this rabid age of post-punk extremism, Faust seem quite at home, and Rien sounds very, very Now."
Rolling Stone
"Faust are essential, not just as a history lesson, but as a living legacy, and as a reproach to an underachieving age."
Melody Maker
Rien
1995
Table of the Elements
[Chromium] TOE-LP-24
Phono LP, gatefold jacket, 24" x 36" poster, playing-card insert, 12" x 10" obi
"[Rien] is rattlingly contemporary, thanks to the production hand of Jim O'Rourke, who has taken the rudiments of Faust's adventurous spirit and transplanted it into a wholly modern context. The influence of this most exacting sound sculptor has effectively created something akin to a dialogue between the contrasting experimental apparel of 70's Prog rock and 90's purveyors of the Ambient aesthetic. There are industrial mantras of almost crushing intensity, neo-psychedelic jams, concrete interludes, even a passage of bittersweet irony in the plundering of Gorecki's Third Symphony (the additional chorale of Industrial noise serving only to heighten the tragic air of Gorecki's original). This is Faust resharpened and revitalized, no longer part of rock's dinosaur parade, but a reshaped, refreshing, challenging voice in 90's experimentalism."
The Wire
"Faust do not just play rock & roll; they bring life to its darkest, most dangerous essence."
Rolling Stone
All photography in this gallery: Bradly Brown
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