Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: For the first time on vinyl, through Karl Records, comes a limited edition and furtive Yoko Ono retrospective, in conjunction with the over-100-strong, Sweden-headquartered ensemble and community network The Great Learning Orchestra. These unlikely recordings were made at the time of the musician and performance artist Ono's 1964 multimedia collection Grapefruit, a cornerstone of what would later become known as "conceptual art". Grapefruit itself is a large artist's book, with a large vellum spine and browned parchment paper; it contains a series of "event scores" that outline, rather than permit the performances of, many different performance art pieces. The effect is apocryphal and ominous, as though the real performance of these instructive works may have accursed or deleterious effects. "Like a musical score, Event Scores can be realized by artists other than the original creator and are open to variation and interpretation"; and yet, Ono's book is a one of one, having never been reproduced or thus made collectable. Pre-dating John Cage by about a decade, the "event scores" described therein have now been performed by The Great Learning Orchestra, where hardly any of the performances / pieces have ever been captured sonically or laid to disc. This record changes all that, realising Ono's bewildering text instructions as tremulous suites, made up of clattering material hits and harrowing string instrumental assaults.

Review: .Schneider TM is the multidimensional music project of Dirk Dresselhaus, and over recent years has been increasingly focused on freeform electronic compositions, conceived and constructed in the moment. This improvisation technique is hard to hear, with the producer seemingly capable of crafting these dense soundscapes that feel painstakingly constructed over time and space. Ereignishorizont, or Event Horizon is the latest case in point. Informed by science fiction, ideas around the unknown, dark matter, black holes and such phenomena at the very limits of human understanding, at times it feels like we've stepped through the portal and wound up on the other side of the dimensional scales. Performed using electroacoustic guitars - some of which he made himself - and effects fed into tube amps, taking a lead from modular synthesis, it's powerful, intriguing and, at times, oddly playful.