Category: releases

pan y rosas release psionic youth by reversed bear trap!

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Reversed Bear Trap is the musical side project of English PhD student Krista Muratore aka Krista Bloom. Krista Muratore is also a video artist, writer and general hooligan.

Psionic Youth is her first album on pan y rosas. It draws on samples to blur the boundaries between mainstream pop and experimental noise music in order to explore what we can learn from sampling. Psionic Youth in particular blends pop rap, synthpop, techno, noise and black metal in a disorienting, chaotic blend that will hopefully, at the very least, make the listener smile as they recognize familiar sounds in new contexts.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release crossings by pascal pons and alistair zaldua

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Pascal Pons is percussionist who is renowned as a soloist, ensemble player, pedagogue, and improviser. He is constantly searching for ways to rethink the percussion set-up to allow sound and resonance to be set free. This aesthetic and technical approach is apparent in percussive arrangements that range from the simple to the complex. He is active in commissioning and performing solo and concerto work with orchestra.

Alistair Zaldua is a composer, improviser and violinist based in Manchester, UK. In addition to solo improvisation, he performs in a duet for organ and live electronics with Lauren Redhead. His most recent projects involve duet improvisations with Alwynne Pritchard (Bergen), saxophonist Christoph Gallio (Aarau), percussionist Pascal Pons (Freiburg), Franziska Baumann (Bern), and with cellist Isidora Edwards.

crossings is the first album by Pascal Pons and Alistair Zaldua as a duo. It was recorded in the summer of 2022, in one take, with short pauses between each number, deep in the Black Forest.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release DJ Protestant by Violeta Garcia and Brice Catherin

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Violeta García is a cellist, composer and curator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She performs in many art forms including free improvisation, contemporary and trans-media experimental repertoire in violoncello and electronic music. In 2015 she founded a digital label and music series called TVL-REC, which is devoted to publishing new music, experimental groups and collectives from Latin America and organizing shows and festivals of noise and extreme music in Latin America and Europe.

Brice Catherin willingly stepped away from the contemporary music institutions in order to very freely develop a few activities: multi-instrumental cellist, improviser, composer and art performer. These activities feed into each another, so that beyond his multidisciplinary shows and improvised concerts, Brice has never stopped composing and premiering written pieces. Most of his recent projects explore the idea of democracy in art: the artists’ individual responsibilities and their place in the social group, as well as those of the members of the audience, are challenged and questioned.

Violeta and Brice brought their cello visions together for a freely improvised joint effort. Their first album as a duo is a unique trip of noise and extended string techniques in an immersive, dark winter. Fog, wood, and love surround these two Libra October-born, beautiful, humans.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release fifty-one aural selfies // real time by Klaysstarr Nets

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Klaysstarr Nets (Iain Findlay-Walsh he/him) is a sound artist, musician and writer based in Glasgow. He teaches sound art and experimental practice at the University of Glasgow.

His first album on pan y rosas discos is a nested problem that captures a listening process. A self-occupation and a form of dreaming. One that listens to solitary listening and documents life at close proximity. Restless street sounds turned inside out. Networks feel for a now that sings.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release Wasserläufer by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Markus Reineke

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Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is Finnish composer, writer and musician who makes music in the worlds of free improvisation, electronics, and (live) coding using electric guitars, pianos, clarinets, and synths. He lives in a small village, between two lakes, in the middle of the forest.

Markus Reineke has made music using electronics since 1996. He has been freely improvising since 2014. He uses recorders and electronics.

On their new album for pan y rosas Jukka and Markus created five improvised songs that they created using recorders, objects, an electric guitar, and electronics.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release este instante by Omar Grandoso!

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Omar Grandoso was born in Buenos Aires. He plays piano and trombone among other instruments. He has participated in many projects with different ensembles and plays regularly with many musicians in improvisation contexts. In addition to playing with free music groups, he also works within experimental films and contemporary dance; making compositions for theater, visual arts and multimedia. He is an activist in the musicians’ organization, MO – Músicos Organizados, that tries to both improve the work conditions of musicians and to strengthen their ties with the community.

To avoid the fear brought on by the Covid pandemic and Omar concentrated on playing the electric piano in his room. After restrictions were lifted in Buenos Aires he scheduled two record sessions at a studio and tried to recreate what he had been doing in his room. He improvised and let other musics (and musics of others) simply appear in the improvisation. After letting the work sit for a time, he began working to condense the recording experience into an instant of the present. Este instante is an effort to converge memories from the past with visions of the future in a small particle of time called music.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release ravel by jenn kirby!

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Jenn Kirby is a composer, performer and music technologist from Ireland and currently based in Scotland. She has a diverse creative output, including instrumental composition, electroacoustic music and avant-pop. Her music has been described as having a “sense of adventure and experimentalism.” Jenn’s performance work is centered around hybrid instrument design, building software, re-purposing hardware, and processing improvised vocalisations. She is a lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland.

On her new album, Ravel, Jenn explores different aspects of the manipulation of time. She asks how the digital results of manipulating time relate to her perception of time in the physical world. Having become comfortable watching videos at 2x speed, she recently found herself wanting to 2x a video call. In that moment, getting the information in real-time seemed inefficient. She wondered if she saw efficiency as simply squashing as much as possible into as little time as possible, and what that means for making and experiencing music.

The artifacts produced from extended time-stretching are further processed to create textures and glitches. The resulting fragments suggest things lost or things found. Through a collapsing, expanding and ravelling of information, something new is created. It is not simply the same thing played fast or slow, but a new ‘thing’ that is very different to the original source, though still connected to it. The foundations of the songs are improvisations and there were no restrictions on the processing and production except that nothing was redone. Though the material was shaped and transformed in many ways, it has an origin that is connected to a time, place and emotion.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release ribcage/davidsongs by cut a lonely figure!

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Cut A Lonely Figure (formerly known as Thank You, Merciless Onlookers) is the musical alias of Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records founder David McNamee.

His new album for pan y rosas consists of two pices. ribcage is a longform brutalist piano composition figuratively depicting two pianos being slowly pulled apart and then pushed back together over the course of its pounding 23-minute runtime. The second piece, davidsongs, is a medley of semi-improvised pieces for chamber organ and piano that functions as a sort of comedown or balm from the intensity of the a-side.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release Where The Wind Takes Us by Trio CZW

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Trio CZW are improviser, composer and jazz musician Paul Cheneour (flutes) who invokes aspects of classical Indian and Persian music, composes for film and performs with—amongst others—the Zen Bicycle Band and ‘Whereness’; the British-Colombian composer Alistair Zaldua (e-violin) – whose recent work has focused on the interplay between notation and improvisation; and experimental musician Maureen Wolloshin (oboe and cor anglais) – who works between notation, improvisation, composition and performance. They describe their collaborative practice as ‘cartographism’: improvisations that are informed by graphic and text scores that can be imagined as maps and allows them to explore, traverse and uncover dynamic spaces.

Based in Canterbury, UK, Trio CZW have been active since 2019 and, as an offshoot of the Free Range Orchestra, emerged from the Free Range Experimental Music Concert Series in Canterbury, UK. Like FRO, the influences of Trio CZW comprise experimental jazz and free improvisation, live electronic music, and experimental sound poetry.

Where The Wind Takes Us is a suite of improvisations inspired by sonic paintings, graphic notation, or titles created during the covid-19 lockdown in the UK. The performances evoke the isolation and stasis the trio experienced during this period, together with the energy and enjoyment of playing together in the beautiful surroundings of St. Mary of Charity Church in Faversham, a traditional Kentish market town, close to Canterbury, where Maureen lives. The recordings were made in single takes using two ambient microphones positioned to capture the acoustic quality of the building and the natural sounds of the instruments within it.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release dirty dialogues by dirty electronics ensemble, jon.ogara, and anna xambó!

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Dirty Electronics focuses on shared experiences, ritual, gesture, touch and social interaction. In Dirty Electronics, process and performance are inseparably bound. The ‘performance’ begins on the workbench devising instruments and is extended onto the stage through playing and exploring these instruments. This time around the ensemble consists of John Richards, Amit D Patel aka Dushume, Audrey Riley, Sam Topley, Harry Smith, Zach Dawson, Robin Foster, Jacob Myer Braslawsce, Ben Middle, Samuel Warren, Matt Rogerson. Photo by Susanne Grunewald.

Jon.Ogara started his musical path by learning the flute at school and discovered the delights of classical music. He studied electronics at the University of Manchester with a focus on radio communications. At university, he learnt the guitar and started to create more independent rock music, influenced by bands such as The Fall or Cabaret Voltaire. He discovered the saxophone and Jazz and started to bring together ideas of Jazz improvisation into his composition. With the development of the internet and connected devices, he started to explore the world of experimental music and began to share ideas and compositions.

Anna Xambó is a researcher and musician with a background in computer science engineering, digital humanities and digital arts. She completed her phd in 2015 (the open university), specializing in music computing and HCI, and is currently a senior lecturer in music and audio technology (de Montfort University). Her musical practice includes live coding, multichannel spatialization, tangible music, collaborative interfaces, audience participation with mobile devices, and intelligent music systems for music performance. She has performed internationally and works actively in the music tech and experimental electronic music scenes as a co-founder of the online music record label Carpal Tunnel in Barcelona (Spain); as co-founder of Women in Music Tech at Georgia Tech (USA); as co-founder of Women Nordic Music Technology (Norway); and as a co-organizer of international concerts.

Dirty Dialogues documents a live encounter between Dirty Electronics Ensemble, Jon.Ogara and Anna Xambó in a free music improvisation session after a long pandemic lockdown. Thirteen musicians on stage combining analogue and digital instruments, acoustic and electronic materials, live coding and DIY sound-making techniques. An intense polymorphic journey of sonic exploration and chaos, which is especially recommended for noise music lovers. This album was recorded on May 17, 2021 at PACE (De Montfort University) with no audience due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Get the album here!