When I first saw his picture on this cute 3" CD, I thought: "what a freak!". But I didn't mean to be mean; the funny-looking captain-dressed 50 year old man with a vague resemblance to Benny Hill and Walter Matthau on the picture is indeed german filmmaker Klaus Beyer, who apparently dresses like that to go to parties and sing Beatles songs in german over karaoke tapes! This is what he has been doing since 1980 (besides films, of course). I visited his website and he truly has an impressive discography!!! He doesn't have a great voice and doesn't have a great pitch either, the sound quality is very very very home d.i.y, but this guy is been getting attention from Rolling Stone magazine and even Playboy, tv documentaries and other media! Don't ask me why, but apparently listening to out of tune, poorly instrumented and poorly recorded German versions of "Yesterday" and "Yellow Submarine" is supposed to be interesting, or at least amusing, considering how much fun the folks at the live recording of the fourth song are having... I understand German and I can see how it can be funny, I am an extremely open minded person too (you have to be, in order to enjoy Staalplaat's releases) and I am not evil when reviewing weird stuff either, but in this case I must give a thumb down; I mean, if you ask me, he should stick to films!

They write that the quite beautiful carton sleeve packaging for this CD, developed with no use of neither plastic nor glue or metal, pretty much like an origami, is most definitely non industry standard, but you can say that again for its contents! What is also interesting and compelling about the original artwork is that the tracks are actually show/displayed, rather than listed, in fact you can see the visual layout of the waveforms instead of a tracklist... The five selections have been carefully placed together after analyzing more than three hours worth of DAT recordings which were the results of some joint sound manipulation sessions by Main (Robert Hampson, formerly of Loop and Godflesh) and Antenna Farm (David Howell and Alastair Leslie). The two set ups came together in 2000 for the Brombron project, started by Staalplaat and Extrapool in the Netherlands, and produced almost an hour of audio consisting of rough crackling electric bits, droning noiscapes, digital glitch passages etc...

Recorded April 18th 2000 for the dutch VPRO radio this 4 piece full lenght instrumental CD presents a band that makes extensive use of guitars and other traditional instruments such as bass and drum... Although their info sheet presents them as a band playing "rock music of the more spacious kinds" there are not many rock traces to be found here... More like some slow almost psychedelic wave eventually escalating into a nearly psychotic repetitive burst of energetic riffs... It's actually pretty relaxing at times.. Yes occasionally, throughout the long run of these four compositions a couple of guitars (tremolo, distorted, clean, noisy) plays over a repeating bass riff and a smooth drum beat with muted snare (like in track no.3).
The cover is made of a silver plastic sleeve designed by Cyan in Berlin.

The three Chicago dudes behind Aerospace Soundwise, Black Dot Corporation and Wheaton Research joined to give birth to a laptop trio called TV Pow. Together they explore small bits of sounds, hi frequency hisses that a 70 year old man would probably not even hear, microscopic audio data streams, occasional string instrument string picks, outside field noises and other sounds and noises from mechanical and natural origin. 15 tracks on a cute little 20 minutes 3" disc. Pretty damn twisted stuff. I wouldn't know about fresh and innovative (unless of course you consider everything in this category of music fresh and innovative just for the fact of plain being in this fresh and innovative category) but definitely something weird ;-).
Recent releases include Staalplaat's "Mort Aux Vaches" (cmp this section for review) and Erstwhile's "We Are Everyone in the Room" with Iceland's Stilluppsteypa.

45.18 is a truly radical release aiming to portrait nine free interpretations of what perhaps is the most controversial composition of all times: John Cage's "4.33", consisting of opening the piano lid and closing it after the given time, without playing a single note. The closest to silence as a form of music is AMM member Keith Rowe's opening track. Other performers also experiment with industrial and electronic noise, hardcore, various noises and include Artificial Memory Trace, Sonic Youth's guitar player Thurston Moore, Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening Band and guests, Jio Shimizu (WRK), Voice Crack, Clive Graham (Morphogenesis), Toshiya Tsunoda, Alignment and Frans De Waard himself, who also provided the CD with very extensive and interesting liner notes (co-written by Alignment's member Mark Poysden). If there was an award for most experimental label of the present time, I think I would definitely award it to Staalplaat and its various sub-labels and branches (such us in this case, Korm Plastics). Get ready, here it comes: silence...