Tetsu Inoue & Carl Stone - Pict.Soul

From Allmusic.com : "A first collaboration between Tetsu Inoue and Carl Stone, pict.soul has been released by the record label of Cycling '74, the computer company that produced the Max/MSP software. One could fear the album would turn into something like a demonstration tool, but it is not the case. The music remains computer-based electronica, but in general inspiration prevails over system requirements -- it sticks close to both artists' previous releases. Of course, each of them tugs on the bedsheets and the balance between Inoue's delicate, experimental ambient music and Stone's more jagged-edge constructions shifts from one track to the next. "%.disc" is pure Inoue: soft, insidious, and mesmerizing. "(.ram)" and "@.fine" are most probably Stone creations: busy, they build interruptions and glitches into something you could dance to if you had a third leg in the middle of your back. Everything in between finds the two compromising to find common ground -- and explore something new, as "?.digit" testifies. A sample (circus organ?) is literally orchestrated to form a mechanical fanfare. Interesting in concept, it is not completely convincing. Otherwise pict.soul is a fine CD recommendable to fans of Kim Cascone, Kit Clayton, and the like."

"Pict.Soul" was released by Cycling 74 in 2001.

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Carl Stone - Nak Won

From Allmusic.com : "Nak Won is a major addition to Carl Stone's discography. Released in late 2002 by the French label Sonore, it presents three pieces performed in real time on a laptop computer running Max/MSP software and recorded in various locations on the West Coast. A demanding program, possibly Stone's most uncompromising album to date, Nak Won is nevertheless highly rewarding. The title track, 24 minutes long, could have you a little worried at first. It starts like one of Sachiko M's sine-wave pieces. Arid at first, it slowly grows as the tones get chopped up and thrown around into the stereo field. A lush background of electronic noises swells at the midpoint, receding as activity decreases to complete what ends up being a cycle. "Kreutz" is very different. First of all, it reveals its sound source up front: a piano. More ambient, the music hovers delicately, like one of Ekkehard Ehlers' limping waltzes or Christian Fennesz's cloudy surf music reminiscences. But the highlight of this album is the half-hour "Darul Kabap." Here, Stone samples, breaks down, and reassembles an Arabian singer, traditional Chinese music, dance music, and a few more sources (Hans Reichel's daxophone at one point?) into a dizzying cut-and-paste race that brings to mind Ground Zero's Revolutionary Pekinese Opera. It never reaches that level of mind-boggling schizophrenia, but it makes a commanding effort trying and ends up (especially in the last ten minutes) sounding like Kid 606 minus the poise!"

"Nak Won" was released by Sonore in 2002.

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Carl Stone - Mom's

From Allmusic.com : "Carl Stone was one of the first contemporary composers to take a serious look at sampling technology and Mom's is his masterpiece. With an extremely wide range of musical interests, Stone generally employed one of two strategies: either he took diverse material from unrelated sources and stitched them together to create an entirely new and amazing fabric or he took the tiniest sliver of sound and investigated microscopically, peeling away layers and unearthing incredible and hitherto-unheard material. The former is in evidence on the title track, with music from numerous geographical areas (what sounds like -- but may not be -- Haitian guitars, South American brass bands, and Eastern European accordions, among many others) being made to cohere into an exciting, rhythmically alive soundtrack from everywhere. "Gadberry's," a live performance (all pieces are titled after eateries favored by the composer), has a generally gamelan feel, with metallic, percolating percussion augmented by guitar and bass sounds that inject an ever-so-slight funky element. "Shing Kee" is an example of the second approach and is a phenomenally beautiful piece of music. Using as its source a tiny slice of the Japanese pop singer Akiko Yano singing Schubert lieders in English, Stone very gradually stretches it out from around one second to several in looped fashion. As more and more of the fragments come into the range of aural perception, the listener has the impression of an impossibly vast landscape opening up before him or her. When, about halfway through, it reaches a turning point, the result is as dramatic and startling as anything in more traditional fields of composition. Recorded between 1986-1992, the art of sampling has come a long way since and there are aspects of Mom's that could come across as quaint to someone familiar, for example, with the work of Otomo Yoshihide (who collaborated with Stone on the fine Monogatari album), but Stone's musical ideas continue to carry the day. No one has covered this area of contemporary music with more grace and acumen. Very highly recommended."

"Mom's" was released by New Albion in 1992.

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Carl Stone - Kamiya Bar

From Allmusic.com : "Composer Carl Stone, known for his advanced work in sampling collages, was commissioned by Tokyo FM to construct a piece consisting entirely of sampled "sounds of Tokyo Life." Many of the sources are clear: street sounds, snatches of conversation, and TV commercials. But Stone has a track record of taking the familiar and stretching and distorting it to almost unrecognizable lengths, as well as combining disparate sounds into a surprisingly cohesive whole. This is done to fairly good effect here, as on "Axis," where a whirlwind of chatter is given a funky rhythmic accompaniment, giving one the sensation of giddily loping down a crowded Tokyo street. Similarly, "Cue" takes samples of male Japanese speakers (street-sellers?) and loops them into rounds that have a techno-y dancehall quality. Other pieces, like "Big Gold," are closer to pure musique concrète work, very reminiscent of Luc Ferrari. But there's a bit of a tentative, lab-experiment quality to some of these pieces, as intellectually fascinating as they might be. It's only with "Cooking Papa" that all the elements come together into a wonderfully rich stew, beginning with isolated shards and ultimately congealing into a driving, irresistible groove. Here, the dizzying, kaleidoscopic nature of what a Westerner might imagine when plunged into the vastness of contemporary Japanese culture becomes viscerally real. While the entire album is enjoyable enough, this one work makes it a must-buy both for Stone fans and for those who generally enjoy all the magic that can occur at the hands of a composer who knows what a sampler is capable of."

"Kamiya Bar" was released by New Tone Records in 1995.

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Carl Stone - Exusiai

From Allmusic.com : "Exusiai is a dance suite written by Carl Stone, well known for his early work in samplers, best heard on his masterwork, Mom's. As is typical in Stone's work, the samples he uses as basic material are manipulated until they are all but unrecognizable, ground up, hyper-extended, or sliced into slivers. This results in a wide variety of electronic washes and burblings with the occasional familiar sound, a trumpet here, a bell tone there. Possibly because of its ultimate use as accompaniment for a dancer, however, there is little focus and development of ideas here and more simply "sound painting" as though, given the time guidelines necessary for the performance, Stone was merely filling the space with various attractive textures. Several sound as though they might have been derived from similar sources to much of "Gadberry's" from the Mom's disc; others recall Terry Riley's undulating keyboard studies. While some of these matrices, like the aptly titled "Liquid Body," are inherently fascinating and even luxurious, there seems to be a lack of driving motivation that characterized his earlier work. Possibly, it was simply a matter of the technology having caught up with him; ten years prior, Stone was a master of the field, but by 1998, others had taken the ball and ran much further. Still, an enjoyable enough effort and one that fans of Stone will be glad to own."

"Exusiai" was released by New Tone Records in 1999.

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Carl Stone - Emit 1196

From Allmusic.com : "The four-part "Nyala" is Stone's first full-length for the Nottingham-based Em:t label, whose usual base of post-rave electronic experimenters is pretty severely shaken by Stone's unflinching, often very dissonant textural sense. The piece works slowly through vague, minimal melodic passages to busier, more antagonistic sections, with repeating elements tweaking and morphing over time."

"Emit 1196" was released by Emit in 1996.

Get it here : Carl Stone - Emit 1196

Lowercase-Sound 2002 [2 x CD Boxset]

From Allmusic.com : "This two-CD compilation describes better than words the scope and interest of the field of attentive listening and microscopic sounds. Beautifully and originally designed, the box contains previously unreleased contributions by a representative cross section of artists. Disc one focuses on pieces derived from field recordings or recordings of acoustic instruments. Gal's "Zhu Shui" (an assemblage of bowling up and cooling down tea kettles) and John Hudak's "Radio Past" (a wax cylinder recording severely altered by the passage of time) stand out, with contributions by Dale Lloyd and Jason Lescalleet also offering memorable moments. Radu Malfatti's "Selbander" is an excruciatingly minimal piece for three trombones made of short episodes of droning activity separated by lengthy silences. Disc two culls tracks of a more purely electronic nature and here we find many top names in the field of experimental electronica and installation art: Francisco Lopez, Stephan Mathieu, Carl Stone, Tetsu Inoue, Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone -- even Toshimaru Nakamura is represented with one of his pieces on no-input mixing board. Stone's gentle ambient workout "Tefu" and Ronnie Sundin's (aka Rsundin) "_siesmol" provide the highlights of this second platter. The latter piece contains a sudden loud sound that ranks as the set's only heart-attack-inducing moment -- you'll remember it. In short, lowercase-sound 2002 is an open-minded, inclusive collection rating high as being representative of both the artists involved in this style and the kind of design that usually accompanies their music. Highly recommended."

CD 1 :
1-01   The Beige Channel - Implosion
1-02   Tucker Dulin - One Minute
1-03   Gal - Zhu Shui
1-04   Josh Russell - Bp70/32
1-05   Bob L. Sturm - 100:200111 Torrey Pines Outer Buoy
1-06   Dale Lloyd - Fleeting Recollections Of The Snow Plain
1-07   Matt Shoemaker - Charm
1-08   Yannick Dauby - In Dolem
1-09   Electric Company - M
1-10   Reynols - Blank Tapes Mogal
1-11   Joseph Siemion - Discorse
1-12   Animist Orchestra - 4/7/01
1-13   Radu Malfatti - Selbander
1-14   Jason Lescalleet - The Destructive Effects Of Group Dynamics
1-15   David Gross - Untitled
1-16   Undr Quartet - Your Name Was Written In Green
1-17   John Hudak - Radio Past

CD 2 :
2-01   Otaku Yakuza - The Space Of A Second
2-02   Francisco López - Untitled #118
2-03   Rsundin - _Siesmol
2-04   Akira Rabelais - Disjectimembrapoetaeeatelich
2-05   Stephan Mathieu - Flake
2-06   Immedia - -(2)
2-07   Dan Abrams - Feature
2-08   Peter Van Hoesen - Objectseq
2-09   Michael Schumacher - Still
2-10   Carl Stone - Tefu
2-11   Tetsu Inoue - Compact
2-12   Taylor Deupree - Inharmil
2-13   Kim Cascone - Edge Boundry #1
2-14   Toshimaru Nakamura - Nimb #20
2-15   Jonas Lindgren - Groundwater
2-16   Civyiu Kkliu - Ludmilla Faulk

"Lowercase-Sound 2002" was released by Bremsstrahlung in 2002.

Get it here : Lowercase-Sound 2002