16-17: Gyatso

Alex Buess, Markus Kneubühler and Christoph Fringeli with a rough mixture of improvised music with a forthright powerful beat & high tech as well as trash electronics. A work of energetic urgency that lives up to its name! From 1989! Mint copies from the label's vaults!

BACK IN STOCK After nearly running out of this title, we just received some returns from a distributor and have14 copies in stock again. 16-17 return to Praxis with a triple assault of ultrasonic remixes. The Pandemic Wargames Remixes are based on backing tracks originally recorded in 1995 for a follow up to the album Gyatso which eventually materialised earlier in 2020 in the form of the Phantom Limb LP on Trost. After that Alex Buess once more gave three tracks a severe treatment for The Pandemic Wargames Remixes 12″ on Praxis, bringing sound and mix firmly into the 2020s.

The album Phantom Limb was originally recorded in 1995 as a follow-up to Gyatso and released in 2020 on the Trost label.Recorded 1995 at Wollf 281 Studio, Basel, by Manuel LiebeskindVocals recorded 2018 at Ruminator Audio, San Francisco, by Monte VallierMixed, mastered and produced 2018/19 by Alex BuessEdited by Roger GrafCut at Centraldubs, Bern, by Adi FlückArtwork by Marco Papiro

"Official bootleg" of wild live show by NoisePunkJazz veterans 16-17 live at Taktos festival in 1995. Remastered by Alex Buess in 2022 and now released as a collaboration of Skin + Speech and Plattfon Records. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=736615850/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=e32c14/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://skinandspeechrecords.bandcamp.com/album/16-17-live-taktlos-1995-the-official-bootleg-album-s-s-main002-fon002-released-in-collaboration-s-s-plattfon-records">16-17 live @ Taktlos 1995_The Official Bootleg Album_(S|S Main002/FON002)_Released in collaboration S|S+Plattfon Records by 16-17</a></iframe>

A momentous, heavy, noisy and radical release by former 16-17 members Alex and Daniel Buess. This is the first release by their Cortex project which has been going on since 1999.  More recently they contributed 'Skin Craft' - RIND & NOL (Praxis 55) to the Praxis label catalogue. A - The Machinic Phylum 7:37  B1 - Usu 3:11 B2 - Mutabor 5:10 <iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3300416508/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=e32c14/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="http://praxisrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vacuum-theory-praxis-48">Vacuum Theory (Praxis 48) by Cortex</a></iframe>

Two powerful compositions by Alex Buess and Daniel Buess, rearranged by Cortex. RIND is a work using three large self-built cow skin frame drums, 1 horse skin container drum, metal plates and electronics. NOL is a composition by Alex Buess for a percussion trio from 1995. The two pieces were recorded live in 2010 and 2003 respectively, also featuring the musicians Daniel Stalder, Peter Conradin Zumthor and Matthias Würsch. They were electronically treated by Cortex in the studion in 2015. This release continues the collaboration with Alex Buess that goes back to the pre-Praxis days of the Vision label since 1987 and includes Praxis 31 by 16-17 and Praxis 48 by Cortex, both of which also included Daniel Buess. Cover art by Darkam and layout by Lynx. ALEX BUESS – is a musician, saxophonist, composer, producer who lives in Basel, Switzerland. He has collaborated with Stephan Wittwer, Paul Schütze, Kevin Martin, Peter Brötzmann, William Parker, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Bill Laswell, Kevin Shields, Tim Hodgkinson, Michael Wertmüller and many other musicians in the wide field of improvisation, electronics, electroacoustic music and composition. He plays/played in the groups ICE, GOD, Phantom City, The Bug, Sprawl, Cortex and his own group 16-17, as well as Melx and The Electric Noise Twist. The latter were part of a close collaboration with Christoph Fringeli’s Vision label from 1987-1991, before Christoph moved to London and started the Praxis label, a collaboration that continued over the decades with releases by 16-17 and Cortex on Praxis. Alex has written compositions for various contemporary music ensembles and also works as a producer and sound engineer. He has appeared at numerous new music festivals and his compositions are performed in Europe and throughout the world. His studies include electronics, acoustics, musicology, phonetics,semantics and composition and his work reflects his experiences with electronic technology, written contemporary music, film music, new mixing and production techniques and computer music. DANIEL BUESS - studied at the Musikhochschule Basel with Siegfried Schmid and with Isao Nakamura in Karlsruhe. Studies in traditional South Indian percussion music, specially the Mridangam from 1995 till 1998 and in Arabic percussion music in Cairo, Egypt from Nov. 2007 till Jan. 2008. Daniel was involved in various groups and ensembles in the realm of experimental and improvised music, like “Ensemble Phoenix Basel” of which he was a core-member and solo-percussionist since its foundation in 1998, Cortex, 16-17 (both with Alex Buess), HOW2 (with the percussionist Daniel Stalder), “Katarakt”, “B&B” (with the flautist Christoph Bösch), MIR (with Papiro and Michael Zaugg), Buggatronic (with James Hullick). Other collaborations include artists like Hany Bedair, Knut Remond, Zbigniew Karkowski, Kasper T.Toeplitz, John Duncan, Michael Wertmüller, Phill Niblock, Julio Estrada, Stephan Wittwer, Volker Heyn, Thomas Lauck, Tim Hodgkinson, Iancu Dumitrescu and many others. At his regular tours through Europe, Asia and Australia, he performed at the most highly recognised festivals for experimental music as well as at several underground-places, open spaces and independent venues. Sadly Daniel passed away in February 2016, making “Skin Craft” unexpectedly a posthumous release.

Limited re-press - OUT NOW!. 50 copies are available for general distribution, the other 50 are reserved for the Praxis online shop and bandcamp. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=945351175/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=e32c14/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://praxisrecords.bandcamp.com/album/trocante-gramofony-e-p-praxis-33">Trocante Gramofony E.P. (Praxis 33) by Nomex</a></iframe>   Originally released in 1999 in an edition of 500 copies on transparent white vinyl as Praxis 33, Trocante Gramofony E.P. by Nomex is re-pressed in a limited edition of 100 copies on black vinyl from the original plates.   Trocante Gramofony opens with the monumental ‘Fire Is The Centre’, followed by two other Nomex masterpieces, ‘Life Destroy’ and ‘No-Step 2000’, as well as three speaker-destroying fragments and locked grooves.   It was a departure from Nomex’s releases on his own Adverse label and was naturally quite different from the DJ Scud collaborations on Maschinenbau. In relation to his other solo work, Trocante Gramofony is perhaps less conceptual and more composed.   ‘Fire Is The Centre’ features vocal snippets recorded at a Dead By Dawn party sometime between 1994-1996. Some of these snippets had been used on the Dead By Dawn record by Shitness & The Jackal, but here they were embedded in a surging wall of noise spread over the first side of the record, complete with crackles, shrieks and ever mounting intensity.   The second side opens with ‘Life Destroy’ an intense collage of voice, noise and music and ends with ‘No-Step 2000’.   Tracks don’t end in orderly fashion, instead the needle jumps out of the groove or is locked in a loop. The flow gets interrupted in the middle of the side of the record. These elements are again vinyl specific and can’t easily be transported to the digital realm, and this is one reason we decided to make this brilliant record available again in its ideal format, the vinyl 12”.  

2 years after their debut album on Utech Records, P/O MASSACRE goes deeper in their immersive noise experimentation in this collaboration album with Alex Buess, and Merzbow (Masami Akita 秋田昌美). An architecture of distortion, Moog processors, spring reverb, drone effects and more, then developed in different directions by two electronic/noise veterans. It’s a journey of pure sensation, destruction, and rebirth. A skull-vibrating sound decomposition to your face. For this very reason of searching the limit of frequency and sound structure, we’ve decided to make this album as double 45 rpm vinyl, for a maximum aural experience, cut for vinyl by Frédéric Alstadt at Mont Analogue Masters. As he says: “it’s the cut of the uncuttable”. The visual design and layout are taken care of by the Taiwanese noise builder Chia-Chun Xu (Karma Detonation Tapes), with the artwork from the film destroying artist Tseng Peng-Chieh. Heavy gatefold sleeve, with obi and a bonus CD which includes an exclusive track “Nonslaught” from the same recording session by P/O MASSACRE only. Double album available in two versions: Black vinyl and a colour vinyl edition with one record in marbled green and one in marbled rusty vinyl. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1552830126/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=e32c14/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://skinandspeechrecords.bandcamp.com/album/aural-corrosion-s-s-main003-wv082-released-in-collaboration-s-s-wvsorcerer">Aural Corrosion_(S|S Main003/WV082)_Released in  collaboration S|S + WVSorcerer by P/O Massacre+Alex Buess+Merzbow</a></iframe>