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RECENT RELEASES: Richard Lainhart - "White Night" - 10,00 € + postage
PRESS RELEASE: “White Night” is a rediscovered early masterpiece of Ambient and Drone music. Recorded in 1974, this lustrous 29-minute track came a full year ahead of Brian Eno’s “Discreet Music” and reinforces Richard Lainhart both as an often overlooked pioneer of electronic music and a composer capable of transforming methodically built experiments into pure and romantic soundstates.
Lainhart taped “White Night” in the late fall of 1974 at the State University of New York at Albany in the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio. As he completed the final mix, a snow storm hit town. “All I could see was the snow swirling in the light against the blackness; a moving painting continually drawn, erased, and redrawn, always changing, but always the same”, Lainhart remembers, “It was beautiful.” To commemorate the evening, he calls the piece “White Night”.
It consists of a single, four note chord, whose root tones were sent through seperate sine wave oscillators. Because these oscillators were in turn controlled by sequencers running in their own independent timebases, the result is not just a static, repetitive drone, but a continously breathing, billowing and deflating “complex harmonic waveform”.
After its birth, “White Night “ then spends two full decades in Lainhart’s archives. When XI Records release their retrospective of his work (“Ten Thousand Shades of Blue”), it is not even included.
In 2005, a full 21 years after its release, Richard Lainhart decides to offer “White Night” for free download from his new website. Only a couple of days later, Tobias Fischer of Ex Ovo decides to search for Lainhart on the web, while browising almost randomly for a story for his WebZine tokafi.com. It is a complete and perfect coincidence. He hears “White Night” and is immediately mesmerised by its beauty. Tobias immediately sends the link to his Ex Ovo partner Mirko Uhlig, who feels the same. They decide to contact Lainhart that very day.
In 2006, Ex Ovo releases “I, Mute Hummings”, a collection of Drone pieces, which includes an eight-minute edit of “White Night”, remixed by Richard Lainhart himself. The track is constantly singled out in reviews, with the Wire calling it “gorgeous”, and creates demand for the full version to be released.
And so here it is, almost a quarter of a century after its completion: A moment of complete inspiration culled from a night covered “in the glow of the sequencers and tape decks."
RECENT RELEASES: Feu Follet & Miina Virtanen - "The Icicle Lectures Vol. 1" - 10,00 € + postage
PRESS RELEASE: "„The Icicle Lectures Vol. 1“ is the first episode of a collaboration between Feu Follet mastermind and Ex Ovo co-founder Tobias Fischer and Finnish composer and pianist Miina Virtanen. Premiered live to great success in Dresden in February of 2007, it embraces elements from Classical Music, Ambient and contemporary composition in one continous, challenging, yet emotional piece. After his debut "Toi Et Le Son" (on Einzeleinheit) in January 2006 and an ankle-deep march through a mesmerising stream of foggy sounds, Feu Follet has arrived at the frozen lake of 2007. The realisation of this album was one of those little miracles life sometimes hands us. In his sidejob, Fischer also writes for the house journal of a large call center located in Münster. It caught his eye that there was an ad in each each edition for CDs with piano music and he decided to check it out. Only a couple of months later, “The Icicle Lectures Vol 1” (which bases on Virtanen’s “Silence Thoughts II”) was a fact.
"The Icicle Lectures Vol.1" sees Fischer combining the glacial drones of the predecessor with the warm, radiating piano drops of Finnish discovery Miina Virtanen. The end result is an airy, hardly tangible composition of removal and recurrence. Like feathers falling down on an icy surface in slow motion." v.a. - Mandala Vol. 1 - 5,00 € + postagefeat. Mirko Uhlig, Feu Follet, Keith Berry & Jörg Eger 
PRESS RELEASE: "The concept for this new series by “Ex Ovo” is simple: Four artists are selected for a musical session of Chinese Whispers. The first starts with five minutes of his music and passes it on to his successor, until there is a complete track of about twenty minutes’ length. Starting things off are labelfounders Mirko Uhlig and Tobias Fischer (aka Feu Follet), as well as two guests for this edition: Zen Drone Master Keith Berry and German guitarist Jörg Eger. From Uhlig’s deep and multilayered opening, the piece crosses into a space of enigmatic listening with Feu Follet’s spacious and touching contribution and Berry’s dark majesty, before culminating in a triumphant and otherworldly slide solo.
Preparations for Volume two are alrady on their way.
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"I, Mute Hummings" - 15,00 € + postageCD compilation feat. Keith Berry, Fear Falls Burning, Dronæment, Troum, Jeffrey Roden, Paul Bradley, Steve Jolliffe, Column One and Richard Lainhart! 
PRESS RELEASE: "This collection of dense atmopsheres features a former member of Tangerine Dream and offers you the chance to listen to the world premiere of a long-lost thirty year old gem by an early synthesizer pioneer - as well as exclusive tracks by seven influential artists from the field of contemporary drone music. “I, Mute Hummings” combines the Zen-inspired timelessness of Keith Berry, the circulating guitarspots of Fear Falls Burning, Dronæment's welfare mix of vinyl crackling with mumbling ether, Troum's excursions into human dreamscapes and on the other side Column One's fluttering and sawing machinery. In between rest the well balanced works of Jeffrey Roden, Paul Bradley and Steve Jolliffe. Roden creates a whole aural landscape with his bass guitar alone. It's like walking through a drony barnyard. You can simply HEAR the fresh air. It all gets more and more closed with Paul Bradley's contribution. Like Berry's piece this one conjures up floating images - ceaseless waves of drones. Steve Jolliffe - who played on Tangerine Dream's 1978 output "Cyclone" - is an old stager of electronic music and here his wonderful flute-sketch sinks deeper and deeper into the hissing maelstrom of digital glitches. But manages to reach the saving shore where Richard Lainhart - a pioneer of Moog-music - closes this collection with an exclusive rework of his stunning "White Nights". All featured titles are previously unreleased! 15,00 € + postage ...And as an EXCLUSIVE MAILORDER BONUS: 
“I, Mute Hummings Special Edition: MUTE SCRIBBLES". This edition will contain a bonus compilation called "Mute Scribbles" on top of the regular CD, which will be limited to 100 copies and can only be purchased via our online-shop. For the airy surcharge of 2 € you will be served a 75-minute menu of well-known projects as well as some up and coming droney artists. Even though some of these names may not yet be known to you, this collection is just as deep and dreamy as the original “I, Mute Hummings” in our opinion. Don’t miss out on it! Feat. Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf, Monostabil, Feu Follet, Tholen, Emerge, Brian Uzna, Mirko Uhlig and Balog 17,00 € + postage only via MAILORDER BUY AT www.exovo.org ABOUT...
EX OVO was founded at the beginning of January 2006 by Tobias Fischer (Feu Follet) and Mirko Uhlig (Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf). "This was not a new-year’s fad but our love for dulcet drone music. We don’t want to specialise in any particular format: we love them all. So there will be releases on vinyl, CDR, CD and maybe something special on cassette. Time will tell. The only thing EX OVO’s not really interested in are DVDs - we try to keep things coming for opened ears and closed eyes." Discography: EXO651 Mirko Uhlig: Vivmmi (2006, Album) EXO001 V.A.: I, Mute Hummings (2006, Sampler) EXO001+1 V.A.: I, Mute Hummings Special Edition (2006, incl. Bonus-sampler Mute Scribbles EXO002 Feu Follet & Miina Virtanen: The Icicle Lectures Vol. 1 (2007, Album) EXO003 V.A.: Mandala Volume 1 (feat. Mirko Uhlig, Feu Follet, Keith Berry & Jörg Eger) (2007, EP) EXO1974 Richard Lainhart: White Night (2007, Album)
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