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Gagaku Suites
Tip! Gagaku is the oldest of the Japanese performing arts, with a history more than a thousand years old. The term refers to Japanese classical music and dance, traditionally performed by families of musicians linked to the ancient Imperial court, and later passed down in Buddhist temple ceremonies and Shinto shrines. Shiba Sukeyasu, founder and director of the Reigakusha ensemble, descends from the Koma clan, whose origins date back to the end of the 10th century.
The recordings partly reflect …
Om Shanti Shanti Om
**Never-before released document of Don Cherry blowing cool fire in Rome, 1976. First official release. Mastered from the original master tapes.** An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, w…
Problemi d'Oggi
** Much needed reissue ** Don't let the name mislead you! The enigmatic M. Zalla is one of the numerous aliases of the italian maestro Piero Umiliani who, during his period of fascination for psychedelic and electronic atmospheres, started to compose a good number of musical portraits dedicated, as the title reveals, to the problems of his time. In the early '70s, Italians were worried about the mafia, terrorism, and social conflicts; and one can sense that the music represents these anxieties i…
I Tarantolati
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.
Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music cir…
Intégrale Acousmatique + Kyoto 1970 + Ste Cy Bundle
Three of the most essential new releases from Metaphon and La Scie Dorée, gathered in a single bundle. Liliane Donskoy's Intégrale Acousmatique - issued here in its deluxe hardboard linen screen printed box edition, including an 8 page booklet - brings together for the first time the near-complete acousmatic works recorded at Ghent's Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music between the 1970s and 1980s - a towering, previously inaccessible body of work by a French composer trained by Mil…
I Don't Know
After more or less 20 albums on guitar released since 2005 on LPs, cassettes and CDs, the first real album on piano by Belgian singer-songwriter Bram Devens aka. Ignatz. In 1910, the illustrator George Herriman created the Krazy Kat comic strip. Ignatz, a vicious mouse, was Krazy Kat’s arch enemy, and his favourite pastime was to throw bricks at Krazy Kat’s head (who misinterpreted the mouse’s actions as declarations of love). Ignatz is the alter-ego of Belgian musician Bram Devens. Since 2005, …
Collines / Racines
Tip! Rarely has the term "soundscapes" seemed as appropriate as for 'Collines' and 'Racines,' these two long, captivating pieces for cello and Loopstation, respectively inspired by the landscapes of Gaume and the Forêt de Soignes. Gwen Sainte-Rose superimposes the sound layers of her compositions and sculpts the sound material. This CD nestled in a wooden box which, like a small cabinet of curiosities, also contains multiple photographic inserts by Beata Szparagowska and the graphic designer Cor…
A Thousand Breathing Forms
On A Thousand Breathing Forms, Steve Roden’s 2003–2008 archive blooms across six discs of loop‑based miniatures, conceptual structures and quietly lyrical instrumentals, charting a mid‑period where lowercase intimacy, rigor and melody fuse into one breathing organism.
Every Color Moving (1988-2003)
On Every Color Moving (1988–2003), Steve Roden’s first 15 years unfold across six discs: from noisy, searching experiments to the hushed, “lowercase” worlds that would define his quietly radical, object‑based approach to sound and space.
Jesus
Two confrontative icons. Two artists willing to go where those icons point. Jesus is one of the most extreme and conceptually charged releases in the Von catalogue - a double LP that documents and extends a collaboration between Prurient and Nico Vascellari built around the figures of GG Allin and Klaus Kinski: two men who treated the stage as a site of absolute exposure, who understood performance as a form of self-destruction, and who attached to the name of Jesus a weight that had nothing to …
Resonant Cuts
Concert and Sound Installation, edited by Carsten Seiffarth and Michael Moser. 21x16 cm, 63 pages, b+w and colour fotos, English-German texts. Limited to 500 copies. CD-1 Concert Installation. Ensemble Polwechsel and guests: Burkhard Beins: percussion, Martin Brandlmayr (percussion), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Theo Nabicht (contrebass, clarinet), Wolfgang Musil (live-electronic). Recorded live on July 24 2008 at Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Berlin. CD-2 Sound Inst…
Freedom of Choice (Book)
Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.Before an artistic and com…
Histoire de Melody Nelson (Book)
Outside his native France, the view of Serge Gainsbourg was once of a one-hit wonder lothario. This has been slowly replaced by an awareness of how talented and innovative a songwriter he was. Gainsbourg was an eclectic, protean figure; a Dadaist, poète maudit, Pop-Artist, libertine and anti-hero. An icon and iconoclast.His masterpiece is arguably Histoire de Melody Nelson, an album suite combining many of his signature themes; sex, taboo, provocation, humour, exoticism and ultimately tragedy. C…
Bitches Brew (Book)
It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself seemed about to split at its seams. Following the circumscribed grooves and ambiance of In a Silent Way; coming off a tour with a burning new quintet-called 'The Lost Band'- with Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette; he went into…
Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (Book)
In 20 Jazz Funk Greats Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates-through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band-an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts (noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition). This is a smart and unusual book about a pioneering band.
Paris 1919 (Book)
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.I…
Suicide (Book)
New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponized noise terrorized unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start a riot on a lack of guitar alone. Those who braved their live shows often fled in fear--or formed bands (sometimes both). Thi…
Computer World (Book)
Computer World was Kraftwerk's most concise and focused conceptual statement, their most influential record and crowning achievement. Computer World transformed the way pop music was composed, played, packaged and released and, in the process, helped create entire new genres of music including hip-hop, techno, trance, electro, industrial and synth-pop. They influenced the influencers. Upon its release on 10 May 1981, the record was a revelation. It was unlike anything created for mainstream cons…
Switched-On Bach (Book)
So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation.Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos's music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-…
Sorrow Tears And Blood (Book)
Sorrow Tears and Blood offers a glimpse into the complicated social, cultural, and political phenomenon that is Nigeria.