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Toneflower
*200 copies limited edition, CDr format* As an artist and a thinker, Massimo Magee has been consistently drawn towards patterns: traditions, lines of influence, schools and the unexpected intersections of each. This album, Toneflower, presents a solo programme, meditating on many of those concepts. As an entirely improvised set of pieces, it is also inspired by Anthony Braxton’s solo alto tradition and the larger solo saxophone canon. Similarly, it draws from Magee’s prior percussive experimenta…
O Life, O Light Vol. 1
Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a notable rising star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz…
New Sense of Hearing
Tip! Limited LP, black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty jacket. Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded o…
Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams
The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt’s compositional process. The record collects five pieces from the artist’s “Ground” series, translating his characteristically variable and spatial scores into “recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays,” to eerie and mesmerizing results. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it…
The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence
'The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence is a sort of emergent collage that came together over four years of composition, improvisation, and production. The foundations for this album were initially recorded in 2018 by producer/engineer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Skinyard) at Soundhouse in Seattle, WA with myself (Evan Strauss, electric bass and upright bass), 5-Track (Guitar) and Sheridan Riley (Drums). The initial foundations of this music consisted of my long-form graphica…
Volume 1
*In process of stocking* Super groups are not a riskless endeavor—but when they’re made up of longtime friends and master improvisers, they tend to work. On their collaboration, simply titled Volume 1, up-and-coming American saxophonist John Dikeman (When The Time Is Right, 577 Records, 2021) is accompanied by a group of UK-based music masters: pianist Pat Thomas, a 577 Records mainstay (Shifa Live at Cafe Oto 2019, BleySchool 2019, Shifa Live in Oslo 2020, Educated Guess 2021), bassist John Edw…
Educated Guess Vol. 2
*In process of stocking* Following their first album, Dave Tucker (Guitar, Electronics), Pat Thomas (Piano & Keys), Thurston Moore (Guitar), and Mark Sanders (Drums & Percussion) decided to “guess again.” In March 2020, Tucker organized this group of musicians for an improvised performance at London’s Cafe Oto on a successful “educated guess.” Organized around a shared appreciation for improvisation and experimentation, that show resulted in the release of a two volume set.
The first volume is a…
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977
Tip! A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police on…
Experimental I / Mechanical I
When Harry Bertoia's Sonambient label was resurrected, Important Records' intention was to tell the story of Bertoia's groundbreaking Sonambient work as revealed through his extensive collection of notes and recordings. When the first new LP was released in 2016, Important were only in possession of 1/20th of the archive. Now, in 2019, the label is excited to release the first LP of new material from the full archive and they present it to increase understanding of what Bertoia was doing in his …
Musica Nuvolosa
Tip! After its reading of Julius Eastman's Feminine, released in 2021, the Ensemble 0 revisit the repertoires of Pauline Oliveros and György Ligeti from another angle. From the works of Oliveros, they exhumed a deeply meditative piece for accordion and voice, giving it a new life in the form of vaporous, cloud-riding chamber music. With Ligeti, the piano radicalism of the Musica Ricercata miniatures crops up again in a new and as yet unreleased orchestration.
Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran
It's an all electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present
a problem-solution scenario, collectively via
a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic and vivid in nature.
Sonic Waters, Underwater Music 1979-1987
A work that literally immerses the listener into an acoustical substance. The sound becomes almost like matter, like jelly. Soon, you're swimming in sound, getting lost inside it
Elephantine
*2022 repress. 400 copies limited orange vinyl + insert* On Elephantine, his new album released exclusively on Sub Rosa as vinyl LP, Cairo-based Maurice Louca guides a 12-piece ensemble through a 38-minute masterwork that might best be described as panoramic. Elements of free improvisation, Sun Ra's cosmic jazz, gorgeous Arabic melody, trancelike African and Yemeni music and minimalism meet in his wholly unique compositional vision. Louca also makes vital contributions on guitar and piano, and i…
Ceux Du Dehors
*2022 repress* Ceux Du Dehors is the third album by Belgian band Univers Zero, originally released in 1981. The title alludes to the short story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft; the players read the story in studio, then proceeded to record the piece. A key release for the band, Ceux Du Dehors sometimes suggests a darker and more complex version of the motorik minimalism of classical music contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich. It finds the group continuing to evolve and return to the …
Heresie
Tip! Sub Rosa present a reissue of Univers Zero's second album Heresie, originally released in 1979. A classic of chamber rock music, featuring heavy use of dissonance and dark, brooding, and extremely complex melodies. "This music on this LP might have little to do with rock, and might also be a massive downer, but the quality of the writing and playing is extremely high. Michel Berckmans' solo work on oboe and bassoon work is magnificent, and Patrick Hanappier's string playing (violin and viol…
Exploring Gongs Culture In Southeast Asia, Mainland And Archipelago
Tip! *In process of stocking* 'Gongs have played an integral role in the mythogeography of Asia. This is not music that aligns with national borders or ideas of homogenous populations, let alone racial stereotypes and exotic clichés. What connects all of these tracks is a simultaneous feeling of entrancement and social cohesion. Communal and collaborative, its form is hypnotically repetitious, melodies and rhythms spread out among the players using the technique of hocketing in which a flowing l…
Wave train
2015 remastered CD in digipak with 12-page booklet including liner notes written by the composer as well as diagrams and scores relating to the published works. Wave Train, originally released by Alga Marghen in 1998, collects experimental works by David Behrman recorded between 1959 and 1968, featuring the Sonic Arts Union. The CD starts with "Canons," a short piece created in Darmstadt over three weeks in the summer of 1959 with David Tudor on piano and Christoph Caskel on percussion. "Ricer…
Primitive / Espaces Paradoxes
Digipack CD featuring two works by Patrick Ascione: "Primitive" (1995); "Espaces Paradoxes" (1987-89). RE: "Espaces-Paradoxes": "The first acousmatic work designed and projected in 16 real tracks, in full stereo. It deals with the question of writing a three dimensional space into the very act of studio composition. A continuum of singular spaces, real and suggested, give rhythm to the overall structure. The alternating of imagined spatial situations that oppose each other, answer each other or …
Une Saison En Enfer
Composed in 1979 and realized at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (Lyon, France) by Gilbert Amy with the assistance of Daniel Teruggi. Performed with Fusako Kondo (soprano), Edwige Parat (soloist of Maîtrise de Radio France), Jean-Pierre Drouet (percussions).
Sons-Frissons
Over the years, Michel Redolfi has revealed our astounding auditory capacities in the water as the pioneer of underwater concerts, where music is electronically broadcast under the surface of the sea or pools to be enjoyed by floating listeners ... Born in Marseille in 1951, Michel Redolfi developed his sound creations in the United States where, at of the age of 21, he was guest resident at several major studios. In the mid 70’s he settled in San Diego, where the Center for Music Experiment (C…