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Iconic musician and political activist makes a typically thought-provoking statement on historic 1969 recording.

Strut presents an exclusive reissue of Experience Unlimited’s 1977 debut album, Free Yourself, featuring a brand new interview with bandleader and co-founder ‘Sugar Bear.` This seminal recording blends soul, jazz, and funk-rock, laying the foundation for Washington D.C.'s go-go scene.  Experience unlimited had originally started out in 1973 when they met at Ballou Senior High School in South-East D.C. and came to the attention of Black Fire Records’ Jimmy Gray after winning a school talent compe…

Originally released in 1967, Ayler's first LP on Impulse! and arguably his best for the label. "During 1967-69 avant-garde innovator Albert Ayler recorded a series of albums for Impulse that started on a high level and gradually declined in quality. This LP, Ayler's first Impulse set, was probably his best for that label. There are two selections apiece from a pair of live appearances with Ayler having a rare outing on alto on the emotional 'For John Coltrane' and the more violent 'Change Has Co…

A breathtaking self-conscious free-jazz masterwork, 'Rise Vision Comin'' summarizes more than 30 years of musical and theoretical/political expression from renowned activist/scholar/free-jazz pioneer Haki R. Standing on the verge of spiritual jazz aesthetic, his music remains timeless & unforgettable after it's longstanding creation. The first album by the group Rise Vision Comin was released in 1976, and features among others Wallace Roney on trumpet, Clarence Seay on bass and Agyei Akoto on sa…

2 × 180g vinyl LP, Flating jacket, Obi. Deluxe edition. Informel emerged from the rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and stands as the point of origin for the present-day Sinsuke Fujieda Group. With regular performance activity brought to a halt, Sinsuke Fujieda was given time to reconsider his own music at its deepest level, and to ask himself what the music was that he truly wanted to express now. His answer was to return to jazz as his foundation, and to pursue, through both compositio…

McCoy Tyner looked towards Africa on his stunning 1970 album Extensions, a far-reaching exploration of Black identity that marked the masterful pianist’s fifth recording for Blue Note Records. After leaving John Coltrane’s band Tyner had moved from Impulse to Blue Note and made his enduring post-bop classic The Real McCoy in 1967. In the following years Tyner steadily expanded his musical scope: writing for a 9-piece ensemble on Tender Moments, exploring the textures of a piano-vibes led quartet…

Sun Ra is better known to most as a musician than a poet, but he identified equally as both. My Words Are Music provides direct access to the sentiments of a poet who never called Earth home. The spoken word album hosts an inspired array of artists who personally chose their favorite Sun Ra poems to recite. Freed from the page, his poetry acquires an unexpected simplicity and poignance it possessed all along. This all-star and intergenerational lineup of artists conjure wisdom from his words: sp…

The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…

Huge Tip! Original released in 1971 by the Black Artist Group group's own label “Universal Justice Records” this album has for years been an impossible to find/listen to album, and this is its first reissue ever. Ofamfa by The Children Of The Sun, a band led by poet/musicien Ajule/aka Bruce Rutlin is a heady mix of poetry/jazz/political songs/ and a document of a comunity avent. The BAG group being about all the arts theater and dance. The original liner notes by Ajule are great Insight in to th…

One for the ages here.  Unearthed from the ESS archives and officially released for the first time ever, a previously unknown half-hour from cosmic mythologist and sound scientist Sun Ra's 1971 U.C. Berkeley course "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Ra's soft-spoken intensity is underscored by the sound of chalk on the board as he ambles effortlessly through his potent and prescient ideas. The class session closes with two musical tracks, a piano version of "Love In Outer Space" and a blistering Moo…

If being the founder and chairman of Third World Press Organisation - the largest independent black-owned publishers - wasn't enough for activist and poet Haki R Madhubuti, he is also credited with a lesser-known yet remarkable music career. As the bandleader of Haki R. Madhubuti and Nation: Afrikan Liberation Arts Ensemble, Madhubuti combined his razor-sharp spoken-word poetry with a band of incredible musicians to create an unforgettable experience of avant-garde and spiritual jazz. The second…

Recital presents a newly unearthed recording of an interview between Sun Ra and composer Charlie Morrow recorded at his New York studio in 1989. This voice-only recording develops more like a kaleidoscopic sermon than any standard interview.

** Deluxe 180gr. Black vinyl edition. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve. Original 1969 BYG album facsimile-edition. Mastered to vinyl from BYG tapes by Nick Robbins. Exclusive liner notes by author John Masouri ** 'A Jackson in Your House' is the first of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s renowned trio of albums for BYG's Actuel series. This album is The Art Ensemble’s most celebrated release and finds the American avant-garde jazz collective at their most sensational, mocking and sta…

Documentary recordings of Hartmut Geerken and Michael Ranta’s November and December 1976 tour of the Middle East and East Asia. Geerken is known for his long relationship with Sun Ra (including compiling a discography), but he wears many other hats too: musician, film-maker, archivist. Ranta is a percussionist best known for his famous “Improvisation Sep.1975” collaborative record with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi. This is a CD reissue of an LP boxset, originally released in 2010 as the …

In the ever-expanding constellation of transnational electroacoustic collaboration, Marja Ahti and Manja Ristić present Transference, a profound investigation into the movement and transformation of energy between distant practices and places, arriving August 8, 2025 via Erstwhile Records. Transference emerges as what the artists describe as "a dialogue of sonic gestures and traces of visits to places and the spirit that occupies them." This collaboration transcends geographical boundaries to cr…

Tombstones is a collection of twenty songs composed by American composer Michael Pisaro-Liu between 2006 and 2010, journeying into experimental pop with pieces that are "experimental or indeterminate but still a song". This disc features eleven songs under the artistic direction of the Lille-based pianist Barbara Dang. Dang and six members of the Muzzix collective (Yoann Bellefont, Ivann Cruz, Raphaël Godeau, Peter Orins, Christian Pruvost, Maryline Pruvost) recorded the pieces in June 2020, wit…

This was the 10 PM set on 9/11/11, and makes for a perfect pair with the Rowe solo - two very different extremes. Where the Rowe set is in your face visceral, Unami and Malfatti created a gentle atmosphere within the pitch-black room (lit solely by Unami's visuals) and an overarching cumulative feeling in the listener. The too-perfect-to-be-scripted intro and outro frame a set that's almost not there, a radical recording even by ultra-minimal standards

Something very cool about erstaeu 002's existing in such a different world than its numeric predecessor (and 003 is altogether different as well). After the sublime compressive intensity of "Dystonia Duos", "Sinter" injects vast amounts of oxygen into the room, air swirling and echoing in huge spaces, light shimmering and hazy. In metallurgical terms, sintering is the making of objects from powder and "powdery", especially with a metallic connotation, isn't the worst term you could use for much …

'Throughout their careers, both Annette krebs and taku unami have explored the areas between composition and improvisation, innovation and repetition, music and ambient sound. On motubachii, their distinctive styles come together to form a whole that is monolithic yet widely varied, simple yet impossible to fully grasp. Annette krebs studied music and concert guitar in Frankfurt-Main, and has lived in Berlin since 1993. She has worked intensively in the crossover area between improvisation and c…

ErstLive 003 is from the duo of Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann, titled 'schnee_live', the final show on the last night of AMPLIFY 2004: addition. Stangl and Kurzmann began working as a duo in late 1999, releasing Schnee in 2000, and playing numerous concerts over the past four years throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. schnee_live documents how much their duo has changed since the initial recording of Schnee, which was the first time they ever played together as a duo.

Ever since Otomo got into his minimal misuse of stereo equipment phase, a collaboration with Swiss toaster torturers Voice Crack was on the cards. Although Otomo's refraction of high end sinewaves around cranial interiors may not seem like an ideal partner for Norbert Mšslang and Andy Guhl's usual industrial clang, attempts have obviously been made to find a common ground. There's an intense focus upon the fine detail of the unfolding electronic fields, with the Swiss duo providing a constantly …

Over the past decade, Swiss-based Günter Müller has collaborated with many of the most prominent Tokyo-based musicians, recording CDs with Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Sachiko M, Masahiko Okura, and Toshimaru Nakamura. Points and Slashes is the latest of these, a duo collaboration with guitar wizard Tetuzi Akiyama.It's impossible to pin down Akiyama, a musician of diverse interests and activities, with a brief description. He has been playing electric guitar since he was 13, and formed his fi…

Mark Wastell and Matt Davis met and first played together in a workshop led by Eddie Prévost in London during the spring of 1996. Soon after, Wastell was invited to join Chris Burn's Ensemble, in which he played with Phil Durrant for the first time. Subsequently, Phil and Mark worked together in the quartets Assumed Possibilities and Quatuor Accorde, documented on Rossbin and Emanem CDs, respectively. The debut trio concert by Davis/Durrant/Wastell took longer to organise than any of the partici…

That said, "Weather Sky" is another thing altogether. Bruno Meillier invited Toshi to play a duo concert in St Etienne with AMM's no-concessions table guitar master Keith Rowe, and took them into the studio the day after to record for Erstwhile. Sensitivity to pitch is less important here (Rowe, remember, hasn't tuned his guitar since the early 1960s): the album's three tracks are real slow-burners. Rowe can be agile and aggressive when he wants to, but his preferred working method is to lay dow…

The five tracks on neuschnee form an ambitious meta-song suite, with the various lyrics and musical styles combining to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The design is again from Berlin designer Marion Gerth, previously responsible for The Magic ID-till my breath gives out on ErstPop. The front cover juxtaposes a satellite picture of snow with the Mao Zedong poem 'Snow', which the musicians discovered in a book bought while on tour in Beijing. "After a long phase of experimental…

Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida, both from Tokyo, met in 1997 and formed the duo of Cosmos the following year. Sachiko M has developed a unique style utilizing a memory-free sampler, creating pure, piercing sine waves with the device's built-in test tones and noise. She has also recently begun exploring the use of contact microphones, as documented on the second track of Tears. Sachiko has worked extensively as a solo artist, in groups such as Filament, I.S.O., and Hoahio, and in duo with Toshimaru Na…

"The first word that came to mind on playing Extracts was understatement, with an almost oriental minimalism and profundity on display. At times I was forced to check whether sounds were coming from the speakers or from outside. However, this is a far cry from the Radu Malfatti school of implied music since it is very much about close group interplay. Simon H. Fell's sonorous bass is of particular note, underpinning, colouring and giving the proceedings a kind of still, stately authority. Likewi…

Don Cherry's downtown Paris funk masterwork Home Boy, Sister Out, produced in 1985 by Ramuntcho Matta and originally released by Barclay in France only, finally gets a worldwide release on Wewantsounds. Featuring French post-punk muse Elli Medeiros, avant-garde poet Brion Gysin, and cult Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang (Xalam), this is a unique soundbite of Paris in the early '80s at its coolest when funk, jazz, and new wave were mingling with sounds from Africa, Jamaica, and Latin Am…

splendid double CD set documenting César Bolaños - one of the leading artists of the Latin American avant-garde of the mid 20th century -  amazing early electronic work. The recordings bring together for the first time a definitive edition of his work on a double CD, the music have been digitalised directly from the original tapes and really have a fabulous clarity. So much music these days is labelled as experimental but I often I ask myself if it's creators are genuinely experimenting. That ce…

This CD is pure aural pleasure. The Santur sounds (something) like a Chinese chen (or perhaps a Korean Kay-a-gum), but it has (a bit) more body. Kupper composes with high merit, leading the listener on a trek that won't soon be forgotten. You must be focussed on LISTENING, or you'll religate it (incorrectly) to the "background" stack...Leo Kupper was born in Belgium in 1935. He worked with He…

Both pieces are intended to aid the listener in times of spiritual change, but are just fine for 'everyday' use as well. Highly recommended." Charles S. Russell, Ear Magazine The two works on this cd - Tara's Room and The Beauty of Sorrow were composed and performed by Pauline Oliveros and recorded in May 1987. Previously only available as a cassette and long out of print." (Deep Listening) "The beauty of sorrow" was played by the composer on a small accordion tuned in just intonation and using …

The long awaited soundtrack of the Ghostdance music and dance collaboration between Oliveros and Paula Josa-Jones, commissioned by Lincoln Center Out-of -Doors. "The Gkostdance collaboration with choreographer Paula Josa Jones began in Monterrey Mexico supported in turn by two month US/Mexico Exchange Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and FONCA. Together with our host—composer/ ethnomusicologist Arturo Salinas—we attended El Dia de los muertos in Chalco to help inform our work…

Masami Akita continues his work as the world's premiere extreme dynamicist on 'Circular Reference,' his latest full-length and first for No Holiday. It's a torrent of synthesized tones colliding against punishing layers of feedback and midrange noise. But there are also snatches of lurching rhythms to be found, as well as moments of relative uneasy calm. More than anything, it's distinctly Merzbow. Released on 2xLP and CD formats, the latest from this titan of noise is sure to please longtime li…

CD Digipack. In early 1967, John Coltrane died. Christian Vander was twenty years old, living in something close to poverty in Paris, and Coltrane's death pulled the ground from under him. He went to Italy, to Milan and Turin, and spent nearly two years in a state of deliberate self-destruction. One morning in Turin he woke up and decided to stop. He returned to Paris, met bassist Laurent Thibault, and began working on something that had no name yet. By 1969 Magma existed as a group. By 1970 the…

Raven is the first new Organum album release since that of Sorrow in 2010 (Siren Records) and was recorded in 2017.For the realisation of Raven, Organum was comprised of David Jackman, Alan Jones, and Daisuke Suzuki.The first Organum 12-inch release 'Tower of Silence' (LAYLAH-1985) was a work of multi-layered bowed sound and scraping metallic objects, but there was an innate silence within this wall of noise - as Basho’s Haiku poem echos :“Deep silence, the shrill of cicadas, seeps into rocks.” …

On The Mild Temper, Kevin Drumm stretches his language of drones, electronics and micro‑acoustics across six hours, fashioning vast, slow‑shifting fields of frequency where restraint becomes a kind of pressure and detail blooms only if you stay. Mastered by Jim O'Rourke.

'Nyarlathotep was an earthbound deity in the mythos of writer H. P. Lovecraft. Unlike the other gods in these stories, Nyarlathotep appears in humanoid form and can speak human languages. This being, as an abstract concept, provides a fitting name for an album that brings largely forgotten and mysterious music to human ears. Indeed, this album is a newly remastered reissue that was originally released in 1997 by the KADATH label, and gathers eight offerings of experimental underground music of t…

An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long-form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a conc…

Junk DNA is the newly christened project from Brian Pyle, a man of many ongoing pursuits including Ensemble Economique, The Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings. Born and raised in wilds of California, Pyle has recently been splitting his time in Vilnius, Lithuania, with his Junk DNA debut Kopk Kopa contemplating his time and place within Lithuania. It is true that much of Pyle’s works is reflective about the human condition responding to a particular environment. The slow burn of Humboldt fog, in…

Heavenly Arms – featuring Otomo Yoshihide – is a bold new sonic journey that bridges experimental sound, improvisation, and emotional resonance. The record, released in collaboration with the visionary Japanese composer and guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, showcases a meeting of worlds where free improvisation collides with delicate melodic structures.   Across its tracks, Heavenly Arms captures the raw immediacy of live interaction while preserving an intimate, cinematic atmosphere. The album moves f…