Back in stock
The Kindest One
This is Mulatu Astatke’s protege and Ethiopian saxophonist and composer Jorga Mesfin’s debut album. It’s a long foray into Ethio-jazz that takes this courageous syncretism further by fusing spiritual experimentation with bits from all kinds of situations in Ethiopian music, jazz music, and specifically Ethiopian jazz music that precedes it.
Jorga Mesfin is widely regarded as one of the most talented contemporary musicians and composers in Ethiopia. He started his professional career at the young…
Katabasis
’Katabasis’ is the first solo album proper from Panos Alexiadis - an electronic musician based in Athens- following a series of cassette and cdr releases with various projects/aliases. With a title that translates to ’descend’, Katabasis is a concrète sound environment generated through real-time synthesis using modular electronics, acoustic instrument samples and location recordings. Aiming to create a distinct psychoacoustic experience, the music avoids any overt tonal structures, focusing ins…
Broken Blues
**Edition of 192 hand-stamped numbered copies ** Reissue of an ultra-limited cdr that popped out quietly on absurd in 2007, this record finds Tetuzi Akiyama and Michel Henritzi joining strengths for a singular set of guitar music recorded at the Alchemy Music Store in Osaka.Captured during the heyday of stylised and pensive improvisation, the music here breaks protocol by avoiding some of the more polite mannerisms of the genre. What starts as a coarse yet beautiful duet of sparse melodic fragme…
Na Tango Ya Covadia 1964-70
The compilation ‘Les Belgicains – Na Tango Ya Covadia 1964-1970’ (‘Les Belgicains’ during the time of Covadia 1964-1970) tells the remarkable story of the first Congolese student orchestras in Belgium. During that time Congolese referred to countrymen living in Belgium as ‘Les Belgicains’. The Congolese Rumba presented on this compilation blew a new, fresh wind through the musical landscape of Congolese popular music under the supervision of the legendary editor and producer Nikiforos Cavvadias …
Merci Yaya Bongo - Les Groupes d’Animation Féminins du Gabon 1982 - 1989
Gabon, 1980’s. President Omar Bongo has been in power since 1967. Together with his wife, the infamous singer Patience Dabany, he invents one of the ultimate political propaganda machine: ‘animation groups’, massive female choirs and dancers, up to 60 women deep, singing the praise of his regime over some of the best soukous rhythms ever, broadcasted live on TV.
Between 1982 and 1989, mainly thanks to the flourishing oil economy, a record-label is created, a state-of-the-art recording studio is …
Mother Earth's Plantasia
If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled "warm earth music for plants and the people that love them," it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.
Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making …
Infinite Love Infinite Tears
In 1975, the New York City alto saxophonist Alan Braufman released his debut album, Valley of Search on the India Navigation label. Recorded at the now legendary 501 Canal St. loft, the album was heralded by Village Voice jazz critic Gray Giddins, who wrote, "These are the musicians who are taking the chances today and their gifts and commitment ought to be attended." Braufman went on to record and tour with everyone from Carla Bley to The Psychedelic Furs, and didn't release another album under…
Keep Together - Fluxus & Neofluxus Part II
"In April 2023, there was released the first part of the Fluxus edition called Stolen Symphony. The year has come and gone and there is the second part of the Fluxus edition called Keep Together. At the centre of both parts of this edition was a broken piano, acquired by the Opening Performance Orchestra for the purpose of making live and studio recordings. During this time other new works for this broken piano were written by diverse Fluxus and non-Fluxus composers. In the spring of 2022, the O…
Emergency!
Miles Davis: "I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums.”
Thembi
VERY last copies Pharoah Sanders recorded the songs that comprise Thembi in the winter of ’70/’71, in between sessions with Alice Coltrane that would eventually become her masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda LP. The same compelling spirituality that embued Coltrane’s masterpiece with a mood of stately calm and grace pervades Thembi. ‘On Thembi, that was the first time that I ever touched a Fender Rhodes electric piano. We got to the studio in California — Cecil McBee had to unpack his bass, t…
Unreleased Tapes 1981-1984
Experimentation in early electronic music in the Sahara from the singular Mamman Sani. Dreamy organs and droning melodies reinterpret ancient folk tradition into sublime fantastical soundscape. Never before released recordings from the very beginning - unreleased tracks from his first album, recordings of a short lived trio, and a cover of an American folk ballad.
Mammane Sani Abdullaye is a legendary name in Niger's avant garde. A pioneer of early West African electronic music, for over 30 yea…
Éthiopiques 27: Centennial Of The First Ethiopian Music Recordings
*2024 stock* Centennial of the First Ethiopian Recordings Double CD The life and work of Tessema Eshete, the first Ethiopian singer to record commercially. 32 historic songs recorded in Berlin in 1910
What Is Not Strange?
Five years on from “Nue”, his collaboration with his father, Yoshi Wada, and friends, Tashi Wada returns to RVNG with “What Is Not Strange?”, a startling new adventure in sound. Riding a razor's edge between experimental music and left-field song-craft, the album's eleven compositions enlist an all-star cast of collaborators - Julia Holter, Corey Fogel, Ezra Buchla, and Devin Hoff - to forge new water and create one of the most startling and mysterious records of the year.
La Rose De Fer / Intiaani Kesä
A true enigma in French exploitation cinema and a key exponent in Jean Rollin’s expansive family of forward thinking French creatives, Pierre Raph delivered four soundtrack commissions to the ABC film company between 1971 and 1974 commencing with Requiem Pour Un Vampire and ending with the bizarre Les Démoniaques. The lost score for the film Le Rose De Fer from 1972 presented a new challenge for both director and composer marking Rollin’s departure from his vampire movie comfort zone to this sur…
Éthiopiques 25: 1971-1975 Modern Roots
*2024 stock* The Swinging Addis of the 1960s and early 1970s (before the dreadful Derg’s Stalinist-military glaciation) was a period of intense experimenting that encompassed the traditional repertoire. Whether Oromo or Amhara, all the greatest voices of the time took part with intense creative fervour, as can be heard on this 25th CD in the Ethiopiques collection. It features such pop singers as Tlahoun Gèssèssè, Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Sèyfou Yohannes, Essatu Tèssèmma etc. as well as traditional art…
Free, Dancing...
Free, Dancing . . . is the first release by a new trio with percussionist and producer Carlos Niño, luminary multi-instrumentalist Idris Ackamoor (of The Pyramids) and wizard guitarist, producer Nate Mercereau. They have been playing concerts together in California since June 2022, sharing a unique vibrant sound, findings and energetics. A remarkable environment for the ethereal reed artistry of the revered Idris Ackamoor, reinforced by the contemplative sounds of Carlos Nino, who utilize drummi…
Etudes De Rien
* Edition of 200 copies, black vinyl * The New Blockaders are unique in the history of music and art. What, in our opinion, stands supreme in TNB’s 40-year existence is a passionate execution of their anarchistic and unconventional stance. In a biographical reference, TNB are often cited as pioneers of Noise music but for TNB themselves Noise music is not just an assault on tonality but a complex language of communication. From Luigi Russolo's 1913 Art Of Noise manifesto to TNB’s T.I.C. manifest…
Éthiopiques 17: Tlahoun Gèssèssè
*2024 stock* To Ethiopian audiences, Tlahoun Gèssèssè is THE VOICE, even more so than Mahmoud Ahmed, Alèmayèhu Eshèté or Mulatu Astatqé. Endowed with a phenomenal, innate vocal talent, he has been the asbsolute and unequalled icon for an entire country since the fifties, heading up the list of Ethiopian discography. Based around seven ‘modernist’ pieces arranged by the brilliant and innovative Mulatu Astatqé (Ethiopiques 4 : «Ethiojazz»), these first Ethiopiques devoted to Talhoun Gèssèssè also …
Éthiopiques 16: The Lady With The Krar
*2024 stock* Before she became famous as a singer and a player of the krar –the traditional Ethiopian lyre– Asnatqèch Wèrqu was well-known as an actress and a dancer. Inspired by the art of the 'azmaris', the Ethiopian wandering minstrels, she found the voice to transform the vicissitudes of life into poignant laments or sarcastic ditties. Asnatqèch is the last great singer, story-teler and free-thinker to carry on the tradition of "poetic jousting". Needless to say, the CD booklet features the …
Éthiopiques 15: Europe Meets Ethiopia
*2024 stock* The result of a surprising encounter between Ethiopian, French and Dutch musicians, Jump to Addis presents a buoying mix of Abbyssinian tradition, revisited jazz and wild rock'n'roll. The krars (folk lyres) and voices of urban azmaris rub shoulders with the guitars, saxophones and drumsets of European musicians, all in an audacious blend.