Best sellers
Urban Sax 1
Much-needed reissue of these incredible LPs. Urban Sax's debut LP was issued in 1977 on Cobra, recalling the best Terry Riley, stunningly psychedelic, it’s the perfect combination of hazy, fluttering psychedelia and tough, tactile reed work. Urban Sax was created in 1973. Gilbert Artman, the mastermind behind Lard Free -who has also participated in dozens of recordings by other artists of the French experimental scene that included Delired Chameleon Family, Clear Light, Komintern, etc.- develope…
Conversation
*Text in French and English* A few months before the death of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), Gunther Schuller (1925–2015) sat down with the composer for an in-depth conversation: his career and friendships, collaborations, new instruments, and the rare freedom he allowed the sounds they produced... Published for the first time in English and French, this is a rare testament for all lovers of "sounds."
Live
2026 Record Store Day Reprise of the 1968 album 'live' by the 13th Floor Elevators. Panned at the time for being billed as "live" when in fact it was a compilation of previosuly recorded studio masters, outtakes and alternate mixes. The "very loud" crowd noise was overdubbed and was actually taken from a boxing match and wholly inappropriate for the purpose. Now, almost 60 years on, the album masters are available, in their original sequence, without the crowd noise, to be enjoyed in their full …
Rhabdolith
*2026 stock* Music primarily for saxophone and electronic sounds with an intermission for electronic sounds and AI text to speech synthesis. High quality audio, in stereo, divided into two sections, as this music was initially intended to be released on a cassette tape
The equipment used on this record are the following: Selmer Series III Soprano, Make Noise 0-Coast, Koma Electronics Field Kit and Field Kit FX, Ableton, Keith McMillen Qunexus, Landscape Stereo Field, AKG C411, Critter and Guitar…
Elements
Tip! Surface World is pleased to share David Lee Myers (aka Arcane Device) and Toshimaru Nakamura’s Elements, a remote collection written and assembled in tandem at the suggestion of the label. Sharing an idiosyncratic approach to feedback-based sound generation and a commitment to their signature instruments (respectively, the Feedback Machine and the No-Input Mixing Board), the pairing lands during an especially fruitful period in their individual discographies. Harmonically dense, energetic a…
do
A groundbreaking release from two youngish Japanese improvisers. Sachiko M plays sample-less sampler, and Nakamura uses the no-input mixing board--both instruments which conceptually produce no sound, yet these two conjure it out, somehow."Do" was recorded live in Europe and Tokyo last summer, and features three improvisations varying in length from just over two minutes to slightly under 40. While the shorter tracks are worthwhile and hold moments of greatness, it is the first, very long track …
A Thousand Leaves
A Thousand Leaves was Sonic Youth's 10th studio album and the group's first major effort to be recorded at their own Echo Canyon studio in NYC. Free from the constraints of paying for costly studio time, the band was able to work at their desired pace and experiment at will. The result was an album born out of improvisation, chiefly characterized by the guitar interplay between guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. The album title was inspired by Walt Whitman as Moore explained, "The same w…
Radiale
Originally released in 2004 on the highly influential Atavistic label, Radiale is back on May 22, 2026, bringing together explosive energy, avant-jazz improvisation and experimental rock in a landmark collaboration. Featuring saxophone player Ken Vandermark, bassist Nate McBride and gifted afro-american drummer Hamid Drake the record has a slightly more exploratory feel.
Listening to Radiale feels less like following a sequence of songs and more like being drawn into a continuous sonic current. …
Silence and Secrecy
Zos Kia’s music is an essential insight and archival piece into the early work of the industrial scene and particularly of Coil in their formative stages. Their recordings are even darker and more industrial-rooted than much of the Coil material that followed. The music is primal, brutal and reveals the interests that surrounded Coil/Zos Kia and the early years of Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth (TOPY) / Psychic TV...
John Gosling was an original member of Zos Kia (as Joan D'Arc), alongside John …
Koyaanisqatsi
Koyaanisqatsi is the soundtrack album to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 experimental film. Composed by Philip Glass, the music accompanies a montage of stark, contemplative imagery without narration, aligning minimalist motifs with evolving cinematic sequences. The CD presents a suite of instrumental pieces that mirror the film’s themes of balance, urbanization, and nature, making it a standalone minimalist work as well as a companion to the visuals.
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Stranded gave Roxy Music their first UK No’1 album and brought with it an undeniable presence that would eventually see Roxy Music’s American audience take note! It was becoming all too clear that Roxy Music were indeed a band ahead of their time.
Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark
Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, the third full-length from Gwenifer Raymond, finds the Welsh guitarist deepening her American primitive explorations with a turbulent, spectral intensity. Across ten instrumental tracks for solo guitar and banjo, Raymond braids the darkness of Appalachian nights with the cosmic anxieties of science fiction, displaying fierce dexterity and meditative nuance.
Green Ways
Green Ways documents a collection of live recordings, drawn from in situ performances given in Doon, Dungarvan, Plaistow, Shoreditch, Singö and Stratford across 2018 by Graham Lambkin and Áine O'Dwyer. It celebrates the filíocht of rural and urban acoustic environments with a playful economy of means, and offers a special salute to the rich heritage of Carnahalla.Áine O’Dwyer and Graham Lambkin are multi-disciplinary artists whose work explores the nexus between music, text, illustration, theate…
Live at Moers Festival
2026 Re-issue. A cornerstone of postwar Japanese free improvisation, captured before three thousand listeners at the ninth Moers New Jazz Festival on 26 May 1980 and issued later that year as TBM-5023. By this point Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi had spent more than a decade refining his theory of mass projection - a model of collective improvisation in which the ensemble operates not as a sequence of soloists but as a single density field, modulating texture rather than line - and the New Direction…
The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow
**17 CDs, 1 DVD and 250 pages of histories, chronology, testimony and commentaries by the band, sundry contemporary documents, and rare photographs – in a sturdy box.** This collection brings together in an inexpensive and definitive edition the full contents of all earlier releases, with the addition of a further 60pp booklet of newly unearthed, or commissioned, band commentaries, pictures and other documents prepared specifically for this box - as well as re-mastered versions of all the studio…
Hot Five & Hot Seven at 100
On Hot Five & Hot Seven at 100, Louis Armstrong’s seminal Chicago sides are reborn in vivid new mastering, letting his trumpet solos, daring rhythms and easy charisma speak afresh as the very moment jazz pivots into a true soloist’s art.
Copenhagen, Bordeaux 1966 & Newport 1967 Live First Release
"These powerful performances from Copenhagen and Bordeaux, released officially here for the first time, and the Newport Festival in the U.S., provide further evidence of the music’s collective necessity – the true ensemble coordination which Ayler adopted, elaborated and romanticized, from his awareness of historic New Orleans precedents." - Art Lange
The Inflated Tear
Last pressed on vinyl in 2005, The Inflated Tear is a studio album by Roland Kirk, released on Atlantic in 1968. Roland Kirk, was a hugely influential, blind jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality, during which virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and the ability to play several instruments simultaneously. Pitchfork placed The Inflated Tear at number 170 on its list o…
Dreams For Sax
Another gem from the extensive Flipper Music catalog, more precisely from their Flower sublabel, "Dreams For Sax" is possibly one of the most stand-out productions from their studio ensemble Gruppo Sound, this time around featuring saxophonist Paolo Russo with keyboardists Stefano Galante and Vittorio Quattrini. First released in 1987, the songs recorded for "Dreams For Sax" are a beautiful melange of easy-listening electronic and jazzy vibes, from mellow tunes such as "Dawning" and "First Class…
Bardo Thödol
In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states.
Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s i…